Quentin Crisp: Loving In The Shade
Questions raised by a problematic trancestor
In her memoir, The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp describes how queer connections and care in WW2 London were made possible by the Blitz:
When most stayed home behind blacked out windows, the streets were empty. This produced a rare opportunity for queers like Crisp to meet in public, and kiss in darkness as the air raid sirens howled.
This an example of love in the very literal shade of blackout. It also points to the more figurative shade of repression that surrounded queer life at the time. With Crisp as a starting point, we see that repression is never total, and can ask:
What is possible inside the closet?
Life pre-Stonewall and the Sexual Offences Act 1967 is often figured as the queer “Dark Ages,” characterised by lack of community, legal and social recognition, and care. From here, our history is supposedly a straightforward progression of coming out of the closet into the light, and receiving the privileges that come with social acceptance.
Crisp’s writing regularly challenges this assumption. She articulates a trans pre-history, of life before the fantasy of state provided healthcare. It’s a life of obscurity, but of wisdom and joy, and care in community, however fleeting. Pointing to this in both abstract and concrete terms, Crisp helps us to answer the question:
How do queers survive the ambient violence of our day?
Crisp’s context of everyday domestic violence, interrupted only by international scales of violence, is familiar to queers today. Further along the supposedly progressive arch of history than Crisp, we see clearly that visibility isn’t necessarily a marker of privilege. Trans visibility in particular has triggered backlash and attack against LGBTQIA+ rights across the world. Living and loving in the shade as she did, Crisp calls us to ask:
What is the cost of visibility, both for the individual and the collective?
So far, these questions the unsettling proposition that it might be better for us to stay in the closet. But Crisp’s example is not necessarily one to follow. Her life was elegant, but simultaneously wretched and tragic. Her philosophy is engaging, but it’s steeped in a shame that she frequently turns against other marginalised groups. Recovering a workable philosophy of queer care from Quention Crisp means contending with her sexism, racism, and homophobia. It means asking:
What possibilities of violence does the closet breed in us? What contortions and internal struggles should we be wary of?
Our parents vaguely remember Crisp, our grandparents maybe more so. But she has yet to be taken up by our generation’s trans activists and historians. Doing so is an opportunity not only to recover and claim a trancestor, but to carry on the questions she was asking:
What possibilities of queer life are lost to the drive for visibility & state recognition?
Who among us do we alienate in the process?
How can we live and love in the shade?
I refer to Crisp throughout using she/her pronouns, and place her within a trans historical context. Though initially identifying as an “effeminate homosexual,” Crisp spent the last decades of her life calling herself transexual. A proud conformist in every respect but gender/sexuality, and with a firm stake in respectability politics, she/her seem the most appropriate in the light of this identity shift.
This piece was written in response to a prompt by Amy Etherington, looking at queer care within and separate from the violent environments we inhabit.