Quentin Crisp, can I get a million likes for Quentin Crisp?

The original Maggie Smith!

I saw him on the beach in Venice, CA once dressed like a vampire.

Didn't he do a lot complaining about being harassed for being gay? The purple updo couldn't have helped matters, he might have tried being less conspicuous.

DL doesn't like him because:

1.) He didn't like Jews

2.) He said that if he had the choice, he would have born straight.

Since he didn't have the choice, he played the cards he was dealt, something that also offends many DLers.

He was a vile English Leslie Jordan without the charm.

If it weren't for William Hurt in the Naked Civil Servant, he would be a homosexual footnote.

Wohoo!

Here: here's a million likes. I adore Quentin, who once said of flying in airplanes: "All there is to do is sleep and watch movies. It's just like being on the ground."

He was listed in the phone book and welcomed calls from strangers. If you took him out to dinner, he'd entertain you in return.

Like. He was a flaming queen when it was illegal. Whatever his opinions later in life, he suffered through int nose homophobia and abuse as someone who couldn’t hide his gayness. Just like today, the nelly queens are the toughest - if perhaps more damaged - gay men.

Pete Buttigied admitted that, if given the option, would have chosen to be straight.

Space Shuttle Gay:

You could see that he was gay from the Space Shuttle.

Sorry, Pete Buttigieg.

r4, what horseshit about Jews.

r5, you're an idiot--it was John Hurt, not William, and Quentin Crisp was fabulous. Of another era and not "woke"--thank God, in some ways. He was certainly ahead of his time and had more guts than any other queen in just being himself. An icon. He invented being out and uniquely himself at a time when it was to only dangerous but illegal.

You queens have NO IDEA.

No, r3--in fact, he never complained about any treatment he got for being gay. He sucked it up.

Do any of you know anything? Have you read any of his books?

[quote]He sucked it up.

That's an understatement if ever I heard one.

Deep down, he was quite shallow.

He was a delight. Flexed his stealth-bitch opinions. After Princess Di died, Quentin called her "trash" for hanging out with "oily Arabs."

Good God Letterman showed in that video exactly why I always hated his interviewing style.

He was certainly more intelligent and had more style than anyone posting on Datalounge.

I would have loved to have him as a neighbor. I would have had him over for dinner every night just to listen to him.

The reason he doesn't get much DL love is that the current crop of DLers have no idea who he is/was. They would rather talk about Armie, Real Housewives, and Royals /Sparkle Markle, instead of actually knowing any significant figures from Gay history.

And they finally managed to run off those who would care about such people.

[post redacted because independent.co.uk thinks that links to their ridiculous rag are a bad thing. Somebody might want to tell them how the internet works. Or not. We don't really care. They do suck though. Our advice is that you should not click on the link and whatever you do, don't read their truly terrible articles.]

I only ever met Quentin Crisp once. It was a brief encounter in Charing Cross road in 1974. I was 22 and wearing a gay liberation badge, which prompted Quentin to retort: "What do you want liberation from?" He continued in a similar vein, dismissing the idea of gay pride: "What is there to be proud of? I don't believe in rights for homosexuals."

This sad conversation sums up what Quentin Crisp had become by the 1970s: an often self-hating, arrogant, homophobic gadfly. He denounced the gay rights movement and slammed homosexuality as "a terrible disease." "The world would be better without homosexuals," he declared.

In 1997, he told The Times that he would advise parents to abort a foetus if it could be shown to be genetically predetermined to be gay: "If it (homosexuality) can be avoided, I think it should be." Other notorious Crispisms include his suggestion that gay men are so self-centred that they are incapable of love and lack the capacity to care about the welfare of other people. This supposed lack of altruism is, according to Quentin, because most gay men have "feminine minds."

He was a misogynist as well as a homophobe. Quentin was a somewhat different person in the 1930s and 1940s, when he made his mark as one of the few out and visible gay men in London. Despite abuse and bashings, he stood his ground, which was incredibly brave and inspiring, as we saw in the 1975 film of his early life, The Naked Civil Servant. Sunday night's follow-up television film, An Englishman in New York, about Crisp's life after he moved to the United States, was much less satisfying. Although it is a fine film, with another bravo performance by John Hurt, it sanitises Crisp's ignorant, pompous homophobia. We were invited by the film to admire Quentin as a hero and pioneer. Yet by the time he moved to the US he had ceased to be either heroic or pioneering. He turned into an ever-more self-obsessed, reactionary character.

