Quentin Crisp Research Articles

Violence, dandyism and the literary self-portraiture of Quentin Crisp

This essay argues that, although he is often characterized as aristocratic and defiant, the literary dandy fundamentally is the object of the types of violence identified by Galtung: direct, structural, and cultural. These three kinds can be traced throughout dandyism’s history, from the historical rise of “Beau” Brummell to more contemporary literary theorizing, as matters of acknowledging direct violence’s common proximity to the dandy, noting the dandy’s strong structural connection to his modern celebrity analogue, and understanding how the dandy transforms the economic and cultural relations of the commodity. Each of these aspects serve to reduce the literary dandy to a state of abjection. As a result of this antagonism, author and literary dandy Crisp adopts a form of life-writing in his memoir The Naked Civil Servant that can be identified as the literary self-portrait, a confessional and contrarian sub-genre theorized by Beaujour. The authorship of the self-portrait, then, serves as a defensive tactic that rewrites and reinterprets the violence of the dandy’s opponents.

A Wolf's Queer Invitation: David Kaplan's <em>Little Red Riding Hood</em> and Queer Possibility

The concept of queer invitation is explored in this reading of David Kaplan’s short film Little Red Riding Hood (1997). I propose that queer reading is activated by the acceptance of the queer invitation initiated primarily by the wolf figure in the film. This invitation to queer reading demands the suspension of the culturally dominant versions and interpretations of the tale by the Grimms and Perrault and activates gay cultural knowledges of celebrity intertexts in their stead. The suspension of “what everybody knows” about the tale and the wolf figure in particular opens space for a repositioning of the wolf-man through the representation of the wolf but also through the relationships between the cinematic visual, verbal, and musical channels and extratextual references to Vaslav Nijinsky and Quentin Crisp. Although offering a queer reading, I do not attempt to offer a template for queer reading of fairy tales; rather, I suggest that situated and specialized cultural knowledges are integral to queer reading and are therefore not available to, or accepted by, all audience members at all times.

Queer Dandy Style: The Cultural Politics of Tim Gunn's Asexuality

It really is Fashion that has killed dandyism.- Roland Barthes, The Language of FashionIf at first you don t succeed, failure may beyour style- Quentin Crisp, Sunday Correspondent MagazineDandyism is not dead. Contrary to Roland Barthes's assertion, quoted above, that fashion killed dandyism, dandyism lives on as it shape-shifts over time and remakes itself in different historical contexts. Nearly impossible to define, dandyism is an aesthetic and life philosophy; it is a lifestyle, and a queer one at that. In Dandyism, or The Anatomy of Dandyism, as it is sometimes translated, novelist and critic Jules Barbey D Aurevilly reminds us that dandyism goes beyond a manner of dress and continually elides definition: is almost as difficult a thing to describe as it is to define. Those who see things only from a narrow point of view have imagined it to be especially the art of dress, a bold and felicitous dictatorship in the matter of clothes and exterior elegance. That it most certainly is, but much more besides. Dandyism is a complete theory of life and its material is not its only side. It is a way of existing, made up entirely of (D'Aurevilly 1988, 31). In its various shades of instantiation, dandyism may even be perceived as a queer style, one that resists definition, blurs boundaries, and specifically plays with gender and its associations with sexuality. While many scholars have argued that queer expressions of gender do not necessarily correlate with homosexual desire, today, the sexuality of genderqueer is often speculated on and interpreted as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. In some cases, scholars of dandyism have reminded us that despite his effeminacy, the dandy male is indeed heterosexual. What is often missing from these readings is the possibility of the dandy as celibate or asexual.1Although there is a historical association between the male dandy and a disinterest in sex, today's oft-hypersexualized conception of queerness tends to eclipse that possibility when we look at the dandy of the contemporary moment. For example, Tim Gunn, a revered gay American fashion icon, continues to shock fans and the blogosphere with his admission of nearly thirty years of celibacy and his self- identification as asexual. In this essay, I make the case that Gunn embodies the aesthetic and persona of the contemporary dandy, thus supporting the idea that dandyism is indeed still alive and, further, that today's dandy has something to teach us about masculinity and the ways in which sexual categories are constructed around gender presentation and normative expectations of sexual desire and attraction.Monica Miller, a scholar in African American cultural studies, suggests that dandies must choose the vocation, must commit to a study of the fashions that define them and an examination of the trends around which they can continually redefine themselves (2009, 8). As former faculty and chair of the fashion design program at Parsons School of Design, author of two books on style, hit television personality of Project Runway fame, and host of his own makeover show, no other popular American figure today seems more committed to the vocation and study of fashion than Tim Gunn. Through this demonstrated commitment, along with his redeployment of clothing, gesture, and wit, to confuse constructions and assumptions of gender and sexuality (Miller 2009, 5), I read Tim Gunn as the quintessential contemporary pop dandy figure. Both in his television persona and his writings, Gunn performs a style of the new millennial dandy: he is finely dressed, astute, well mannered, proper, public, and quite fashionable. He revives the history of the dandy through his own coming out as sort of asexual and cataloging of twenty-nine years of celibacy, all while maintaining his gay identity. To be clear, I am not interested in presenting Gunn as a figurehead of any type of movement, nor am I concerned with an analysis of his person. …

