No Speed Bumps

Memory Is A Funny Thing'

Memory's a funny thing. I recall Quentin Crisp largely as the light-weight flamboyant and distinctly mauve showman into which he evolved after gaining international celebrity with the release of the 1975 film 'The Naked Civil Servant' with John Hurt, a movie was based on Crisp's 1968 autobiography of the same name. This book grew out of a 1964 radio interview Crisp gave to friend and fellow eccentric, Philip O'Connor, which was heard by the managing director of Jonathan Cape.

I was reminded of his earlier self watching a book tour kind of interview with Bernard Braden in the year the 'The Naked Civil Servant' was published.

At times, this almost chillingly serious Crisp seems a kind of latter day Oscar Wilde but in quasi drag - in part, it's the paradoxes he delights in, such as that acceptance of homosexuality will come from boredom - that one can't legislate for changes in attitude.

With deft equanimity, the author manoeuvres into some kind of sense answers to some fairly bizzare and perhaps patronising questions, such as to whether or not gays, being uninterested in reproduction, would make good leaders. A kind of crazy 'time of your hands' approach to politics. Crisp counters that homosexuals are often first more concerned with themselves, and then their friends and only finally the outer world. And being excluded, he proposes, means queans (original spelling) have little experience and so expertise of this world at large. But such self-focus of course seems general and not specific to any one/our group.

He pithily draws in Jacob Bronowski's construct of the 'arrow of time' which 'always points in the direction of diminishing difference' to point out that gays now (1968) do not seem to see themselves as distinct and apart - which begins to sound like an individualist argument from another era. The 'diminishing difference' phenomenon has currency in gay groups I have involvement with today - the construct of 'inclusion politics'.
There is much to disagree with but I liked his analysis of the underlying differences in meaning of the British 'old girl' and the American 'sugar' and 'honey'.

I must say I'm glad to be brought back to something like the pre-chat show Quentin Crisp. Though rooted in his time, I admire his uncompromising and stringent efforts to see outside received wisdom.

And I'm happy to spend the few minutes this interview offers to reflect on a true and courageous gay hero. Someone who stood up to be counted when it was not easy at all to do.