Quentin Crisp, 25 December 1908 – 21 November 1999), was an English writer and raconteur.
He became a gay icon in the 1970s after publication of his memoir, The Naked Civil Servant.
By his own account, Crisp was effeminate in behaviour from an early age and found himself the object of teasing at Kingswood Preparatory School inEpsom, from where he won a scholarship to Denstone College, Uttoxeter, in 1922.
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.
Crisp left home to move to the centre of London at the end of 1930 and, after dwelling in a succession of flats, found a bed-sitting room in Denbigh Street, where he "held court with London's brightest and roughest characters." His outlandish appearance – he wore bright make-up, dyed his long hair crimson, painted his fingernails and wore sandals to display his painted toe-nails – brought admiration and curiosity from some quarters, but generally attracted hostility and violence from strangers passing him in the streets.
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.
Crisp had published three short books by the time he came to write the The Naked Civil Servant at the urging of agent Donald Carroll.
Eventually made into a film In 1975 The Naked Civil Servant was broadcast on British and US television and made both actor John Hurt and Crisp himself into stars. This success launched Crisp in a new direction: that of performer and lector. He devised a one-man show and began touring the country with it. The first half of the show was an entertaining monologue loosely based on his memoirs, the second half was a question-and-answer session with Crisp picking the audience's written questions at random and answering them in an amusing manner.
When his autobiography was reprinted in 1975 after the success of the television version of The Naked Civil Servant, Gay News commented that the book should have been published posthumously (Crisp commented that this was a polite way of them telling him to drop dead).
By now, Crisp was a theatre-filling raconteur. His one-man show sold out the Duke of York's Theatre in London in 1978. Crisp then took the show to New York. His first stay in the Hotel Chelsea coincided with a fire, a robbery, and the death of Nancy Spungen. 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 on East 3rd Street in Manhattan's East Village.
As he had done in London, Crisp allowed his telephone number to be listed in the telephone directory and saw it as his duty to converse with anyone who called him. For the first twenty or so years of owning his own telephone he habitually answered calls with the phrase "Yes, Lord?" ("Just in case," he once said.) Later on he changed it to "Oh yes?" in a querulous tone of voice. His openness to strangers extended to accepting dinner invitation from almost anyone. While it was expected that the inviter would pay for dinner, Crisp did his best to "sing for his supper" by regaling his hosts with wonderful stories and yarns much as he did in his theatrical performances. Dinner with him was said to be one of the best shows in New York.
He continued to perform his one-man show, published ground-breaking books on the importance of contemporary manners as a means of social inclusivity as opposed to etiquette, which he claimed is socially exclusive, and supported himself by accepting social invitations and writing movie reviews and columns for US and UK magazines and newspapers. He said that provided one could exist on peanuts and champagne, one could quite easily live by going to every cocktail party, premiere and first night to which one was invited.
In December 1998, he celebrated his ninetieth birthday performing the opening night of his one-man show, An Evening with Quentin Crisp, at The Intar Theatre on Forty-Second Street in New York City.
A humorous pact he had made with Penny Arcade to live to be a century old, with a decade off for good behaviour, proved prophetic: in November 1999, Quentin Crisp died, nearly one month before his 91st birthday, in Chorlton-cum-Hardy in Manchester, on the eve of a nationwide revival of his one-man show. He was cremated with a minimum of ceremony as he had requested, and his ashes flown back to Phillip Ward in New York. He bequeathed all future UK-only income (but not the copyrights which belong to Stedman Mays, Mary Tahan and Phillip Ward and managed by Mr. Ward) from his entire literary estate to the two men he considered to have had the greatest influence on his career: Richard Gollner, his long-time agent, and Donald Carroll. His estate at death was valued in excess of $600,000.
In 2000, designer MIGUEL ADROVER transformed quentin crisp's discarded mattress into a overcoat.
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