David Weir, Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890–1926Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890–1926. David Weir. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Pp. xxii+233.

<i>David Weir</i>, Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890–1926<i>Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890–1926</i>. David Weir. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Pp. xxii+233.

World Without Tears: A Devotional

Coda: I climbed all the way inside Your tragedy I got behind The majesty Of the different shapes In every note The endless tapes Of every word you wrote Preface: Twilight of the Idols Much has already been said about the gay men and their beloved tragedy queens. From Oscar Wilde to Judy Garland to Lady Gagas current acid reign over the homosexuals who overpopulate her fan base, it is indeed possible, and far too easy, to cast a certain genealogy of tragedy queens who have held court in the hearts and minds of modern gay men. Rather than orchestrate or even critique the cultural impacts of these figures, whose stories and identities have already been told and retold, this essay will offer up Lucinda Williams as an overlooked tragedy country queen, carrying with her an approach to ruin that transcends the hackneyed misrecognition of camp to be creative, forceful, and, in the end, something other than just ruined. The problem with the fixation and attachment to the archetypical tragedy queens I have laid out before you is that the interest in them that gay men have cultivated and held dear has been based on bad faith and misrecognition. While my decision to draw on Wilde, Garland, and Lady Gaga may seem, to some, too subjective or general, I would like to simply point to the significant role that themes and invocations of tragedy have to play in the reception and affiliation that undergirds each of their individual constructions as iconic figures in the imagination From the scandalous, failed, and even pert ways Wilde himself presented the details of his private life to the public, to Garland s unfortunate and very wellknown problems with substance abuse, to the tears that Lady Gaga conjures up and weeps for her 'Tittle monsters, the publicity machine that has produced this particular line of tragedy queens has relied on sentimentalizing and protecting the bond made with their gay audience around a shared sense of misfortune. Tragedy operates here not only as a spectacle to behold, but also as a site of identification and affiliation necessary in the maintenance of the bond held between tragedy queens and their homosexual audience - failed women bonded to failed men. Lucinda Williams is the subterranean, all-powerful, aural, post-tragic queen of ruin. Composing her ruin as a work of art, Lucindas approach to destruction and loss finds capacity in despair and invents a new form of musical expression that intensifies violence and romances ruin as a way of becoming-imperceptible. While tragedy, and indeed the term woman itself, may imply, both discursively and historically, a kind of lack, Lucindas ruin is about capacity - to act upon it, to sing about it, and to find glory within it. More than a transformation of a negative term into a positive one, Lucindas creative approach to ruin is a kind of becoming - a decomposition of loss and an invention of force within experiences we might mistakenly write off as merely tragic. Ruin is Lucindas style and not just her burden. Style is a process of being and becoming yourself - a way of performing and broadcasting difference before the world that both defies and travels through familiar ways of being. Quentin Crisp, the subject of my dissertation project on style and failure, is, like Lucinda and indeed any object of my attention and affection, a counterhero in the story he has to tell about the life of the modern homosexual. Failure is a source of creativity for him in the same way that ruin and tragedy operate for Lucinda as a process of invention and artistic creation in her body of work. Style, for both Quentin and Lucinda, constitutes a sacred endeavor: of both constituting and spreading themselves unto the world by not only being, but also becoming their failures and tragedies, which are able to become events and beautiful objects in and of themselves. How personality and creativity are tethered to any project of style is exactly what, in Quentin s terms, we must lament about the ways our celebrities and our cultural icons have become historical moments and fashion trends in and of themselves: We have lost forever our capacity for reverence. …

