Agent Seduction: Part 1: The Initiation (lesbian, hypnotism, force, military, erotica, adult)

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Tilly: They didn't want it to be a man's version. There's a male version of what lesbians are, and you see it in the soft-core porn movies all the time. They really wanted to get it right. They wanted to be very respectful of the lesbian community. They wanted it to be very, very authentic and raw, not pornographic. Although it was pornographic because we're hot. [ Laughs] As am I. Representation always matters, whether it's in the Halls of Congress or at your local independent theater. Queer women deserve to have their queer female sex represented on screen, without it devolving into typical pornographic tropes: shaved vaginas, sorority sisters, giant jiggly boobs, foot-long dildos, scissoring, a well-hung neighbor guy who just "pops in" for a threesome, etc. There's absolutely nothing wrong with any of these erotic ingredients, per se, but it's formulaic and not particularly representational of most queer sex. Are women useful as spies? If so, in what capacity? Maxwell Knight, an officer in MI5, Britain’s domestic-counterintelligence agency, sat pondering these questions. Outside his office, World War II had begun, and Europe’s baptism by blitzkrieg was under way. In England—as in the world—the intelligence community was still an all-male domain, and a clubby, upper-crust one at that. But a lady spy could come in handy, as Knight was about to opine. Gershon: I just thought I'd be inspired. I certainly was inspired with tattoos and stuff. I ended up choosing my own tattoos and where I wanted them and all that stuff. Tilly: I did have so many girls come up to me—and so many drag queens saying their drag name was Violet. It really made me feel, in a weird way, like I had a responsibility when all these girls would come up to me and say that they came out of the closet and realized they were gay after they saw this film.

Tilly: Once they got the two of us in the room, I thought, "This is a girl that I can really see being in a relationship with." Has she been climbing the walls? “You know what? No, weirdly,” says Lynch. “I’m a true believer in everything having its time. And for whatever reason the world needed its time to reset. So I feel a little weirdly unshakable at the moment. Like, if anything else was to happen tomorrow, I’d be like, ‘OK, cool, how do we get present to what’s happening?’ So I’ve had to calm down everyone else around me.” Gershon: There was one take that all four of us were like, "That's the one." It was like a real love scene. You didn't see a boob. You didn't see anything; it was all suggested. It really played on our face more than anything. Tilly: It was a classic film noir, except instead of the lead being a male, it was Corky. A studio offered the [Wachowskis] a lot more money to make the movie, but they said that they had to make Corky a man.

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Historically, women had indeed counted on their charms in practicing espionage, mostly because charms were often the only kind of weapon permitted them. During the American Civil War, when a group of elite hostesses relied on their social connections to gather intelligence for both sides, Harriet Tubman was an outlier who actually ran spying efforts. But the aggression, vision, and executive capacity required to direct an operation were not considered within the female repertoire. Besides being a genuinely considerate movie with some thoughtful meditations on religion and culture, it has the added thrill of having super erotic sex scenes, made possible because: Lynch, who gracefully declines to say whether she’s in a relationship, found salvation in her “indoor jungle”. “Quite literally, my plants have saved my life,” she says. “I just like watering them, watching them grow, playing them good music. I’ve been playing them Cleo Sol and Kaytranada – they like calm, melodic music and being turned every couple of days. So basically, they’ve danced through me.” Her husband reacted surprisingly well too, suggesting that they enrol in therapy to help both of them exit their long-standing relationship. I took this as my cue to make a commitment and said I would move to the suburbs to be with her and her three children, once her husband had moved out.

Gershon: Look at your body. Honestly, whenever I wasn't sure of what I was doing I would just stare at your chest. Tilly: Everyone's positive that they're so in love, and they're going to live happily ever after, but I really think in Violet's nature, she's a predator. I do not think it's going to end well. Violet's in love with Corky, but she's very damaged and I just don't think it's going to be like one of those, "50 years ago, we met cute," you know? In the office, nothing changed. Both of us swore not to tell anyone else. I dodged questions from friends about my relationship status like bullets - the lies were worth it for the delirium I felt when I was with her. I’d come out when I was 17 and been disowned by my parents. I’d moved to London and been in and out relationships and casual flings. She was 40 and had been married for 10 years, with three children under the age of 10. The agency we worked for also represented her husband, an esteemed writer, so I knew I absolutely couldn’t go there. Gershon: I really liked the hip [tattoo] that wrapped around my hip and crept up. You saw the top of it coming out of my pants sometimes. I thought that was really sexy. I had seen that on some girl at a bar, and I was like, "Oh that's hot."

