Steed as a drag queen and the asexual Number Six: Notes on cult tele-fantasy’s queer roots

Deconstructed masculinities and camp vistas

In their own distinct ways, both The Avengers and The Prisoner challenged the normative masculinities of the 1960s. The Avengers started out as a straight-up spy series but by its third season had developed into a very different show, one that played with the generic conventions of the traditional espionage format, gradually blending it with comedy and science fiction. Indeed, beyond generic hybridity, there are several aspects that made it ‘cultish’ TV at the time and I want to suggest that these were foundational, both to future industrial models of cult TV and the inherent queerness of that model. Academics have discussed its gender politics—the importance of Dr Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman), then Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) and to a lesser extent Tara King (Linda Thorson), as the earliest examples of female TV crime-fighting action heroes (Chapman, 2009; Short, 2011). Steed’s (Patrick McNee) foppish, dandy masculinity and its feminine attributes have also been discussed (Chapman, 2009), but my focus here is on how his masculinity changed across the series and relationship of this evolution with ‘popular camp’.

The Avengers itself started out as a series drenched in masculinity with two male leads (Patrick McNee as Steed and Ian Hendry as Dr David Keel) who—although ostensibly not private eyes—aped the iconography of the troubled hard-nosed private eye that had been fashionable since Humphrey Bogart played Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) (Chapman, 2009: 59). These darker, more stereotypically masculine early episodes, were different from those in its last four seasons. The Avengers became a celebration of modern London pop culture, parading the garish and bold interior design of the Swinging Sixties through the show’s regular starting point of Steed, Dr Gale, Mrs Peel or Miss King’s homes. The show's loud and pop art quality was compounded in the last two seasons with the introduction of technicolour. The show's writers were not frightened to play with Steed’s masculinity, transforming him over a number of series from the trench-coat-wearing moody agent into a champagne-sipping, fashion-conscious dandy. While this firmly positioned Steed within a discourse of masculinity acceptable at that time, it is one closely associated with the feminine through style and the assumption that a wealthy background means a softer, more domesticated lifestyle. In this way, and to be crude in gendered terms, the series literally shifted its centre of gravity from masculinity to femininity, from hard-nosed seedy storylines centred on the criminal underworld featuring macho detectives to enigmatic, mysterious fantasy-orientated narratives played out in a diegesis steeped with frivolity. The series’ play with gender identities and associations was only one aspect of its transformation into a celebration of camp; parody and irony became two of its central tenets, turning on the show’s interest in murderous megalomaniacs or new technologies of horror twinned with fashion, style and throwaway puns.

While The Avenger’s camp was not overtly associated with queer politics, Moe Meyer notes that this version of camp – a ‘pop camp’ – is the

unwitting vehicle of a subversive operation that introduces queer signifying codes into a dominant discourse…its final effect is the reproduction of the queer’s aura by the un-queer camp liberator who has been transformed into a drag queen with no other choice but to lip-synch the discourse of the other. (1994: 13)

Similarly, The Prisoner played with masculinity against a pop camp backdrop, but in different ways. The series follows the story of a spy who resigns and is taken by unknown captors and held in ‘The Village’, a seemingly idyllic location from which he can’t escape. Interpretations of Patrick McGoohan’s cult spy-fi series range from suggestions that it is an allegory for McGoohan’s own dilemma as an actor trapped by his previous role as John Drake in Danger Man (1960–1968) to the protagonist Number Six representing homosexuality, in relation to Number Six’s distant and even mildly misogynistic approach to women (Short, 2011: 24). On this last point, and starting to think about the series from a queer perspective, this is one of the only readings of the series that foregrounds the work the series did to lay the ground for future cult tele-fantasy which would eventually play with gendered sexual identity in a much more overt way. While Steed’s foppish and dandy masculinity allowed him to take part in the high-camp of The Avengers, McGoohan’s Number Six represented another version of masculinity in his reaction to his new-found surroundings of the campy, neo-baroque, but much darker surroundings of The Village. While Steed’s masculinity became playful with camp, Number Six was lost and vulnerable in his new environment, emblematic of a masculinity beginning to question itself against the cultural backdrop of changing expectations for men. Number Six’s masculinity is less overtly queer in that sense, but still an important break from the traditional models of hegemonic masculinity of the period. This shift is made more obvious if we read McGoohan’s Number Six against his previous role as Drake in Danger Man. In Danger Man, McGoohan plays a more conventional spy hero, certain of his place and role as a spy for NATO and later the British spy organisation, M9. Moreover, Drake had some limited romantic encounters, while Number Six lacked a specific sexual identity; despite advances towards him he never engages in any romantic or sexual activity in the series—for all intent and purpose he is asexual. Of course, narratively we can read this as part of his distrust of anyone in The Village—a safety measure. Nevertheless, even as a side effect, these aspects of Number Six’s masculinity are certainly queer representations of both gender and sexuality, in a wider TV and film landscape where leading action men needed to be seen to be taking control and actively proving their romantic hetero-masculinity.

