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By Perry Brass
It seats seven hundred and fifty people, and virtually every seat was filled. The event was organized by the new Quentin Crisp Foundation that wants, I gather, to do for Crisp what the Tom of Finland Foundation did for Tom: turn a once live cult figure into a dead but profitable commodity. I had spoken to Quentin about that, about becoming a commodity, a brand name, and he was, in his usual dead-pan way, all for it. He told me that a scotch bottler in, where else, Scotland had put out a Quentin Crisp Scotch, to appeal to the gay market. "Can you imagine that?" he asked me. "In Scotland, they want to appeal to the gay market. I did not realize there was a gay market in Scotland." On one hand Quentin would have loved all the to-do about him. He loved attention, though attention in a nice, decorous way. He did not want twenty-one gun salutes, but, like a true lady or gentleman of his period, he loved having doors opened for him, either literally or figuratively: he responded to every invitation he got and often sent thank you notes. Over and over again at the service we heard about Crisp's "exquisite" manners, a term which has many meanings, a few lost on us today. For one, "Exquisite" was an Edwardian term for an "exquisitely" rarefied fairy. One who held everything betwixt thumb and pinkie, who died his hair, and wore make up and chiffon scarves. In other words, a true Quentin Crisp.
In Crisp's day, the line between the closet queens who hated Quentin because his very existence blew their cover (when they were not blowing him, or vice versa; queens of the QC variety were forced often into prostitution as their only professional avenue) and the toughies got kind of scratchy. The same "H"-dropping cockney who kissed you in the dark could kick you in the teeth once the lights went back on. So the only people who treated the youthful Crisp decently were either kindly women, sympathetic straights, or a very few enlightened queer men who were actually secure enough in their homosexuality (an almost unheard of characteristic: very few people were secure enough then in any sexuality) not to be threatened by this human gay albatross. It is no wonder then that the much older Quentin, living like a Madame Toussaud's wax figure in his cramped bedsitter, had little good to say about his fellow "sexualists." Like my Southern-Jewish mother who firmly believed that "the Jews were their own worst enemy" (conveniently forgetting that event called Hitler), Crisp believed that the worst thing that ever happened to gay men was other gay men. Tra-la, sorry, but that just ain't so. There is some real loveliness to us and our own deeper feelings (like love, warmth, compassion); but unfortunately Mr. Crisp had to squeeze most of that out of his life to survive openly when so few people were. He made up for it with attention. Quentin loved attention. He had a truly Zen relationship with attention. There was virtually no such thing as "bad attention" in his book, although he did loathe and fear Larry Kramer's psychotic diatribes against him as a "murderer" who remained silent during the AIDS crisis. He told me that if "Mr. Kramer walks into a room, I have to leave." Quentin had "exquisite manners," which this overly-long memorial service, lasting close to two and a half hours, repeated over again. This is the "other hand," where I believe Crisp would have fallen asleep. Quentin did not believe in saints, although he liked godly acts. Or just any good act, for that matter. The sainthood making here went on way too long for any self-respecting Exquisite. They would have repaired to powder a nose (something Quentin did beautifully) or dash out to revive last month's henna treatment. There were twenty-three speakers, including a videoed tribute from John Hurt, who originally brought Crisp to America's attention through "The Naked Civil Servant," the film about Quentin's youth in which Hurt starred. There were long, self-serving tributes from people like the performance artist Penny Arcade, who craves attention as much as Crisp did—they became buddies on the party and performance circuit; Eric Bently, the playwright and Brecht scholar, who lectured to us about Quentin's importance, which Bently feels he finally discovered; and various editors and book people, such as Guy Hettelhack, his editor, and Stedman Mays, his agent, who ended up repeating the same stories with the same effects and adjectives. The audience was starting to grow a little dead itself. Many people went out for a powder, and did not return. Crisp would have hated that. He did not like to lose his audience. He loved life itself and hated "dead air," and could revert to his own company, which he found, as he told us often enough, "most rewarding," when it became that way.
