A childhood of illness and being bullied. A young adulthood spent in a hostile environment where he dared to be exactly who he was – a self-confessed and self-evident homosexual - that once resulted in his arrest for soliciting, a charge against which he defended himself heroically and honorably in front of a disapproving court, and won. A move from England to Manhattan at an age when most people are readying themselves for retirement homes.

I saw Quentin Crisp in person only once. In 1997 he and I happened to sit next to each other in the audience of a comedy show taping. I kept trying to look at him out of the corner of my eye. I wanted to respect his privacy so I didn't say anything. It wasn't until after I began doing research on him that I learned how much he enjoyed being recognized and talked to. If only I had known, I would have asked him a million questions. Throughout this essay I shall refer to him Mr. Crisp, just as it was his habit of being both formal and intimate with people.

I first heard of Mr. Crisp in the mid-1980s, when my acting teacher assigned me the witness-box scene from The Naked Civil Servant to do in class. I was hooked. Over the years, people kept telling me “You should play Quentin Crisp!” On November 21, 1991, the day Mr. Crisp died, it happened again. Someone said, “You really should play Quentin Crisp!” On a lark I called my playwright friend Jeffrey Hartgraves: “Write me a play where I can play Quentin Crisp!” I was joking, but damned if the next day he didn't call me up to read the first seven pages.

Hartgraves went on to write that play, Carved in Stone, an after-life comedy about Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, Truman Capote and Quentin Crisp. The gay literati loved ones are lounging around, chatting vivaciously, when a new confused fictional literary icon appears and they welcome him into their heavenly fellowship. I played the part of Mr. Crisp when the play opened in San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre Company in 2002, and I reprised the role again in 2009 when Carved in Stone opened in Los Angeles.

To play Mr. Crisp, I had to absorb him not only through my brain but in my heart and soul. He’s stuck around in both places ever since. The research was a joy, discovering how astonishingly intelligent and what a true philosopher he was, and how closely his beliefs matched my own. Playing him made me a better actor but, more importantly, his influence made me a better person.

For me, delving into his books and audio recordings was like finding my own personal guru in both life and in the arts. Here, in Los Angeles, where so many actors look alike in their attempts to "be" what "they" want, Mr. Crisp had it right. Be yourself, and let them find you.

Courage

The life Mr. Crisp lived took tremendous courage. With the tacit consent of the public, he was regularly hectored and beaten up – sometimes left unconscious in the gutter - for being a feminized homosexual man. There was also the cruelly real ever-present risk of jail. Although he lived in harm’s way for most of his life, he did not live in doubt about who he was. His personality was so unique and so strong that he simply didn’t know how to be anything but himself. Being anything or anyone else would have required too great an effort.

In 1987 the singer Sting dedicated a song to Mr. Crisp, called “Englishman in New York.” It included the lines:

“It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile,

Be yourself no matter what they say…”

Theistic Views

Quentin Crisp was a nontheist. He revealed his views aboutGod (whom he sometimes referred to as “You-Know-Who”) in a typically droll way:

“I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer as petition. It does not seem to me to be sufficiently humble to imagine that whatever force keeps the planets turning in the heavens is going to stop what it's doing to give me a bicycle with three speeds.”

“I have never understood why humans inflict pain, suffering, and violence on one another. What is the moral reason for it, I have no idea, but I don’t think anything is ordained by God, so I don’t think we have to think why does a god do this to people. I think people have done it to themselves. And everyone has the capacity to inflict pain, to feel hatred, contempt. So, it’s an inevitable thing of being human.”

One incident during his one-man stage show (“An Evening with Quentin Crisp”) became a classic. Mr. Crisp would tell the story of how:

“When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?’”

In Manhattan one time Mr. Crisp spoke at a Universalist Society meeting. He talked of how he was not a believer in any organized religion, and that he didn’t believe in immortality.

Alluding to Milton’s Paradise Lost ("Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven"), Mr. Crisp initially wanted to call his autobiography “I Reign in Hell” But his agent, Donald Carroll, insisted on “The Naked Civil Servant.” The book was published in 1968, and a star was born.

