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A touring production of "An Evening with Quentin Crisp" brought the writer to New York a year later. Crisp was instantly enchanted by the city's pageantry and blasé, live-and-let-live attitude. He decided to emigrate, and the green card he received in 1981 made him an official New Yorker and U.S. resident alien -- a term he took for the title of his New York diaries and, poignantly, embraced as a kind of metaphor for his existential plight. "Wherever I am on this earth, I am and shall always be a resident alien," he wrote in "How to Become a Virgin" (1981). "People are never with me, they are always in my presence. I am never involved in conversation, I am always being interviewed."

The estrangement described here was Crisp's great theme: Beneath the wry adages and bon vivant postures, Crisp brooded on the melancholy and difficulty of living as a homosexual in a heterosexual world. He insisted that being gay was "abnormal," "an illness," a contention that made him an object of ire for many younger, politicized gays. But if Crisp was old-fashioned, he was no self-hater. There was as much Sun Ra as Sartre in his resident alien formulation; he clearly enjoyed being a mischievous interloper from another planet, and his vision of homosexuality was ultimately affirmative and romantic:

Homosexuals have time for everybody. This is not only an instance of the known law that all outsiders are polite to insiders because at best they secretly revere them or at worst fear that they may one day need them. Homosexuals are sincerely interested. They will sit for hours on stairs while chars complain about their rheumatism; they will stand at street corners while postmen rage against the handwriting of correspondents; they will pay extra fares to hear conductors rail against their wives. Every detail of the lives of real people, however mundane it may be, seems romantic to them. Romance is that enchantment that lends distance to things, and homosexuals are in a different world from the "dead normals" with many light years dark between. If by some chance an hour of pointless gossip makes fleeting reference to some foible, some odd superstition, some illogical preference that they find they share with the speaker, homosexuals are as amazed and delighted as an Earthman would be on learning that Martians cook by gas.

The largesse that made Crisp a confidant of chars and train conductors was his defining quality. "I have lust for small talk," he wrote. "Nobody escapes my love." He was often compared to Oscar Wilde, with whom he shared foppish brio and a way with words. But Crisp's democratic spirit was a world away from the aristocratic hauteur of Wilde. In New York, Crisp was a fixture of celebrity social life, befriended by models, writers, performance artists and Sting, who paid tribute to him in a hit song, "Englishman in New York." But Crisp was just as happy spending time with anonymous New Yorkers; his telephone number was listed in the Manhattan directory, and he vowed never to turn down an invitation. On virtually any day of the week, Crisp could be found at the Cooper Square Diner on Second Avenue, in the company of whatever new friend had come to receive a pinch of his stardust.

The message boards on Crisp's recently unveiled Web site are a testament to his generosity to these pilgrims -- they are filling up with memories of lunches, conversations on street corners and other Crispian close encounters. Meanwhile, two or three floral bouquets have materialized outside the door of Crisp's building at 46 E. Third St., an amusing, appropriately feeble parody of that rite of media-age grief for the celebrity dead. "My fondest hope is to die at the hands of a murderer," went one of Crisp's favorite lines. "In America, the truly famous are always murdered." Alas, this ambition eluded him: Crisp died of a heart attack after eating what he doubtless would winkingly have called The Last Supper. No matter: Leaving behind a small pile of charmingly written books, a treasure trove of bons mots, a filthy apartment and memories of the dignity he brought to the role of gentleman iconoclast, Crisp assured himself a fittingly singular immortality.
salon.com | Dec. 3, 1999

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