She told a story about going to numerous parties with Quentin (the ancient line about Miles is that she would "go to the opening of a door") and the two of them sitting together quietly on a couch and being "ignored by everyone else"—although I think this was more like advanced diva phobia. The thought of trying to play a third act on that bill could be intimidating to anyone short of Holly Woodlawn. I have a similar story. I got to know Quentin Crisp through the agency of my friend Sal Monetti, the public relations director at the Leslie Lohman Gay Art Foundation. Sal, an artist, did a series of wonderful portraits of Crisp and at one point did a group of portraits of "Famous Gay New Yorkers." The subjects consisted of Quentin, me, Donny Russo (the "huge" porn star), and Sal himself. The pictures hung for a while at A Different Light Bookstore in Chelsea. There was a nice opening for it and dozens of Sal's friends and Quentin's came by. Quentin glowed and cooed and I felt particularly blessed to be in this company. It was one of my moments of "reflected fame." I got my first true singular lesson about reflected fame from Quentin. In my fairly wasted kidhood as a writer in New York and thereabouts, I thought that "fame" was too close to "flame." All it did was scorch you. It took Quentin for me to realize it can warm you as well . . . but you better know exactly how to approach it and how long to stay. If not . . . well? After getting to know Quentin through Sal, I found that he was easy to approach, loved to talk and sought out company, but sometimes found himself alone because people did not know that. As he so wisely put it, "In America, fame is a job you do," and lots of people just did not want to interfere with that important job. For the famous to be famous, you have to be at least a little awed by them, but this was not something Quentin liked, certainly not a hundred percent. They saw Crisp as a "celebrity," a profession that he took seriously, but not one which leads to much closeness. Celebs are people you genuflect to. You don't go all goo-goo and hug them, unless you are another celeb. Not that Crisp cared about that. Like any good royal, he did not invite physical intimacies. But, anyway, to my surprise, I sometimes encountered him in public situations off alone. At the big publication party for Patrick Merla's anthology "Boys Like Us," he was sitting downstairs in the basement of, again, A Different Light, which had been rigged out for the evening with cafe tables and chairs. I went down the stairs wanting some relief from all the egos upstairs—dozens of beaming gay writers and their teeming wannabees—and there I found Quentin, all alone like a little beached turtle. I walked up to him and introduced myself. I figured that at his age of ninety-plus, he'd not remember me, even though we had met several times. He did remember me and he asked me to sit down and he started talking, very sweetly and personally. "People often ask me," he entoned, in his martini-dry, antiquarian accent (a type of English you never hear anymore), "how old was I when I came out? The truth is, I never came out. I was never in, so how could I come out? My parents, you know, were not the least concerned that I was gay. Their only concern was how was I going to make a living." I told him that is usually the concern of parents. "Yes, they don't want you sponging off them, and they are right to feel that way. I never wanted to sponge off anyone. It's like living with someone else." In the past, Crisp had gone on to me about shared living and how odious it is (a feeling I never agreed with); but he then went sailing into that and I noticed something. That because I was now sitting next to him, others started to feel that he was not that unapproachable. So if I could climb to the top of the Pyramid and sit before the idol, they could too. Now about a dozen people trooped by, to shake his hand, ask for autographs (he autographed Merla's book even though he had nothing in it; people just wanted his autograph and it seemed that as a famous writer, he should have been in the book anyway), and exclaim to him, over and over again, how "Fabulous you are!" Several men who I noticed in the past would never speak to me, for whatever reason (it's New York; you don't need a reason not to speak), stopped and smiled genuinely to me, and gushed at Quentin. He took it all in stride, smiled gamely, and I saw then the lovely, sweet, reflected search beam of fame. It drippeth like the gentle dew on all things by it. The dew, in other words, gets its due. Finally, after about thirty minutes, I got a little tired of dew dripping on me and thought it was time for someone else to have his chance in the glory seat. So I got up, and quickly another acolyte took my place, just as Quentin was going into, "My parent, you know, did not care at all that I was gay. They just worried about how was I going to make a living!"
Others who knew Quentin knew that he had a ready "stump" speech, and
like any good politician or celebrity (now they're all "stumped"
together), he knew when to bring it out and use it. My friend, the late
Village Voice writer Arthur Bell said about Crisp that he was "the most
passive person I've ever met." This infuriated Arthur, who came from the
gay activist "confrontational" school of life and journalism.