Echoing tin-pot homophobes, Quentin disparaged homosexuality as an illness, affliction, burden, curse and abnormality. He said he felt "disfigured" by his gayness. After The Naked Civil Servant, he had celebrity and a public platform, which was based entirely on his flamboyant homosexuality. Alas, he never spoke out for gay rights or supported any gay equality cause. He declined to endorse campaigns against homophobic discrimination and violence. Anti-gay politicians and preachers were never on the receiving end of his famously barbed wit.

An Englishman in New York acknowledges that Crisp disgracefully dismissed Aids as a "fad" at a time when thousands of gay men were dying and the US government was ignoring the epidemic. However, it ignores his ridiculing of the gay liberation movement and his dismissal of the struggle for lesbian and gay equal rights.

Why did Quentin turn so bitter? Jealousy. He resented the fact that he was no longer unique – no longer the only visible queer in town. Hence his loathing of the gay liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It had encouraged and empowered the mass coming out of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. They stole his limelight. Put bluntly: Crisp disliked being overtaken and over-shadowed by other gays. We queered his pitch.

Well, fuck Peter Tatchell, whoever he is. Crisp was the first openly gay man to live openly as a gay man the way he chose, in England no less I don't need some twat telling me what Quentin Crisp represented, r22. He was a hero to many, and stil is. So The Independent can fuck itself.

r23, I'd like to see links to all those "quotes" you're attributing to him. I met him, too, in fact--in NYC, where a friend of mine was a friend of his. I was in his company a few times. Nothing you say could be further from the truth about his nature, his kindness to other people--I saw it with my own eyes.

He was most often commenting about the straight world when he said things like, "You can't expect them [straights] to accept you." He was saying what he thought was really true about straight people.

r23 is imposing his own attitudes instead of attempting to understand Crisp in context--apparently that's too challenging for r23.

I miss John Hurt.

He was speaking at A Different Light bookstore in the Castro in San Francisco and he stated that gay men just wanted to be women. Lost any respect I had for him right then.

People lost respect for them because he wasn't saying all the "woke" things they wanted to hear, while ignoring what he did do. Tough shit to all of you.

OP, Crisp would be disdainful of "Likes."

I met him once, in the early 80s when he came to Columbia to speak to the gay group there, then called GPC. He was funny and extremely feminine, I remember not knowing really what to think of him for some of the reasons r23 lines out in his post.

I enjoyed: Manners from Heaven: a divine guide to good behaviour

... although he plumbed his own experience for material which he then presented with a unique twist on honesty, he was not introspective in the way that readers of memoir have come to expect in our tell-all era. Crisp was a man of his time as well as of his country of origin, both of which furnished his ever-so-polite, velvet-glove-concealing-poison-tipped-stiletto style. The self to which he was true was not a person so much as a persona; a fascinating one, to be sure, made only more alluring, like Miss Garbo, as he called her, by its essential elusiveness. But anyone wondering where the real human being lay beneath the performance he maintained even in private conversation, knew better than to pry.

he was outspoken. contradicted himself. he could be very entertaining. Quentin's somewhere between oscar wilde and boy george. he was no saint. but he did defend himself — in court, against allegations that he was a prostitute.

What Does It Mean To Be Human?

by Quentin Crisp

When Professor Connolly asked me what it meant to be human, I was very sorry that I was not a scholar and had no philosophical point of view to express. More than not being a scholar, I am not really a human being. I do not mind spending long hours alone, and I never find something to do. This is part of my nature.

My sister reminded me before she died that she and my mother sat on each side of the fireplace and occupied themselves with darning socks, and knitting, and writing letters on their laps. I lay as a child on the rug between them, and once an hour one of them said, "Why don’t you get something to do?" And I said, "Why should I?" That is a question I cannot answer. Why should I have something to do?

Of course, there is the theory that time is money. It is an American theory: I am not earning money while I am doing nothing. Which is sad. But if I were rich, I would never do anything. I was asked by a paper, "If you suddenly had a million dollars, what would you do?" And I said, "Go to bed, and never get up again!" This was a great disappointment to the people who asked me the question. But idleness is my only occupation, and people are my only hobby.

