Book Review: The Naked Civil Servant - Quentin Crisp

It occurs to me that I mostly read modern books. But sometimes I dip into the classics to see what modern literature is built upon.

Quentin Crisp was - depending on how you read his⁰ autobiography - famous for being infamous, notorious for being Proud before Pride, or an uncompromising icon of studied awfulness.

The book veers wildly between achingly painful prose and unimaginably bitchy barbs. Every page is stuffed with acid-drops of social commentary.

About my immortal soul I did not worry. Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer-appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.

Being Gay in the early half of the 20th Century was, to put it mildly, not easy. The book deals lightly with some rather awful abuse. It also reveals rather frankly how prevalent queer culture was in the inter-war years, and the effect of "over-paid, over-sexed, and over-here" GIs on the scene. It's something I've never seen mentioned before in any book about the London Blitz.

Curiously, the book is remarkably non-salacious. I wasn't expected a modern bonk-buster, but it is faintly amusing where the line of respectability is drawn.

It is both bewildering and heartening to see how much has changed in the last hundred years. Parts of the book feel almost like a damp-squib today. Crisps decision to be as outrageously "out" as possible was obviously terrifying and liberating all at the same time. And, the result is that nowadays some of the things he describes are completely unremarkable.

I was over thirty before, for the first time, I heard somebody say that he did not think of himself as masculine or feminine but merely as a person attracted to other persons with male sexual organs. A confession of this nature would still bewilder and, perhaps, anger some of my homosexual friends.

And, yet, there are nasty little echoes of a future that hasn't changed all that much:

In spite of their tameness, all these clubs for homosexuals were raided sooner or later and the cases that followed enlivened the pages of the News of the World and the People.

It is a stellar look at (one aspect of) queer life in the last century. It is painful, hilarious, maudlin, and hopeful. It is as flamboyant a book as you could hope to read. And it is that relentless dedication to being true to oneself which has, I think, liberated more people than can possibly be imagined.

As Brophy's First Law says, it is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.