Quentin Crisp was a flamboyant and eccentric queer raconteur: a great wit who was also a controversial gay icon. His life story sounds somewhat like a Jean Genet novel: a rent boy who spent some 20 years undressed as artists model, who spent WWII dressed very effeminately and cruised the streets of London looking to pick up American GI’s. Her memoir The Naked Civil Servant was published in 1968 to good reviews but to poor sales but one person who did buy the book was documentary filmmaker Denis Mitchell who asked Crisp if could adapt into a film. The result made the actor John Hurt  and Crisp into stars

On the back of this newfound fame Crisp devised a one-person show which she toured all over the UK. The first half of the show was an entertaining monologue loosely based on her memoirs, while 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. Her witticisms became much quoted: There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.

The show was a sell-out in London, so Crisp took it to NY and very quickly became the toast of the city, where she said she officially considered herself transgender.  She decided to move there permanently and found a tiny apartment in the East Village and quickly blossomed in this new found fame and celebrity which combined with performing the show,  and she could live off both of them.  With small roles in films like Orlando and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar  the 1990’s became a very busy period for Crisp.  However it was also a time when the eccentric Crisp started trottng out certain opinions which verged on being both offensive and downright homophobic.  Even though she had an uncredited cameo in the 1993 AIDS drama Philadelphia, Crisp still  caused controversy and confusion in the gay community by calling AIDS “a fad”, and homosexuality “a terrible disease.” That did not sit well as so many of  us were dealing  with both the personal and global costs  of the Pandemic

Crisp’s comments on Princess Diana were nothing short of viscious.  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. 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.”

Thanks to Crisp’s Executor and former Personal Assistant Philip Ward, there are still readings of his work some 26 years later after his death.   Such as the upcoming “An Evening of Quentin Crisp: A Celebration of Life in His Own Words” invites you to a night of celebration at the Gene Frankel Theatre to commemorate the legendary life of Quentin Crisp on the 26th anniversary of his passing. Special guests will read excerpts from Mr. Crisp’s books, two short films by filmmaker Adrian Goycoolea (Mr. Crisp’s great-nephew), Phillip Ward, and a rare screening of the Alternative Queen’s Message. His work is too good to be forgotten, even if some of his worst opinions cannot.