If I regard what I think is human, and perhaps I was asked precisely because I am not a human being and, therefore, have a detached view of the subject, I would say it was a preoccupation with the idea of death. The reason why people do not live alone and do not spend hours doing nothing is because they can hear time ticking by. Then they develop hobbies, which drive them mad. You may ask them, "Why do you do this?" They ultimately say, "Well, it helps kill time."

I don’t want my time dead. Time is meant to be lived! Those who are not hopeless are worried that one day their lives will end. And, if you live long enough, of course, you long for it to end. That’s been my desire in recent times. I only hope to become extinct. But before all that, you must try everything. Have children. Behave in such a way that monuments are built to you. Rule the world! Have streets and theaters named after you. Write your autobiography. These are ways to stay alive, and this seems to be a preoccupation with being human.

When I was younger and was not ill, I didn’t mind how long I lived. Now that every step of my life is painful, I long for death. If being human has any other special aspect it is that in every human being there are two people. One who sits in judgment on the other. The worldly, the doing person, acts irresponsibly, or nobly, or wisely, or foolishly, according to the mood or the situation. But inside him, further away, is an abstract spiritual being who never changes and who sits in judgment on him.

This situation becomes evident when we hear people say, "I was ashamed of myself." Who is ashamed of whom? It is this duality between the active living organism and the contemplative inner-self that sits in judgment that constitutes the whole human being. This is, I think, what constitutes a human being.

“Other notorious Crispisms include his suggestion that gay men are so self-centred that they are incapable of love and lack the capacity to care about the welfare of other people”

I think most gay men I know are like that. As well as most straight men.

ON OSCAR WILDE

by Quentin Crisp

I would have hated him! He never faced anything!

Wilde said the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

He was the male Madonna.

AND IT'S UNCOMFORTABLE!

by Quentin Crisp

There’s nothing that great about sex — never was. What usually comes from it? Sweat, fatigue, and dirty linens, then later unwanted pregnancies, and, of course, today there’s the health angle.

As for gay sex in particular: Nothing’s really that great about it. It’s very uncomfortable and many times vastly more complex than lovemaking in heterosexual counterparts.

When a boy and girl decide they are going to have sex, they roughly know what to expect. But before two men have sex, they practically have to hold a board meeting in order to figure out the agenda of what they’re going to do.

Thank you, r34/r37. So much better to read the words of the actual Quentin Crisp, who is far superior to the woke judgments of him, as well as the exaggerations and fabrications that are meant to assassinate his character.

Sting wrote "Englishman in New York" for Queen Quentin.

Quentin's LES phone number was listed in the Manhattan phone book. The fraud and their little kids in the neighborhood even knew who he was.

He was a real character.

I love his declaration about cleaning and dust, something alone the lines of, "After the first 20 years, you won't notice any difference!"

Much of its wasn’t PC and was over general, but insightful, meaningful and wisdom from his experience in his era.

Personally his pride in his laziness and absence of ambition is what I admired about him. Thoroughly rejected the capitalist life - which is as important a statement as gay rights. I think oppression now is more from capitalism than homophobia. And social rights and economic rights need to both be fought over.

"Personally his pride in his laziness and absence of ambition is what I admired about him. Thoroughly rejected the capitalist life - which is as important a statement as gay rights."

I absolutely agree, r41. Another reason to appreciate Crisp. He walked the walk when it came to being a modern-day gay pioneer, period. And he also transcended sexuality to be a humanist rather than some queer symbol.

How people can look up to this critter is beyond me. He was an angry and bitter fag who did. I thing for gay rights. People project this onto him because he was so flamboyant. But, he was actually very homophobic and disdainful of gay men. Especially ‘normal’ gay men.

Whiten was basically a trans women who die to being born when they were, were t ever able to really transition. Thought the notion of 2 men being equal in a relationship gross.....very heterosexual notions of gay being fucked, but tops ‘straight’ etc.

Vile, vile human, whose mystique created by OTHERS have shielded him from he scorn he actually deserves. Mary me all you want, but I hate this old queen. And as for the poster saying ‘fuck peter tatchell, whoever he is’ my god, you men and actually gay rights campaigner who actually DID something for gays. Only on datalounge could a prominent gay rights activist be treated with such scorn, while a vile, lazy, hateful faggot get some kind of praise. Fuck off.

