I won’t put this exactly right, but as far as I can remember Grace put it something like this: British spy stories, from Le Carré to Another Country to The Prisoner, is mostly about how being gay and aristocratic turns England’s sons against her. Gay men have to be spies, because they’re tapped early on by a quiet homosexuality-detecting government department and pressed into service, where they begin to blackmail one another out of fear of being blackmailed themselves, and thus Smiley’s Circus is mostly a collection of genteelly-closeted gentlemen all fanatically suspicious of one another’s closetedness. And it is true that Le Carré has more ways of gently raising the possibility of
Based on this prose, it seems there's a class that's "gentlemanly soft," which is valid in British spy fiction, and "pansy types," which aren't. The More You Know!
This makes me think of every time Peter Guillam is referred to as "Smiley's cupbearer", or the description of him from "The Honourable Schoolboy": "Guillam is tall and tough and graceful, and probationers awaiting first posting tend to look up to him as some sort of Greek god."
Every Time A Gay Cipher In A John Le Carré Novel Indirectly Accuses A Colleague Of Being A Gay Cipher
Based on this prose, it seems there's a class that's "gentlemanly soft," which is valid in British spy fiction, and "pansy types," which aren't. The More You Know!
This makes me think of every time Peter Guillam is referred to as "Smiley's cupbearer", or the description of him from "The Honourable Schoolboy": "Guillam is tall and tough and graceful, and probationers awaiting first posting tend to look up to him as some sort of Greek god."
A gentleman named D'Arcy is automatically homosexual, any further description is just gilding the lily.