quentin crisp: the mother ship

The British writer, author, commentator and absent grandfather of metrosexualité Mark Simpson has written an illuminating and -- to my mind -- very accurate psycho-bio on the pathology of England's most stateliest homo, Quentin Crisp. The blog entry can be read here. It is titled Quentin Crisp and Hurtian Crisp and delineates the difference between the real doyenne of the Black Cat Café and Hurt's portrayal of his sister-in-crime.

Hurt is heterosexual and brought a certain sexual charge to his depiction of Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, in the the same way that Terence Stamp was unforgettable in his role of the transsexual, retired performer in Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. Hurt confers a virility on Crisp that simply was not present in its real-life owner. He strides gaily through the streets of Bloomsbury, overburdened by bon-mots crafted  through years of self-internment, advertising his actuality to bystanders on suburban station platforms.  Tossing a slipper into the face of 1930s convention, Crisp is Genet in deeply mauve eye-shadow. One warms to him. But the Painted Sultana of Sodom had little to do with sodomy, or even sex. Crisp was determinedly "the only gay in the village" until the 1960s undid him. A living sculpture of high narcissism,  the scale of his emotional ruthlessness and detachment was boundless. Crisp would have survived even in ancient Rome. His unsentimentality sometimes ran to the cruel and the exotic. I think he was right about many things but his 'truisms' were also firmly implanted in the life lead unshared; a life that gave not an inch to either commitment nor compromise. And  a sink piling up with unwashed dishes that had reached the 'fish stage'.

Quentin Crisp was a Mother Ship to many British homosexuals in the 1970s who saw his biopic, The Naked Civil Servant, and in it the  reflection of their own circumstantial isolation at a time that neither understood nor barely tolerated homosexuality. It was the fiesta of a rouged passeggiata through the post and pre-war years of a bombed London.  His autobiography is fairly well written if sometimes exhaustive in the repetition of its daily, domestic accounts. The life-philosophy is grandiose and Wildean yet expounded within the small, amethyst cell of a slovenly, bath-robed typist who refuses to dust. That is not a pejorative term -- the internet has claimed us all as shorthand typists.

Crisp was an exhibitionist. An exhibitionist is not interested in group activity or collectivism -- his existence, his oxygen depends upon the uninterrupted monologue and an enraptured audience that is amused and shocked. Anyone with a flair for after-dinner entertainment knows this. Crisp allied himself with nobody. I don't think he would have been comfortable with metrosexuality, which would have robbed him of his martyrdom. Nor may the legalisation of homosexuality (and all the unisex hair salons that sprang up around it) have necessarily been good news,  de-throning him of his unique status. He needn't have worried -- Crisp went on to outlive a great many people who were born fifty years after he first over-buttered toast.
They really could have done with him in the Army -- his survival skills were second-to-none.