Crisp's writing in R34 is brilliant. I admire him more now having previously only listened to him in YouTube segments. He was a brilliant provocateur. It is good that we remember him here this Memorial Day. He was something special.

We are often the person we hate, R43.

r43's rant is fairly incoherent but what can be gleaned in the diatribe is a fairly common critique of Crisp: he didn't wear his gay pioneer status well in that he had opinions based on his era. Well, good for him. He was still a brilliant and sparkling wit and personally very polite and congenial.

Quentin wanted to be a woman and it was his biggest regret that he didn't become one. He said if it were available and cheap when he was in his twenties he would have had the surgery to become a woman. Seems he had a lot of self loathing.

Crisp defied expectations and many resent him for that. I am not one of them.

He was a passive resister. General acceptance would've cramped his style, and style mattered a great deal to him. "Look what good can be done when life deals you a losing hand," h taught. Andy Warhol was a leader in this way as well.

r47 is projecting his own tired (and false) analysis of Crisp.

r49 raises an excellent point re: Crisp and Warhol. Crisp was the more talented.

Your an idiot R50. In The Last Word Crisp said "The only thing in my life I have wanted and didn’t get was to be a woman. It will be my life’s biggest regret. If the operation had been available and cheap when I was young, say when I was twenty-five or twenty-six, I would have jumped at the chance. My life would have been much simpler as a result."

*You're

Crisp used language, Warhol images, but both were iconoclasts.

^ hmm, I think Warhol had a preternaturally good eye for the iconic. I see him more as an identifier of icons.

When Quentin died, he had saved more than $300,000...

I admire this man. His story is very moving. He left his middle class family, who were cold and didn't accept him. He joined the demi monde of London's underworld and survived as a prostitute. He was true to himself. I don't blame him for wanting to have been born straight. He was beaten up on the street regularly as a youth. His reaction was to withdraw from the world. Very sad.

r47/r51--you're the idiot to equate self-loathing with what Crisp was expressing. Because Crisp was hardly self-loathing. It says more about you than Quentin Crisp.

[quote] "After the first 20 years, you won't notice any difference!"

Actually regarding his aversion of cleaning he said that "after the first 4 years the dirt doesn't get any worse. it's just a question of not losing your nerve".

He also profoundly said "never attempt to fit into society. If you stay where you are society will eventually form itself around you".

On Andy Warhol he said "never did anybody do less to achieve more acclaim". How very true.

"Never did anybody do less to achieve more acclaim" - He should know. He could have been describing himself.

His whole career was constructed on calculated outrageousness and facile quips. He knew the more "shocking" (and offensive) his statements the more publicity he would receive. And his deciding that he was transgender after all is the epitome of "woke".

Oh he was always around in the 80s, OP. I lived somewhere near him in the East Village and spot him several times a year. He hung out in the West Village. He wasn't part of the East Village scene but he could have been, as he was well-liked, pleasant, had a talent, and respected for being so old school. He was better than those Warhol factory clowns trying to dine out past their sell-by dates.

An ideal evening out in the Village would be spent, for me, with Quentin Crisp and Taylor Mead. They certainly had a fondness for each other, thankfully. Can you imagine the stories?

r59 is some tired hater. Go away, bore. Quentin Crisp contributed far more than you to culture. How many books have you written?

r60, wasn't the East Village kind of shoddy and dangerous in the 80s?

I love his quote about dirt. I use it whenever I hear some queen complain how dirty someplace is.

He grew up decades before gay rights. He has a right to not have the same beliefs as post-Stonewall gays. May have been self-loathing. But the key is he survived as a nelly queen when being a nelly queen ensured you were abused and outcast. As a gay martyr, he deserves respect.

I always imagined Dafydd from Little Britain was partly based on Quentin Crisp's personality.

R65 - Daffyd was the post-Stonewall Verizon. Expects special treatment BECAUSE he is gay.

Partly R66, but he also resented not being the only gay in the village and was horrified by the thought of sex with another man and did everything he could to avoid it.

He despised his home country. Hence the venomous article posted by R22 and R23.