Movies

The closest thing Mr. Crisp had to religion was his lifelong love of going to the movies. He particularly liked Hollywood films, which he studied and reviewed. Movies were an escape from the real world and, because he was such a great observer of people, he couldn’t help but to analyze them. Movies helped him to develop an astonishing amount of insight into human nature, gender roles, and the mores of the times. Mr. Crisp described going to the movies as descending into a “forgetting chamber” where he was able to live a “rich full life by proxy."

Love

For a man who did not experience much joy in his personal life when it came to love relationships, Mr. Crisp was nevertheless particularly eloquent on the subject. His views on self-acceptance, self-love, and self-expression made me think of psychologist Dr. Albert Ellis’ rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT), developed in the late 1950s. Decades before, however, Mr. Crisp seemed to have been the unacknowledged pioneer of the practice.

Kurt Vonnegut once said, "Being a humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead." Similarly, invoking the idea of ‘virtue is its own reward,” Mr. Crisp’s take on the subject was:

“If you have love to give, you give it and you give it where it is needed, but never, never ask for anything in return.”

“Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.”

A Happy Curmudgeon**

Mr. Crisp’s eminently quotable bon mots coruscated in Jon Winokur’s book The Portable Curmudgeon. However, Mr. Crisp did not see himself as a malcontent, for he had many friends. He said of himself, “I am not really misanthropic. I merely do not have an aptitude for festivity, especially foreordained festivity, because I am by nature relaxed and happy.”

His philosophy for happiness was to never envy the lot of other people. He was known to charm and to treat people kindly, honoring the worth and dignity of human beings because, as a gentle man who understood the vicissitudes and fragility of humans, he could.

He tended to use humor without cruelty. Yet, because some of his opinions were so bracing and out of the ordinary they caused some people to react defensively. Mr. Crisp certainly knew how to shock public sensibilities, much as he did when he first came out in 1931, dressed in sandals, with pastel-colored hair and maquillage of mascara and lipstick in place. He may have exaggerated for the effect sometimes, but he was succinct and did not mince words:

“It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn't give enough.”

“I don’t represent homosexuality, I represent me.”

“Zealots are totally incapable of any emotion other than rage. It is an unalterable law that people who claim to care about the human race are utterly indifferent to the sufferings of individuals.”

“Etiquette is a process of exclusion, chiefly practiced by the English, to make sure that people of a lower class than their own cannot enter their kingdom.”

“I think good manners mean that you are in many situations the loser, but the gains are very considerable in the long run.”

**Quentin Crisp’s Essential Humanism

Quentin Crisp was among a select group of people throughout history who've been able to look outside their own family and society. British historian and scholar Christopher Dawson defined what a humanist viewpoint often entails: “It seeks to liberate the universal qualities of human nature from the narrow limitations of blood and soil and class and to create a common language and a common culture in which men can realize their common humanity.”

Mr. Crisp was one of those rare people who figured out early in his life that, although he was almost daily regarded with disgust, it was society’s problem, not his. In order to survive and thrive, morally strong people sometimes have had to come up with a different set of rules for themselves to placate what they perceived to be an unjust and hostile world. Such people as Mr. Crisp was often helped to inspire the world to become more empathetic and civilized.

Despite his rough start in life, and the dangerous situations he subsequently encountered during most of it, Mr. Crisp nevertheless remained his gracious and generous self until the end. In his one-man stage shows he would say to his audiences, “If I am rich, it is because I have taken my wages in people and you are my reward.”

References

Crisp, Quentin. The Naked Civil Servant. Jonathan Cape, 1968.

Crisp, Quentin. Resident Alien. Alyson Books, 1997.

Kelly, Nigel. Quentin Crisp: The Profession of Being. A Biography. McFarland & Company, 2011.

Barrow, Andrew. _Quentin and Philip: A Double Portrait. Kindle Edition Pan, 2011.

The Human Fabric: Humanism http://thehumanfabric.njms.rutgers.edu/?page_id=60