Ah, Quentin Crisp, what a wonderful man. Witty, intelligent, and very brave. He was out as gay in 1930s England, when such an admission was punishable by imprisonment.

Mr. Crisp described himself as “effeminate by nature,” dyed his hair, wore make-up, painted his nails, and sashayed through London’s busy streets in his open-toed sandals. This is how he described himself in the opening of The Naked Civil Servant:

“I wore make-up at a time when even on women eye shadow was sinful. From that moment on, my friends were anyone who could put up with the disgrace; my occupation, any job from which I was not given the sack; my playground, any cafe or restaurant from which I was not barred, or any street corner from which the police did not move me.”

Mr. Crisp never had a problem with who he was. No, it was only other foolish people who had a problem. Quentin presented himself as how he wanted to be seen, or as he said in this interview on CBC in 1977:

”I laid it out so everyone would know what they were getting.

“[The public] were extremely hostile. And I think it’s because they saw my difference from the rest of the world was sexual. And in England, sex is not popular. Not of any kind. No display of sex, no talk about sex was popular until the permissive society began.

When asked why he had not thought of moving to a more expressive and liberal city like Paris, Mr. Crisp replied:

“There’s no good doing it in Paris. If it causes no stir, then it covers no ground.

“I wanted to survive the stir. The idea was not to create it but to outlive it. To show that people like me had to go on living. That they had to take their laundry to the laundry, they had to eat their meals in restaurants, they had to had to go to work, they had to come back.

“This is what people had to learn.”

All these decades later, it would appear there are many people who could still learn a thing or two from Quentin Crisp.