Quentin Crisp - the quintessential queen

Tonight we watched the 2008 movie An Englishman in New York about the last 20 years of Quentin Crisp's life. The actor John Hurt plays Crisp. (Hurt played the role of Crisp in the 1975 movie The Naked Civil Servant based on Crisp's memoirs published in 1968.)

Quentin Crisp was the quintessential queen but he was a brave man and a true gentleman. He was born Denis Charles Pratt on 25th December 1908 in Surrey:

Crisp was an English writer and raconteur. He became an icon of homosexuality in the 1970s after publication of his memoir, The Naked Civil Servant, brought to the attention of the general public his defiant exhibitionism and refusal to keep his sexuality private.
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After leaving school in 1926, Crisp studied journalism at King's College London, but failed to graduate in 1928, going on to take art classes at the Regent Street Polytechnic.

Around this time, Crisp began visiting the cafés of Soho – his favourite being The Black Cat in Old Compton Street – meeting other young homosexual men and rent-boys, and experimenting with make-up and women's clothes. For six months he worked as a male prostitute, looking for love, he said in a 1999 interview,[citation needed] but finding only degradation.
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Crisp attempted to join the British army at the outbreak of World War II, but was rejected and declared exempt by the medical board on the grounds that he was "suffering from sexual perversion". He remained in London during the 1941 Blitz, stocked up on cosmetics, purchased five pounds of henna and paraded through the black-out, picking up G.I.s, whose kindness and open-mindedness inspired his love of all things American.

In 1940 he moved into the bed-sitting room he would occupy for the next four decades, the first floor apartment at 129 Beaufort Street. Here he stayed until he emigrated to the United States in 1981. In the intervening years he never attempted any house-work, saying famously in his memoir that "After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse".

He left his job as engineer's tracer in 1942 to become a model in life classes in London and the Home Counties, and continued posing for artists for the next three decades. "It was like being a civil servant," he explained in his autobiography, "except that you were naked." Pamela Green, who went on to be a famous glamour model of the 1950s and '60s, remembers him at St. Martin's School of Art, as “very thin with a skin so white it almost had a greenish tinge”.

Crisp had published three short books by the time he came to write the The Naked Civil Servant.
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When his autobiography was reprinted in 1975 on the strength of the success of the televisual version of The Naked Civil Servant, Gay News commented that the book should have been published posthumously. Quentin said this was a polite way of telling him to drop dead. Crisp was not sympathetic to the Gay Liberation movement of the time. "What do you want liberation from?" he asked in a 1974 chance encounter with Peter Tatchell. "What is there to be proud of? I don't believe in rights for homosexuals."
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Crisp then took the show to New York [and] Crisp decided to move to New York permanently and set about making arrangements. In 1981 he arrived with few possessions and found a small apartment in Manhattan's Lower East Side.
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Crisp remained fiercely independent and unpredictable into old age. He caused controversy and confusion in the homosexual community by jokingly calling AIDS "a fad", and homosexuality "a terrible disease". Crisp commented after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales: "She could have been Queen of England [sic] – and she was swanning about Paris with Arabs. What disgraceful behaviour! Going about saying she wanted to be the queen of hearts. The vulgarity of it is so overpowering."

Crisp returned to England to do a show but died soon afterward on 21 November 1999 a month before his 91st birthday.

He was always true to himself, a true individualist, a full-time satirist and a part-time philosopher. Some quotes:

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.

The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!

There are girls [fag hags] who do not like real life... Some of these girls are innocent enough to think that these unreal friendships [with homosexuals] will lead to true love — a kind of sexual intercourse that will happen to them without their having to take too horribly much notice. Even those who are sufficiently sophisticated to know that this will not be so persist in these relationships. They provide an opportunity to lavish emotion on a pseudo-man without paying the price that in heterosexual circumstances would be inevitable.

I now know that if you describe things as better as they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you are called a satirist.

It would be impossible to get through the kind of life that I have known without accumulating a vast unused stockpile of rage. Retaliation, though, was a luxury I could never afford. On the physical level I was too feeble. On any other I was not rich enough. I never dared to be rude to anyone. I never knew that I might not need him later.

It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.

An autobiography is obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

Life was a funny thing that occurred on the way to the grave.

Needless to say Crisp was hated by "gay activists" because he would not conform to their group-think or promote their agenda.