Old and gay

The self, not sex, is the issue

By Burt Berliner

NEW YORK(AP) Quentin Crisp sits demurely in an armchair at New York's Chelsea Hotel. His hair is gray with a mauve rinse. His conservative shirt and tie are a marked contrast to a face that's powdered and rouged.

"I am what you see," says Crisp. "An aging, effeminate homosexual.”

Frail and elegantly flamboyant, England's tribute to individuality has been a walking civil rights case for 70 years.

"I don't represent homosexuality. I represent myself," says Crisp, whose oneman show kicks off an American tour in New Haven, Conn., Tuesday. From there, he goes to Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The controversial subject of an acclaimed TV documentary, "The Naked Civil Servant," Crisp invited ridicule and beatings when he first "came out" in 1931

on the streets of London. He made no effort to hide his outrageously effeminate manner and eccentric appearance.

"Sex has never mattered to me as much as personality the right to be yourself,” he says. "I could have easily lived a life in which certain forms of sex were forbidden, provided I was free to give expression to the feminine parts of my nature."

Crisp's self-evident homosexuality (“I wore makeup at a time when even on women, eyeshadow was sinful") inspired the self-mockery and witty insight into sexual role-playing that characterize his show.

Despite a change in the gay stereotype from effeminacy to ruggedness Crisp has not altered his style. "We now have in England pubs where the people go entirely dressed in leather and

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Associated Press

Quentin Crisp, 70-year-old English homosexual: "Sex has never mattered to me as much as personality."