“Had I been born a woman, none of my life would have happened and I could have been happy”
BY ADRIAN GOYCOOLEA, IMAGE FOR CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN FOR DO NOT FADE, STARRING LAVINIA CO-OP AS QUENTIN CRISP AND LEXA ROWLEY AS ORLYN CRISP
In an interview with The Independent published shortly before his death, Quentin Crisp said, almost as an aside: “It’s been explained to me that I’m not a homosexual. I’m a trans-something.” I am Quentin’s great-nephew. I still use he/him because he never declared otherwise — but I have been thinking about that aside for a long time.
Quentin was the closest thing I had to a grandparent. As a child, I saw him at family events and his stories inspired me to become a filmmaker. When I went to film school in New York, we grew close. At the Cooper Square Diner, we gossiped over fried eggs and mashed potatoes — his regular order, which I copied. I helped with his groceries and brought him soup when he was sick. He was family.
Quentin was an outsider everywhere he went. In the London of his youth, where homosexuality was illegal, he walked the streets in full makeup and got beaten for it. Neither did he fit in the gay world, where “straight-acting” men trying to pass found his flamboyance a liability. He held a singular, sometimes stubborn philosophical position: that individuals should simply be themselves and let the world adapt. During the AIDS crisis he callously quipped that it was a fad, then quietly donated regularly to amfAR. Fundamentally, he was not a joiner.
His first autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant, and its 1975 ITV adaptation starring John Hurt made him famous overnight. He moved to New York in 1981, where he found a greater acceptance. He continued to write, appeared on talk shows, and along with actress Sylvia Miles, worked the wine-and-cheese circuit. Most memorably, he played Queen Elizabeth I in Sally Potter’s landmark queer film Orlando. When Terry Wogan asked if he was happy, Crisp replied: “I am happy now.” He was. And yet.
In The Last Word, dictated because he could no longer type, he was unambiguous: “At the age of ninety it has finally been explained to me that I’m not really homosexual. I’m transgender. I accept that now.”
“Had I been born a woman, none of my life would have happened and I could have been happy. Well, perhaps that’s stretching a point. Let’s just say I might not have been quite as unhappy.”
“If it’s confusing for you, think how confusing it has been for me these past ninety years.”
At the end of his life, he understood fully who he was. But he never got to actually be her. His fantasy of what that life might have looked like as a woman was touching and entirely wrong — he imagined running a wool shop in a distant town where no one would know his secret. In reality, these days the lives of trans women are more threatened and more marginalised than those of gay men, not less.
He once predicted that in the twenty-first century “the lines of gender will become more and more blurred.” He was right. In a backlash, though, governments have started drawing them back — systematically dismantling the rights of trans people, persecuting them, and labelling them terrorists. The philosophy Quentin lived by has never been more necessary or more brave.
I’m making a short film, Do Not Fade, which imagines Quentin as Orlyn Crisp: a young trans woman alive today — the woman he always was but never got to be, navigating the world he predicted but never got to inhabit. Almost everyone making it with me is trans, non-binary, or queer.
The film is currently crowdfunding at crowdfunder.co.uk/p/do-not-fade.
Where Quentin refused solidarity, I have tried to build it. I think he would have found that faintly ridiculous, but I think it’s necessary. We didn’t agree on everything.
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