R63 Of course but it changed RAPIDLY in that decade. I lived on a top floor floor-through walk up and on either side were collapsed tenements. So rather than those dark airshaft windows, on the sides, it was bright and airy. I was priced out along with my friends. We moved to Brooklyn. Which was itself shifty as we had already been priced out of prime Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights, which were only middle class or above in their cores. Then we got priced out of Brooklyn! Anyone who didn't have the cash and salary to get mortgages.

Crisp seems like an anachronism now and never had the broad appeal of icons like Garland. His beliefs were not unusual from queeny pre-Stonewall gay celbes. They had more or less played by the rules, accepted their lot and were able to prosper. Changing time enabled him to be more outrageous but basically, he was a more outre, British version of Paul Lynde.

Vulgar.

😹 She's lovely.

QUE ?

He was born just a few years after Oscar Wilde died. A different era, with archaic values and prejudices that remained prevalent until the 1960s. He flouted many social conventions, but accepted others (like his contemporary, Terrence Rattigan). He was a good writer, but it was the next generation of writers, like Joe Orton, that really blasted away at outdated attitudes and hatreds.

Quentin Crisp had no inclination to blast away outdated attitudes, but he certainly did address hatred of gay people dead on. At any rate, it's ridiculous to compare Joe Orton to Quentin Crisp. What's archaic is the notion that because they were both gay, like Rattigan, they were all supposed to be doing the same thing, or have the same attitudes.

Given his extreme hatred of gay pride and his casual racism so fondly recalled by R17, it’s no wonder he’s admired on DL.

R76, I guess we'll have to de-throne Capote, too. Instead of saying "gays" Capote coined the disparaging term "yags." So fuck "Breakfast at Tiffany's"

r76 is a fool.

One thing Quentin always said: "You don't have to win." I think he saw all the young gays trying to win, and all they got was, instead of liberation, only a sad sort of assimilation.

He didn't act like a victim or feel sorry for himself, that's why he's a gay hero to so many. He is the effeminate homosexual demographic that is treated like an invisible species by the masculine gay community and not acknowledged by them to even exist: did he cry about it though? No. He was free in a deeper kind of way. Much freer than the pathetic people who long for acceptance from their oppressors and so play up their victimhood and the evils done to them.

"What is there to be proud of? I don't believe in rights for homosexuals." "Homosexuality a terrible disease." "The world would be better without homosexuals." In 1997, he told The Times that he would advise parents to abort a foetus if it could be shown to be genetically predetermined to be gay: "If it (homosexuality) can be avoided, I think it should be."

Oh, he was free, all right. He'd probably be best buddies with Mike Pence.

SAFE SPACE, TRIGGER WARNING: Quentin Crisp must be eradicated — just like Al Franken

“You don’t have to win” - what a fantastic saying. It really does summarize what’s wrong in hypercapitalism/social media world. So much happier now that I’ve dropped the keeping up with the Jones’ rat race. I’m not the richest, best job, prettiest, most interesting person - and I’m not going to compete. Great motto for life.

R82, you’re ridiculous, do you know that? People are simply pointing out what this person actually said and believed in their lifetime, not that long ago, and how damaged they clearly were by the times they lived in. Why are you so threatened by that? Why do you sound like a Breitbart troll?

r84, People are simply pointing out what this person actually said and believed in their lifetime. ... This thread is why is NOT loved or "liked" on Datalounge. And the reasons for the dislike.

He came up in a time when homosexuals were treated on the same level as stray dogs who were crapping all over people's yards. He was beaten over and over again because of his homosexuality, not because of anything bad he did to anyone else . Of course he would have a view of homosexuality that gays of today wouldn't understand. It's entirely possible he ended up with something close to Stockholm Syndrome. Tell a kid he's bad simply because of how he was born for a long enough time and he'll grow up believing he, and those like him, are bad.

R85, can you say that in English?

Yeah, no one cares, r81. You're a bore.

I wonder if he had a daily bowlful......

He was brilliant and will never be diminished. I met him once and it was an honor.

Hear hear, r90. I met a couple times and it was an absolute pleasure. He was delicious to be in the company of.

