Quentin Crisp on Yeros

Apart from a few restaurateurs in England and America, Mr Yeros is the only Greek gentleman that I have ever known, but I’ve always been dimly aware that, as a nation, the Greeks have been consumed by a passion for the human body so much so that, during its heyday, Athens must have looked like an outfitter’s window during a weekday strike. This book at first appears to confirm this ancient belief but, as one turns the pages and the postures of the models become more and more bizarre, one realises the whole idea is being deliciously satirised a thoroughly entertaining book.  

"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. 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.

Excerpted from: salon.com ( Dec. 3, 1999 )

Quentin Crisp, 1908-1999

He was the late 20th century embodiment of a turn-of-the-century archetype: the bohemian flâneur, the arty, outrageously dressed stroller of the boulevards who negotiates a hostile world, surviving on his guile and witticisms. At the root of Crisp's act was a kind of radicalism:, he transformed himself into a walking, quipping objet d'art.

It was this feat of defiant self-invention that eventually brought him celebrity. He wrote several wonderful books and at least one famous one, his 1968 memoir "The Naked Civil Servant." But Quentin Crisp's masterpiece was, emphatically, "Quentin Crisp."

In 1942, Crisp began sitting as a life model for art students. "I took up posing as a profession," and the work suited him so well that he did it for the next 35 years.

It was this nude modeling work that gave Crisp's breakthrough book its title. "The Naked Civil Servant" was an elegantly written memoir of Crisp's struggles, filled with fizzy wit and touching ruminations on his life as a perennial outsider.

In a modest way, it was a literary milestone -- one of the first blunt depictions of gay life to reach a mainstream audience. "Wherever I am on this earth, I am and shall always be a resident alien," he wrote in "How to Become a Virgin" (1981).