A Room in Chelsea: Quentin Crisp at Home

Quentin Crisp's 1968 autobiography The Naked Civil Servant was adapted to considerable success in Jack Gold's 1975 television film, with John Hurt in the role. Crisp would identify himself as ‘bohemian’ as much as queer, and in his writings he traces a life in which London bedsits and rooming houses are home to those, like himself, whose wilful social otherness meant a rejection of domestic mores. Crisp's anarchic attitude towards domesticity and homemaking would become highly quotable, and the image of his Chelsea room enculturated as a quite singular provocation of ‘good’ domesticity. Crisp's room would correspond with cultural representations of the bedsit as a marker of liminal identity, and the media fascination to which it was subject reveals not only the political motivations of journalists often blind to the very rich life of The Naked Civil Servant, but also that they were oblivious to Crisp's performative tendencies and his own hyperbole about his room as a place of exile.

Quentin Crisp und die Kunst der Schamlosigkeit

Gender and sexuality belong to social markers that are most heavily influenced and also enforced by the affect of shame and the interpellation of subjects as shameful. Quentin Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant (1968) shows that discussions of shame and gender/sexuality are incomplete if they do not take into account strategies of “disinterpellation” (Sedgwick), which seek to undo the mechanisms of shame and shaming through displays of shamelessness.

Beyond the Stars

Beyond the Stars

Works on paper: the craft of biography and autobiography

Michael Holroyd opens this volume with a startling attack on biography, which is answered by two essays on the ethics and values of non-fiction writing. book then goes on to examine the work of several contemporary biographers, the place of biography in fiction and of fiction in biography, and the revelations of some extravagant autobiographers, from Osbert Sitwell to Quentin Crisp - to which he adds some adventures of his own. In particular an important and unpublished piece, The Making of GBS, a story of internecine literary warfare. book ends with a series of satires, celebrations, apologias and polemics which throw light not only on Michael Holroyd's progress as a biographer, but also his record as an embattled campaigner in the field of present-day literary politics.

'Don we now our gay apparel': gay men's dress in the twentieth century

From publisher's description: Gay style actually sets trends. Its what straight people take fashion from. Tony Woodcock From the New Edwardians and muscle boys to Radical Drag and Genderfuck, gay mens dress has had a profound impact on fashion. However, it is easy to forget that, with few exceptions, gay men earlier in the century took great pains to conceal their sexual identity. Men such as Quentin Crisp, while highly influential, were far from the norm. Most gay men resorted to a number of subtle dress codes to identify themselves to other gay men -- from Oscar Wilde's famous green carnation, which was still being worn in the 1930s, through to suede shoes. Beginning with a look at the subcultural world of gay men in the early part of this century -- particularly in New York and London -- this fascinating book analyzes the trends in dress adopted by gay men as well as the challenge gay style has made to mainstream mens fashion. The importance of dress choice to the formation of sexual identity is highlighted, as is gay influence on punk and the fashion industry as a whole. The rise of new dress choices in the wake of gay liberation is analyzed with particular emphasis on the masculinization of gay dress. The importance of the body to gay culture is addressed, from the physique magazines of the 1950s, through to tattooing and body piercing, and their origins in the SM scene.

