His favourite line was from A Streetcar Named Desire: "I never lied in my heart." The author and performer, Quentin Crisp, who died on November 21st, aged 90, was always honest. He was emotionally far tougher than the guys in leathers at the bar, "carrying their helmets," as he said, "even though they've come by bus".
He had been through and seen through love, sex, gender, fame, failure, poverty, 60 years of deep-pile dust carpeting bedsits, and John Hurt approximating his life in five wigs, mouse to mauve, in the televised version of his memoir, The Naked Civil Servant. He had proved his belief that even if you only lean limply against a wall, but live a very long time, it will give way.
Born Dennis Pratt, in Surrey, his miserable boarding-school years were followed by a journalism course and art school. But he already knew what he wanted to do in life, and that was not to do, but to be. He wanted to be celebrated for being himself.
"Blind with mascara and dumb with lipstick," he stalked brazenly about London, as haughty and as stylised in gesture as a supermodel. Martyrdom he expected, and was seldom disappointed: he was slapped across the face without a warning word; followed by crowds; beaten up. "Who do you think you are?" the scornful hissed. He did not think. He knew.
He was proud of being homosexual, which by his definition meant living as a dream of a woman, though without the aesthetic insult of travesty cross-dressing. He did not come out of the closet. He had never been in one.
Late in the second World War, having been excluded from call-up on the grounds of "suffering from sexual perversion", he found a nearmetier. The dearth of able-bodied men, any men, meant his country needed him as a freelance art-school model. Concluding that he had generally been no more than a civil servant, although often a naked one, he hit on the title for his autobiography.
He settled in a Chelsea boarding house where he left the dust heroically undisturbed through decades, saying that "after the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse".
At the age of 40 he swapped henna for a blue rinse - hence his crack about being "one of the stately homos of England".
In 1968, Jonathan Cape accepted The Naked Civil Servant. Quentin Crisp knew that most publishing was about personality, and the publication gave him access to audiences, starting with a Late Night Line-Up show.
Following the television adaptation of the autobiography, with John Hurt playing the lead role, Quentin Crisp became "part of the fantasies of total strangers". He maintained that his crusade was for identity and individuality, rather than the lesser right to sexual freedom.
At the age of 72 he became New York's oldest runaway in a rooming house on the Lower East Side. He was candid about the "fatuous affability of celebrity", otherwise known as the smiling and nodding racket, and told a chat-show host he could live on hospitality, peanuts and champagne.
He feared intimacy, and yet adored company, investing to the end much of his energy performing for strangers. He claimed not to fear dying alone. "If you die with people," he explained, "you have to be polite. You have to say give my love to Monica."
When asked once what he would like in his obituary, he said: "Mr Crisp thanks the world for letting him stay so long."
Quentin Crisp (Dennis Pratt): born 1908; died November, 1999 992612548