Identity fracture

The fluidity of masculinity foregrounded in different ways by The Avengers and The Prisoner highlights that both series challenged notions of fixed gender identity well before queer theorists were highlighting its importance to gender and sexual politics in the late 1980s (see Butler, 1990). In the case of The Prisoner, beyond masculinity, questions of identity dominate the series, mostly through the perspective of Number Six and his self-reflexive exploration of his loss of identity and fight to regain his previous persona. Therefore, identity here is fractured; imagined as a blank canvas that antagonist Number Two believes he can shape in order that Number Six and the other ‘retired’ spies can live out their remaining lives in ‘useful peace’.

Similarly, questions of identity dominate The Avengers. While the beginnings of the series were a little more explicit about the motives of Dr Ian Hendry, seeking to avenge the death of his fiancée, even the introduction of Steed at this point is shrouded in mystery. As an audience we never find out much more about Steed’s background or of his spy partners across the series’ six seasons. When we do, the series fetishises those moments. For example, when Emma Peel leaves Steed for the last time at the end of season five, she is driven away by a man we assume to be her partner, whom, in the show’s characteristically ironic way, is wearing a similar suit, bowler hat and umbrella to that of Steed’s iconic costume. Identity in The Avengers is something that can be played with, and in part it allows the groundbreaking crime-fighting female representations and pop camp masculinities to be just that, free from the tethering of romantic relationships, which would restore domestic heteronormative models of gender of that time.

Both series’ obsession with identity play can, of course, be seen as emblematic of the late 1960s. A period of significant cultural shifts during which identity politics were on the ascent, following the US civil rights movement and its gains around equality in the workplace in racial and gender terms through the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A renewed feminism, now referred to as second wave, began in the United States in this period and spread to other Western countries. In the United Kingdom in 1967, the Government made homosexuality legal for those over 21, arguably the moment that marks the beginning of a slow but progressive liberalisation of the law around alternative sexual and gender identities. Neither The Avengers, nor The Prisoner, were leading lights in racial representation given their predominantly white casts. However, both series’ questioning of the stability of social identity mirrored the moment when it became a more widely understood, yet simultaneously problematised construct.

Conclusion

With Sense8’s (2015–2018) reasonably quick demise, excitement about the possibility that VoD, with its subscription-driven model, could challenge LGBTQI+ boundaries with less fear of advertisers has perhaps been overstated. Nevertheless, we need to recognise the progress we have seen against the backdrop of a cult tele-fantasy past where LGBTQI+ characters were conspicuous by their absence. Despite the past dearth of representations, the relationship between the LGBTQI+ community and cult tele-fantasy has always been a close one. The London Pride festival’s 2007 decision to show the Doctor Who finale in Trafalgar Square, for fear of low attendance, is a good example. Given the lack of LGBTQI+ representation in so much early cult tele-fantasy, it begs the question – what has fostered this interest in cult TV from LGBTQI+ fans? By returning to some of the foundational texts in the industrial development of cult tele-fantasy today, we can see those texts are—as Jones notes—escapist, offering queers in their bedrooms fantastic worlds as a distraction from a real-world oppression. However, they also challenge the models of fixed gender and sexual identity subsequently identified by queer theorists as central to hegemonic heteronormativity. If canon cult tele-fantasy is defined by its edginess, its generic hybridity, its hyper-diegesis and its enigmatic nature (see Hills, 2004; Jones and Pearson, 2004; Lavery, 2010; Short, 2011) then, given its historical interest also in non-normative models of gender and sexual identity, I would argue that we need to question whether we have fully accounted for this, in terms of what makes cult TV, truly cult.