John Hurt: 1940-2017

One of our finest actors.

One night in the late 70s ITV re-broadcast The Naked Civil Servant. It must have been after it won every television award going. My mum let me stay up to watch it. I wasn't even in double figures yet. Tellingly my dad had gone out.

I was in awe. I'd never seen anything like it, he could have come from space. I thought he was so beautiful, and yes, so brave. The scene that haunted me was the taxi driver refusing to take him when it was clear he was about to get queerbashed by a bunch of thugs.  An epochal evening in my childhood.

'You can not touch me now. I am one of the stately homos of England.'

'It’s about the tenderness of the individual as opposed to the cruelty of the crowd' - John Hurt

Thanks mum, and thank you Mr Hurt.

'I told Mr. Hurt it was difficult for actors to play victims, but he has specialized in victims. When he stopped playing me, he played Caligula, which was only me in a sheet. Then he played The Elephant Man, which was only me with a paper bag over my head.' - Quentin Crisp.

Yes o yes, the noble outcast, refusing to hide, braving the mean streets of London.

Quentin Crisp: A Brunch With Greatness

When I found out Quentin Crisp had moved to America, Tom (my partner at the time) and I thought we had to figure out how to meet him. Growing up, I had seen The Naked Civil Servant and we had just been to see his film Resident Alien. So Tom said let’s just look him up – and he was listed!

“We’d love to take you to lunch,” we said. And he goes, in that voice: “Hold on please while I check the Sacred Book.” There was a rustling noise and he wrote it in his diary and we arranged to meet at a restaurant.

It was for lunch on a Sunday. Lo and behold, there he was.

He was 80, which meant he'd actually been in New York for ten years.

I don't remember much about it really.

He probably said something very witty and we all laughed.

Did you know he dyed his hair?

Anyway, I'll just end with a quote I found on Google and - hey bingo - we're done!

Ed Burstell remembers a clearly not very memorable encounter with Quentin Crisp in The Observer.

Jack Gold: 1930-2015

The director of The Naked Civil Servant.

Radio: The Death Of Quentin Crisp

The flamboyant and eccentric gay writer and raconteur died on 21 November, 1999. He was on a visit to England from his home in New York - a city that he loved. Hear from his biographer Tim Fountain, about the man who became a celebrity after his memoir The Naked Civil Servant became a bestseller.

BBC World Service and iPlayer.

A colleague was so excited to be interviewing Mr Crisp on his visit to England, then came the phone call....

Pretty good excuse for getting out of an unwanted interview, though.

Rob Halford: Slip Of The Tongue

"I feel a bit like Quentin Crisp these days, I've become the stately homo of heavy metal."

Indeed, his sexuality was a topic the record company advised me not to dwell on, but Halford brings it up before I do, cheerily suggesting that coming out during an MTV interview in 1998 was less an act of defiant bravery than a slip of the tongue. "I just say what's rattling out of my brain, you know, and I just happened to go, 'Well, speaking as a gay man …' and then I heard this noise, and it turned out the producer had literally dropped his clipboard when I said it."

Slip of the tongue or not, he says, it was "the greatest thing I could have done for myself". Now he wonders why he didn't do it sooner. "I think I just built in this delusional fear that I was going to destroy myself, no one was going to look at me any more as a metal singer, I'm going to destroy Priest because of my attachment with them. It was all self-imposed paranoia. It didn't affect Priest one iota: the record sales didn't plunge, the show attendance didn't plunge. Unconditional love will accept you for who you are, and I think that was the blessing I had from the fans."

Alexis Petridis interviews the ker-brilliant METAL GOD!© Rob Halford for The Guardian.

Note how the record company had told Alexis Petridish not to talk too much about the gay thing, but the artist brings it up and then happily squawks away. Sounds familiar...

Armistead Maupin: No More Tales Of The City

In 1974, when Armistead Maupin began writing what became Tales of the City, he thought of it as "an in-joke about the way life worked in San Francisco". Four decades later, that in-joke has been shared by more than 6 million readers. His stories of interlocking gay and straight lives in the city constitute one of the best-loved of literary sagas. The New York Times described reading them as "like dipping into an inexhaustible bag of M&Ms, with no risk of sugar overload". Now though, after four decades, that bag is finally about to be exhausted. The series will conclude with Maupin's ninth book, Days of Anne Madrigal, published at the end of this month.

Quentin Crisp once introduced him with the boast: "This is Mr Maupin. He invented San Francisco." More importantly, Maupin virtually invented the mainstreaming of gay life and helped the world see that "the gay experience" was nothing lesser or greater than human experience...

The Observer.

About time she stopped flogging that knackered San Franciscan gay horse.

Only joking!!!

