Quentin Crisp
The screening of John Hurt’s adept portrayal of Quentin Crisp (1908-1999) as An Englishman In New York over Christmas has prompted a brusque response from Peter Tatchell in The Independent. While praising Hurt’s uncanny ability to reprise his role in The Naked Civil Servant, which depicted Crisp’s youthful bravery and flamboyant one-man crusade to be himself in the face of outright hostility, Tatchell says Quentin Crisp latterly expressed contempt for homosexuality, gay rights, and jealousy of a burgeoning gay movement that denied him his former place as the most outrageous queen on the block.
So what’s the truth about this man born in Surrey as Denis Pratt, who, after conquering Manhattan and expressing his ambition to meet everyone in the world, died back in the England he once so hated, on the eve of embarking on a sell-out speaking tour a month short of his 91st birthday?
Quentin Crisp’s diaries of the New York years became the substance of his his highly entertaining book, Resident Alien. One cannot read this without sharing his real delight at being uniquely himself, parading beneath the skycrapers the welcoming streets of 1980s gay America. Waking up there, he famously said, was like taking a shower in champagne every morning.
"dyed his hair..painted nails and bright make up"
Americans had held a special place in Crisp’s heart since he had experienced the kindness of US servicemen as he trolled the streets of wartime London. No one could doubt his courage in earlier decades when he dyed his hair, wearing painted nails and bright make-up at a time when even for women to do so was socially unacceptable. In the late 1920s he had spent six months as a prostitute which did much to reinforce the lifelong underlying pessimism of his style. This revealed itself in his insistence that homosexuals could never find true love together, that he spoke only for himself, and his apparent opposition to the very gay movement from which he drew his enraptured audiences. This came to a head when he dismissed AIDS as “a fad” despite 600 gay men already having succumbed to its ravages at the time. A retraction of his statement he found impossible to make.
Crisp had Oscar Wilde’s gift for inverting popular sayings, and for self-confident, sweeping declarations. He maintained he meant everything he said, at the cost of popularity and work for long periods even in the places he was most feted. He could be an unfailing champion of individual gay men as in the case of the painter Patrick Angus who, with Crisp’s encouragement , saw his work achieving recognition just before he died of AIDS at thirty-eight. He expressed amusement, on the other hand, that he had
“lost the love of all the gay men in England overnight”
by describing Princess Diana as “trash” for “traipsing around Paris with an Arab”! His parents were firmly middle-class and he retained a certain class consciousness of how things used to be done all his life, hence his advice on style, manners, and his affectation of calling everyone Mr.
What Tatchell doesn’t say, but what An Englishman In New York makes clear, is that privately Crisp gave away a considerable part of his newly acquired riches to AIDS charities and foundations. The enigma was that what he so adamantly couldn’t show in public, he expressed in secret. I don’t think he really felt eclipsed by the peacocks of a new hedonistic gay world, because he was a one-off. The best of them could only follow. Perhaps there was a real twinge of regret that the sexual revolution had passed him by, which led to some of his more embittered statements. There was even a suggestion that his demise in England was a calculated final gesture, knowing that it would get more newspaper coverage over here.
Be that as it may, Crisp by his example showed that the most obscure of us can and should enjoy the gift and privilege of being gay without fear of reprisal, limits to our adventurousness, or bounds to our joy.
By John Hartley
(c) Copyright 2010. All rights reserved.
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