Gay lives: homosexual autobiography from John Addington Symonds to Paul Monette

In his autobiography, John Addington Symonds relates a glorious night of passion, in which he and his lover lay covered from cold in bed, tasting honey of softly spoken words and blossoms of lips pressed on lips. Christopher Isherwood's first autobiography, on other hand, was far less direct; he wrote a second autobiography in part because first was not truly autobiographical in that the author conceals important facts about himself. These contradictions, evasions, and explicit sexual details of life stories of 14 men form Gay Lives, an account of homosexual autobiography. Paul Robinson reads memoirs of French, British, and American gay authors - Andre Gide, Quentin Crisp, and Martin Duberman, among others - through prism of sexual identity, asking questions about homosexuality and its relation to literary form. How did these authors discover their sexual identity? Did they embrace it or reject it? How did they express often conflicted desires in their words, which ranged from defiant and brutally frank to ambiguous and abstract? Robinson considers choices each made - as a man and an author - to accommodate himself to society's homophobia or live in protest against his oppression. Despite threads that connect these stories, Gay Lives refutes notion that there is a typical homosexual career by showing that gay men have led wildly dissimilar lives - from exuberant to miserable - and that they have found no less dissimilar meanings in those lives.

The Counterdiscourse of the Feminine

In Counterdiscourse of the Feminine in Three Texts by Wilde, Huysmans, and Sacher-Masoch (106 [1991]: 1094-105), Rita Felski doesn't emphasize the writers' conscious motives for the fin de siecle of art and artifice (1094) she otherwise treats so well. Of course, her forthcoming book may do just this, but I think her article scants the extent to which the writers involved knew what they were doing. First-and I don't think this can be emphasized too much-careers and lives could easily be smashed by any openness at all, and everyone knew it. Second-and Felski seems to me to de-emphasize this too-there is the formidable difficulty of describing or envisioning oneself at all, given the cultural counters available. How to describe-or even be-this manwho-is-not-a-man? How to do so especially at the particular time Felski notes? As Jonathan Ned Katz demonstrates (Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary, New York: Harper, 1983), the crucial business of inventing heterosexuality-that new identity the European medical profession was so insistent aboutrequired for real success homosexuality: bad and deviant twin. The cult and the new identity fit precisely, too. Unnatural? Fine; we'll make value of artifice. Immoral? We'll make virtue of heartlessness. Feminine? We'll scorn women. Defective? We'll be aristocrats, either by birth or by taste. Without more emphasis on the reactive nature of the cult, readers of Felski's article may misinterpret such phrases as a subtext of anxiety and repressed violence (1102) and deeper anxieties about sexuality and the body ( 1101) and conclude that such anxieties result from homosexuality or that they cause it. When oppression is soft-pedaled, the connection between anxiety and oppression gets lost, as does the link between anxiety and outright persecution. When actual gay politics becomes active rather than reactive, so does cultural politics, of course. Some of this did happen in the period Felski describes. I look forward to her book, but I hope it will embrace more of the historicity of the phenomenon she studies and will face more squarely the problem of how conscious strategy the decadent sensibility was and what sort of strategies were practical for writers whose earnings and living depended directly or indirectly on their work. Along with Katz, Sheila Jeffreys (The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880-1930, London: Routledge, 1985) and Lilian Faderman (Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, New York: Morrow, 1981) are important sources for this period; that Felski doesn't use them here is mistake, I think. A note on Huysmans's character Miss Urania: her name is joke clearly aimed at those in the know. A German term, originating in the 1860s, uranism was used throughout the 1880s and 1890s (especially in the United States, says Katz) to mean homosexuality. Huysmans's brutal strong man at the fair reappears in Quentin Crisp's Naked Civil Servant as the tall dark man and throughout Jean Genet's novels as just about everybody.