Real men don't really mind homosexuals. You are somewhat . . . They might say in a routine way, "Oh, it's disgusting." But really they take no notice of them. I live on the same block as the [Hell's] Angels who have a bad reputation but they have never murdered me. And when I go toward First Avenue, I pass between their house and a row of harlots. I pass with bowed head to show I accept their supremacy. And they've never taken any notice of me. I don't matter to them. I am not an influence in their lives. When people are sure of themselves, they don't mind what other people do. -- Quentin

He's right that he had no choice to be anything other trhan the flaming queen that he was. Still he biught into the disease,model, the no fighting for rights nonsense, etc. Yes, he has to be considered in light of his time, but that doesn't mean we should consider him a hero or even a DL fave.

Well that is a great quote R92.

"You used to live an easy lying down life in the sea. But your curiosity and your courage prompted you to lift your head out of the sea, and gasp this fierce element in which we live. They are seated on Mars with their little green arms folded saying 'we can be reasonably certain there is no life on earth, because there the atmosphere is oxygen, which is so harsh it corrupts metal'. But you learned to breath it.

"Further more you crawled out of the sea, and you walked up and down the beach for centuries until your thigh bones where thick enough to walk on land. It was a mistake but you did it.

"Once you have this view of your past, not that it was handed to you but that you did it, then your view of the future will change. This terror you have of the atom bomb will pass. Something will arise which will breath radiation. You learned to breathe oxygen. So you don't have to worry.

"Embrace the future. All you have to do about the future is what you did about the past. Rely on your curiosity and your courage and ride through the night." -- Quentin

It seemed that he wanted gays to be perpetual victims of violence and hate and could not understand why many of us didn't want that.

Just go about your life getting beaten up by anti-gay people and wear it like a badge of honour.

Some of us didn't want to live our lives as punching bags.

Fuck no!

R96: Doubtful. He simply couldn't envison a world unlike the one he had grown-up inhabiting.

I think he was really a tranny

Those Letterman interviews are fabulous. He comes across exactly like a female Bette Davis!

He eventually thought so too, r99. Always up on the latest trends.

Quentin's CK1 commercials — ’90s realness.

I remember when we used to call him on the phone and talk to him! He lived above the Hells Angels club house in New York and it was a big deal over who was going to get his apartment when he passed. If I remember correctly, Penny Arcade got the apartment. It was a rent control.

Anyone here watching The Naked Civil Servant 40-some years ago on a Washington DC station (then WMAL, I think it was, but not sure) when the announcer in between commercial breaks kept referring to him as Quentin Qwisp?

She was fierce

There will never be the likes of her again. Lucky are they with memories of an encounter.

More of his artistry.

R107 my favorite part is when the goat tries to eat little red's dress. You naughty goat, that's the wolf's job!

It's pointless to expect him to be political, his whole life was constructed around surface and individuality. He was born in 1908 when homosexuality was looked on in a worse way than pedophila is now. He still decided he couldn't hide himself, so presented himself , deciding to ' swim with the tide but faster'. He was able to survive in a lethally hostile environment by being both humble, in his manner, and arrogant in his presentation. He wore make up, flamboyant clothes and dyed hair at a time when most women didn't. Along side this outrage he developed a Zen-like attitude towards his tormentors, absorbing their Edwardian disdain and accepting of their rejection . It worked for him and he was able to live in the cracks of society, creating a bohemian life of illustrating, prostitution and modelling, all on a subsistence level, tolerated during a time of zero tolerance. This tolerance did not save him being arrested, beaten up and generally abused on a regular basis, but he remained an affront to society throughout, impelled to show his true self, one of the few reminders people during his era would ever get that homosexuality existed. By the time gay rights arrived he was a relic, a survivor of his own life and far too stuck in the individualism he based his whole philosophy on to become a part of any group. The fame that came to him late in life was an unexpected Indian summer that I'm glad happened as he is a fascinating character with an inspirational story, a dazzling wit with a great deal of wisdom on the human condition. The fact he does not always chime with modern thinking is inevitable of an Edwardian who constructed a fantastical bespoke shell that displayed him to the world while protecting him from it. He may not be a pioneer of gay rights and would never have wanted to be seen as such, but he is a striking figure to remember on the path to them. His one man show is a real tour de force and a cherishable record of his uniqueness.

🤮 yuk!

I sat across from him on a New York City bus one night, Gramercy area, 1980s. He looked just like himself, though sort of touchingly old and I thought vulnerable looking. But I guess he got around all right.

From the nuance of r109 to the numbskull of r110.