This is quite a "nice" interview, by the way.
Thanks for asking.

Though Fagburn's pretty sure she's called time on her Tales at least once before...

Sisyphus: Theatre Of The Absurd

"The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labour..."
The Myth Of Sisyphus, Albert Camus.

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."Samuel Beckett.

"If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style."
Quentin Crisp. 

"Kids, you tried your best, and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try."
Homer Simpson.

"You mean it's all been meaningless?"
The Magnetic Fields. 

"Oh - what's the bloody point?"
Kenneth Williams.

Quentin Crisp: Thought For The Millennium

"Well, everyone will rush out into the street and drink and shout and wave their arms in the air and have their pockets picked, then go home again. But I shan't. I shall hide. I hope for nothing – nothing – in the new millennium except death. It will get noisier, it will get darker, it will get faster and the music will thump more. But I shall be dead."

From Observer Food Monthly - and why not?
John Hind claims to be the last person to interview Quentin Crisp, a week before he died in November 1999.
I think he probably was.
Fagburn knows the journalist who was booked in to interview Mr Crisp when he returned to London a few days after.
And believe you me, if you knew that journalist you'd have lost the will to live too.

Frances Cobain: Never Mind

Frances Cobain - daughter of Kurt Cobain and Mrs Witch, Courtney Love - for reasons best know to herself has had a tattoo of Quentin Crisp inked on her back.
Fine by me.
Like faghag dad, like daughter.

He knows I'd love to see him...

Bette Bourne: The Movie!

Bette Bourne & Mark Ravenhill talk about their new documentary from Jeremy Jeffs on Vimeo.

It's Bette's 70s, basically,
The Gay Liberation Front, radical drag, The Brixton Fairies commune, The Bloolips, Quentin Crisp...
Sounds amazing, doesn't it?
But you can't watch it.
Nothing personal, but they need to raise a bit more money to finish the thing.
Maybe you could help them out?

Things I Learnt Over The Weekend

I've had a cold. Looks like I didn't miss much.

1. The Guardian still can't get enough of John Waters.
Superfreak made his third appearance in The Guardian/Observer in a fortnight.
This week he's explaining What I See In The Mirror.
Answer; the body of a junky and Little Richard's moustache.
I think the thing I like most about John Waters is how he revels in bad behaviour - his own and other peoples' - and he never ever apologises.
Unlike some more stately homos...

2. Elton John is the nation's favourite scratched record.
On Piers Meets Elton, a royal command performance of sorts, Sir Elton of John wibbles on about My Drugs Hell.
Again.
I guess it takes a special kind of talent to make taking shedloads of drugs sound boring.
Forgive him great British public for he has sinned...

3. Channel 4's The House That Made Me is the new mea culpa for "troubled" gay stars.
Boy George was on it this week.
It's Michael Barrymore on Thursday.
Both once much loved working-class lads from that London who've been in a spot of bother and are desperately seeking rehab with the great British public by showing off their roots.
Boy George mused; "I'm basically a gay version of my dad.”
Gor blimey, luvaduck, apples 'n' pears, 'ave a banana!
The one thing they won't talk about is the one thing on everyone's mind; the house that ruined them.
Rachel Cooke reviewed the bad Boy George in the New Statesman; "It's hard to be surprised by anything George-related these days. It's only a couple of years, after all, since the bizarre episode that led to his conviction for falsely imprisoning a male escort. The escort in question, who eventually escaped into the street in his underpants, was Norwegian - a detail that has for some reason stuck in my mind like glue."

4. Matt Lucas isn't a bundle of laughs.
And like Boy George and Barrymore, there is one place we aren't allowed to go.
A prickly Lucas is interviewed inThe Observer Magazine.
His camp straight (comedy) partner, David Walliams, fields most of the questions.
"I make what seems a harmless enough inquiry about Lucas and he fires back that, should I report any details in this article, "I would caution you from a legal perspective right now... that you run the risk of being on the end of a lawsuit."'

5. If you are a grumpy old queen, as Quentin Crisp might have said, then turn being a grumpy old queen into your style.
The Daily Mail wonders; Who'll Save Dun Sulking: Ted Heath's home reveals an unexpected side to Britain's grumpiest PM - so why does it face being sold off?'
Apparently he never married.
"There are photographs of his devoted parents and his brother, John, but no clues as to any lady friend who might have cracked this sturdiest of bachelor hearts..."
This stately (alleged) homo's stately home sounds like the world's grandest confirmed bachelor pad.
"He had no immediate family but that is precisely why his home is such a treasure. Instead of leaving it be carved up by relatives, he left it all in a charitable trust — ranging from gifts from Mao Tse-Tung to the moneybox his father made him as a child."
So if you can't be a national treasure, then leave one to the nation.