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Throughout TV and movie history, lesbians and cops are like peanut butter and jelly, and it seems like half of the time a TV show or movie (that isn't about lesbians) has an adult lesbian character, she's a cop. Fashion editor Jo Jones; photographer’s assistant Joe Stone; fashion assistant Peter Bevan; makeup by Alex Babsky at Premier Hair and Makeup using Bobbi Brown Cosmetics; hair by Earl Simms at Caren; nails by Joanna Newbold represented by Arlington Talent using Morgan Taylor available from Red Carpet Beauty Tilly: We had to reshoot the last scene too because, when they were driving away, you could see palm trees reflected in the windshield. Gershon: As soon as I met Jen, I thought, "Oh my God, all I have to do is watch her." She was so amusing and so fun. It's just so easy to watch her, like her butt and her legs. It made my job easy to kind of objectify her. We liked each other as soon as we met. I'm not about to put Kissing Jessica Stein in this category, because it's too weak of a queer film to be even considered. There's also Mulholland Drive, which had some very brief hot queer moments relative to its era (2001). Heavenly Creatures (1994) served the queer goth community particularly well. Sadly, that community is relatively small.

This seems like it shouldn't be a victory. And yet, the list of movies who've accomplished the same feat is painfully abbreviated. Don't talk to me about Blue is the Warmest Color, a movie made famous for its extended, impractical sex scenes and allegations of harassment by its director, Abdellatif Kechiche. Kechiche reportedly bullied the two female protagonists as well as his staff, forcing them to work 16-hour workdays under extreme pressure. Critics further accused the director of creating "voyeuristic" sex scenes intended to solicit the male gaze. Ever since Director Sebastián Lelio's Disobedience premiered at TIFF in 2017, it's been the talk of the town among the five queer women who care about this kind of stuff. The film tells story of Orthodox Jewish lesbians in London: Esti (Rachel McAdams) caught in a loveless relationship with a Rabbi, and Ronit (Rachel Weisz) trapped in a series of meaningless heterosexual hookups.

It's also interesting to note how many of these lesbian cops are women of color. Again, queer women of color are more easily accepted by "average Americans" if they're helping to uphold the systems that oppress them. Tilly: Look at this, we're like equals. You know I'm full of s–t; I know that you know I'm full of s–t. We both know what you're here for.

Lynch was born in Shepherd’s Bush in 1987, a second-generation Jamaican child of a Windrush family. Her father was a social worker for young teens and her mother is a housing manager. “They were both in service, both helping people,” she says. They separated when she was young, but Lynch continued to see a lot of both of them. She also had a formative period, between primary and secondary schools, when she lived with her grandmother. “I think that’s where the maturity came on board,” says Lynch. “You’re with an old lady, so she’s gonna teach you old-lady things!” The SOE’s leaders were readier than the old boys of MI5 and MI6, the foreign-intelligence agency, to grant that women enjoyed certain advantages. Many French men had been sent to labor camps in Germany, so women operatives were better able to blend in with a mostly female population. As Sarah Rose writes in D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II, a British captain who recruited three female SOE agents, Selwyn Jepson, believed that women were psychologically suited to behind-enemy-lines work—“secretive, accustomed to isolation, possessed of a ‘cool and lonely courage.’ ” Some officers thought women had greater empathy and caretaking instincts, which equipped them to recruit and support ordinary citizens as agents. Women were considered good couriers—a high-risk role—because they could rely on ingratiation and seeming naïveté as tools in tight spots. The war also provided openings for women to show that they could execute operations, making strategic life-and-death decisions. In some cases, women had their own blinkered views of female leadership to overcome. Barely 30 when she was recruited in 1940, Fourcade had lived abroad, and relished the liberated environment of 1930s Paris. Still, she was astonished when “Navarre,” the code name for Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, asked her to be his deputy. Being a woman surely ruled her out, she protested to the World War I hero, who was secretly mobilizing citizens worried by Nazi aggression in Europe. That was precisely why she would be above suspicion, he told her. “Good God—it’s a woman!” cried another recruit, who became one of her most trusted aides. After Navarre was arrested in Algiers in 1941, Fourcade became the undisputed leader of Alliance. The introduction of Lynch’s Nomi is clearly part of a strategy for keeping 007 relevant in the modern world. “I think they were just looking for someone who would be able to be a match for Bond,” says Lynch. “Who would be able to stand up and be vocal and forthright and strong and able to handle a weapon, able to handle herself and not someone who takes any crap from anybody at all. Then, as it unfolded, she became this quite complicated, free, open-minded vocal human being who brings a really nice twist to MI6.”As a queer woman myself, I was mostly concerned that the two female characters ate a whole plate of spaghetti without brushing their teeth before commencing intercourse. Lynch, as you may well have suspected, got the part. In No Time to Die, the 33-year-old from west London will play Nomi, an MI6 agent. That much we know for sure. There are persistent rumours that Nomi inherits the 007 designation from Bond, who has handed in the keys to the Aston and retired to Jamaica with the French psychologist Madeleine Swann ( Léa Seydoux). Let’s pull this plaster off: are you, Lashana Lynch, the next James Bond? “Nooo! You don’t want me!” she says, with a fit of giggles. “I’d just be like” – she feigns ditsiness – “‘Erm, right, so where do you start again?’” Tilly: Somebody said, "Oh, you know, females don't have any sex organs." [Susie] goes, "Yes we do; it's called a hand." So they did do a lot of shots of hands.