I recently read the new posthumus autobiography of Mr. Crisp called The Last Word.
That was so good that I wanted more and I had not read his first book to be published, the one that made him the international celebrity he became for the last 30 or so years of his life.
So off to the library I went after asking my branch to locate it for me. Yes, The Naked Civil Servant is even available in Nassau County Long Island, New York USA.
As he discusses in The Last Word, Quentin is more trans than gay, but given the fact that the variety of gender orientation had not been much explored by the time of The Naked Civil Servant’s publication in 1968 he was not fully aware of his own place on the spectrum.
I not really aware of the culture of the UK in those post Stonewall years after USA gay liberation had its defining action in 1967, but the feeling I had personally as a bisexual identified teen at the time was that the popular notion was that there are two sides, a person is one or the other; gay or straight. This didn’t fit me but anyway, that was the general impression I got and I think that is what the USA culture at the time thought.
Yet reading THe Naked Civil Servant it is clear that even then Crisp knew he was something other than the one slot or the other categorization. He claims to have very early on worn makeup, but he is not really a crossdresser. He is not dressing as he is to act more like a woman to attract men really in any way, but rather to express what he felt within himself and what he ought to do and be.
The Naked Civil Servant is the work of an outsider critical to the workings of the society he found he had to live in. No doubt his gender feelings were part of the impulse that set him in the outsider direction, but what he becomes by the time of this writing is someone who looks at the world around him, does not really want to participate in it if he can avoid it and describes it in endless critical witticisms.
So readers, this is not primarily a gay book. This is a work of an outsider that I would encourage other outsiders, whatever their sexual proclivities may be, to read. He is most definitely one of us who takes to the pages, his stage here, in a manner most entertaining and fortifying for the rest of us.
Of particular interest to me was the art model stuff as well as his other attitudes toward work. He is only willing to work because he has to. I think this should be the natural human response to the wage slave cycle we are forced into in our modern civilized world. If one looks into anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer people, which is the way human life was for 6 million years until the agriculture thing started just 10,000 years ago, one can find that people simply didn't “work” all that much. Maybe a few hours a day, and not every day, were necessary to get what was needed to sustain. The remainder of the time given over to hanging out, telling stories, resting , sex, whatever.
I like to think that Crisp, like myself was old school in that way.
Art modeling is the closest thing I have found for being paid for doing nothing. The model just sits there, the mind remains one's own, unsold.
I first saw Quentin on The Dick Cavett Show in my youth and loved his not bullshit stance since.
