Quentin Crisp

Early life

Denis Charles Pratt was born at Wolverton, Egmond Road, Sutton, Surrey, on 25 December 1908, the fourth and youngest child of "feckless and frequently unemployed" solicitor Spencer Charles Pratt, and former governess Frances Marion, née Phillips.^[5] She changed her name to Quentin Crisp in her twenties after leaving home, and expressed a feminine appearance to a degree that shocked contemporary Londoners and provoked "gay-bashing" assaults.^[1]

By her own account, Crisp was "effeminate" from an early age, resulting in her being teased while at Kingswood House School.^[6]

Around this time, Crisp began visiting the cafés of Soho, her favourite being The Black Cat in Old Compton Street, meeting young gay men and rent boys, and experimenting with make-up and women's clothes. For six months, she worked as a prostitute;^[7] in a 1998 interview, she said she was looking for love, but found only degradation.^[8]

Middle years

Crisp attempted to join the British army at the outbreak of the Second World War, but was rejected and declared exempt by the medical board on the grounds that she was "suffering from sexual perversion". In 1940, she moved into a first-floor flat at 129 Beaufort Street, Chelsea, a bed-sitting room that she occupied until she emigrated to the United States in 1981. She remained in London during the 1941 Blitz, stocked up on cosmetics, purchased five pounds of henna and later paraded through the streets during the black-out, picking up G.I.s. In the intervening years, she never attempted any housework, writing famously in her memoir The Naked Civil Servant: "After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse."^[9]

Crisp left her job as an engineer's tracer in 1942 to become a model in life classes in London and the Home Counties. Crisp wanted to call her book I Reign in Hell, a reference to Milton's Paradise Lost ("Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven"), but her agent insisted on The Naked Civil Servant, an insistence that later gave her pause when she offered the manuscript to Tom Maschler of Jonathan Cape on the same day that Desmond Morris delivered The Naked Ape. The Naked Civil Servant was published in 1968 to generally good reviews, although it initially only sold 3,500 copies. Crisp was then approached by the documentary film maker Denis Mitchell to be the subject of a 1968 short film in which she discussed her life and lifestyle. The documentary aired on British television in 1971.^[10]

Fame

After the success of the film, her autobiography was reprinted; Gay News commented that it should have been published posthumously (Crisp said that this was their polite way of telling her to drop dead). Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said he had met Crisp in 1974, and alleged that she was not sympathetic to the Gay Liberation movement of the time.^[11] Tatchell said Crisp quipped: "What do you want liberation from? What is there to be proud of? I don't believe in rights for homosexuals."^[1]

By now, Crisp was a theatre-filling humourist; in 1978, her one-man show sold out London's Duke of York's Theatre. She then took the show to New York. Her 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, in 1981, found a small apartment at 46 East 3rd Street in Manhattan's East Village.^[12]

As she had done in London, Crisp allowed her telephone number to be listed in the telephone directory. She saw it as her duty to converse with anyone who called her, saying "If you don't have your name in the phone book, you're stuck with your friends. How will you ever enlarge your horizons?"^[13]

Crisp continued to perform her one-man show, published books on the importance of contemporary manners as a means of social inclusion (as opposed to etiquette, which she claimed is socially exclusive), and supported herself by accepting social invitations and writing film reviews and columns for UK and US magazines and newspapers. She 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.^[14]

Last years

Crisp remained fiercely independent and unpredictable into old age. She caused controversy and confusion in the gay community by (perhaps jokingly) calling AIDS "a fad", and homosexuality "a terrible disease".^[1]

Crisp was a stern critic of Diana, Princess of Wales, and her attempts to gain public sympathy following her divorce from Prince Charles. She stated: "I always thought Diana was such trash and got what she deserved. She was Lady Diana before she was Princess Diana, so she knew the racket. She knew that royal marriages have nothing to do with love. You marry a man and you stand beside him on public occasions and you wave and for that you never have a financial worry until the day you die."^[15] Following her death in 1997, she commented that it was perhaps her "fast and shallow" lifestyle that led to her demise: "She could have been Queen of England – 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."^[16]

In 1997, Crisp was crowned king of the Beaux-Arts Ball run by the Beaux Arts Society. She presided alongside Queen Audrey Kargere, Prince George Bettinger and Princess Annette Hunt.^[17]

Gender identity

In an interview with CBC in 1977, upon being queried about whether she desired to be a woman, Crisp stated: "Well, I suppose when I was a child, when I lived almost entirely in a dreamworld, I suppose I thought of myself as a woman. But, later on, you realise that you have to live in the real world, and that you are not a woman. You are only in some senses 'effeminate', or 'feminine', and you must learn to make this compromise – to live in a world where, statistically, you are a man, whatever you may think about yourself."^[18]

At the age of 90, Crisp said in her book The Last Word that she had come to the conclusion that she was transgender:

Having labelled myself homosexual and having been labelled as such by the wider world, I have effectively lived a "gay" life for most of my years. Consequently, I can relate to gay men because I have more or less been one for so long in spite of my actual fate being that of a woman trapped in a man's body. I refer to myself as homosexual without thinking because of how I have lived my life. If you are reading this and are gay, think of me as one of your own even though you now know the truth. If it's confusing for you, think how confusing it has been for me these past ninety years....

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. I would have told nobody. Instead, I would have gone to live in a distant town and run a knitting wool shop and no one would ever have known my secret. I would have joined the real world and it would have been wonderful.^[19]

Death

Crisp died of a heart attack on 21 November 1999, at age 90, while staying at the home of a friend in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, on the eve of a nationwide revival of her one-man show.^[20] She was cremated with a minimum of ceremony as she had requested, and her ashes were flown back to her personal assistant and travel companion Phillip Ward in New York.^[21]

Posthumously published works

On 21 November 2017, MB Books published The Last Word: An Autobiography, written by Crisp's friend, Phillip Ward, on the basis of tape recordings made of Crisp's dictations, and edited by Ward and Watts. Whereas The Naked Civil Servant made Crisp famous, and How To Become A Virgin detailed that fame and her life in New York, The Last Word was written as a goodbye to the world, with Crisp knowing the end was near. In it she recounts several previously untold stories from her life, walks the reader through her journey from obscurity, reflects on her philosophy and gender identity.^[22]