Arthur once kicked an offensive, conservative New York politician in the ass. Quentin Crisp would never have done that. He would have resorted to some line that would have sounded innocuous at first and later would have revealed cunning enough to extract blood from a rutabaga. In other words, put him exactly in his place but . . . "evuh so kindly." This was the hallmark of Crisp. He was a true Edwardian gentleperson at heart. Edward VII was the son of Queen Victoria and his reign, from 1901 to 1910, marked the last time that Europe was unafraid of anything—world wars, revolutions, etc. Anything except going broke. Crisp was born in 1908 to a fairly proper but eccentric suburban English family, filled with vicars and tradesmen. The period, like ours, was a time of incredible speculation. Fortunes, vast, vast fortunes, were being made around the clock. Edward was famous for being a fat king with a good-looking mistress and a sweet, forgiving wife. Like today, the fiction of keeping up appearances was every place. Although Quentin Crisp, by his twenties, was scaring the horses as a "touring queen," with his hennaed bouffant hair and make up, he still had the manners and sweetness of a well-raised Edwardian girl. He once said to me that the nineteen twenties were the last period when "you could truly tell the men from the women. After that, everything changed." Crisp liked that difference, that (to use a fifty-cent word) "dichotomy," between men and women, gay and straight. If he were going to dress up like a woman, he did not want to dress like a woman who dressed like a man. I noticed that among the seven hundred and fifty people clamped down for his memorial service, there were very few dykes. That is, butch women. He must have had several as friends, since Crisp wanted everyone to be his friend, at least for an hour or so. But he liked florid women and . . . well, florid men, too. That is, men who were fairly secure in their maleness. Mustached, insecure gay men from the 60s and 70s, the kind who thought they had invented "butchness" were just not his cuppa. They brought out a certain defensiveness in him. For one thing, they wanted to make "gayness" normal. Crisp himself wanted nothing to do with "normal." Of course there had to be a "normal" for there to be a Quentin Crisp residing outside of it. (His real name, by the way, was Dennis Goycoolea. It sounds like a Jewish dessert, doesn't it: "Rivkelah, would you pass me a bit of that goy-coolea, please?") But, in short, Quentin wanted the gay guys who played on his side to be definitely not "normal." He was an Exquisite, and gay liberation was taking all the exquisiteness out of Exquisiteness. The new gays wanted to be like the boys-next-door. They wanted to take all the difficulty out of gayness; whereas Crisp saw it like ballet, an artform that requires practice and hidden sweat for it to seem "easy." This has made him the patron saint of all those for whom "coming out" was traumatic. Who felt they were, truly, the "only ones." Who needed an amiable freak about them to point the arduous way to their own acceptability. It is a paradox, but one that I can easily see and understand. The other paradox, which I instinctively understood (the old "takes one to know one" thing) was that Quentin Crisp was a truly shy person, like me, who was also an ardent exhibitionist. (Unlike me: I'm more the voyeur, but every good exhibitionist needs one.) This created in him a conflict found in many celebrities who often start out as the freaky geekies of their high school classes and who then have to compensate by becoming centers of attention. To compensate for this shy-but-exhibitionistic problem, Crisp had to create a buffer zone around him of cool, but approachable detachment. He referred to everyone as "Mr.," "Mrs." or "Miss." Even the dead. He told me that "Mr. Proust" was his favorite author, the one "I should like most to take on a desert island with me." Crisp began soon enough to live within this lovely buffer zone itself. It was a place almost devoid of true intimacy, which can be combative at times. Crisp had lived through enough gay-bashing violence in his youth during the twenties and thirties not to invite any sort of personal conflict; but the zone brought in the multitudes in a way that only true royalty can understand. He knew how push out this blue-haired cardboard figure of himself and then watch it. The figure was what we were interested in. It was what we paid to watch. In America, this was a certified accomplishment, because we make such a fetish out of "authenticity." Everyone here must be "true to himself," down to his/her own revolting but "authentically" bad manners, idiotic unformed opinions, and desperate attempts to do "his own thing," even when he does not have an inkling what that "thing" might be. You are paid here by how aggressive you are, and how much of your real self you are ready to sacrifice to be paid. So anyone who is actually paid anything to be himself (the definition, really, of celebrity: you are paid, usually a lot, to be "yourself") stuns us. It kicks us in the knees with envy. It means more than simply talent. It means that you are paid . . Wow! . . . to be you. In Crisp's Edwardian England, which possessed a solid upper-middle class that hardly worked at all, thousands of people were exactly that: paid to be themselves. They were the genteel Upstairs waited upon by the grumbling Downstairs. So they all developed that buffer zone, that veneer around them of class, taste, and a subtle understanding of everything that "really matters." As a shy, but exhibitionistic queer kid, Quentin quickly picked up on that. He once said that who he really wanted to be was Greta Garbo: distant, unapproachable, adored. He wanted to make men "suffer." Here in the States, unapproachable would not do. You don't make friends and money here that way; but knowing exactly how to dole out the approach is very important. And Quentin Crisp became very good at that, while Dennis Goycoolea only sat back, smiled, and watched. 
Perry Brass's newest book is Angel Lust, a hot to the point of "crispy"
erotic novel about time travel, reincarnation, and booming real estate
in New York and the England of William the Conqueror. You can get some
information about this newest Brass masterpiece at www.perrybrass.com.
And you can also email him from that site. With the right servile
attitude, he is approachable.
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On March 3, 2000, a Friday, I went to a memorial service for Quentin
Crisp (who died on November 21, 1999), held in the Great Hall at Cooper
Union in New York. It was a setting Quentin would have loved. Some of
the greatest names in American history have spoken at Cooper's Great
Hall. Lincoln. Susan B. Anthony. Adelai Stevenson. Martin Luther King.
The best tributes were the quickest and, like Crisp, able to make the
point and go on. The composer Ned Rorem spoke for exactly one minute,
extolling Crisp's lovely "unbitchy" wit. Michael Musto, the Village Voicewriter was all dish and wonderful. He saluted Crisp as one of history's
"great queens." So was the actress Silvia Miles, who has become an
American female Quentin Crisp: she's been there, done that, and knows
just what to say about it.
© 1997-2000 BEI