Quentin Crisp (born Denis Charles Pratt; (1908-12-25)25 December 1908 – (1999-11-21)21 November 1999) was an English raconteur, whose work in the public eye included a memoir of his life and various media appearances.

His iconic status was occasionally controversial due to his remarks about subjects like the AIDS crisis, inviting censure from gay activists including human-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.

[3] The interviews he gave about his unusual life attracted great curiosity, and he was soon sought after for his personal views on social manners and the cultivation of style.

[5] He changed his name to Quentin Crisp in his twenties after leaving home, and expressed a feminine appearance to a degree that shocked contemporary Londoners and provoked "gay-bashing" assaults.

[1] By his own account, Crisp was "effeminate" from an early age, resulting in his being teased while at Kingswood House School[6] in Epsom, Surrey, from which he won a scholarship to Denstone College, Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, in 1922.

After leaving school in 1926, Crisp studied journalism at King's College London, but failed to graduate in 1928, going on to take art classes at the Regent Street Polytechnic.

Around this time, Crisp began visiting the cafés of Soho, his favourite being The Black Cat in Old Compton Street, meeting other young gay men and rent boys, and experimenting with make-up and women's clothes.

Crisp attempted to join the British army at the outbreak of the Second World War, but was rejected and declared exempt by the medical board on the grounds that he was "suffering from sexual perversion".

He remained in London during the 1941 Blitz, stocked up on cosmetics, purchased five pounds of henna and later paraded through the streets during the black-out, picking up G.I.s.

In 1940, he moved into a first-floor flat at 129 Beaufort Street, Chelsea, a bed-sitting room that he occupied until he emigrated to the United States in 1981.

Crisp wanted to call his book I Reign in Hell, a reference to Milton's Paradise Lost ("Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven"), but his agent insisted on The Naked Civil Servant, an insistence that later gave him pause when he offered the manuscript to Tom Maschler of Jonathan Cape on the same day that Desmond Morris delivered The Naked Ape.

After the success of the film, his autobiography was reprinted; Gay News commented that it should have been published posthumously (Crisp said that this was their polite way of telling him to drop dead).

He appeared in the 1985 film The Bride, which brought him into contact with Sting, who played the lead role of Baron Frankenstein, and who in 1987 wrote the song "Englishman in New York" for and about Crisp.

Crisp also appeared on the television show The Equalizer in the 1987 episode "First Light", and as the narrator of director Richard Kwietniowski's short film Ballad of Reading Gaol (1988), based on the poem by Oscar Wilde.

Four years later, he was cast in a lead role, and got top billing, in the low-budget independent film Topsy and Bunker: The Cat Killers, playing the door-man of a flea-bag hotel in a run-down neighbourhood, quite like the one he lived in.

He caused controversy and confusion in the gay community by jokingly calling AIDS "a fad", and homosexuality "a terrible disease".

Crisp was a stern critic of Diana, Princess of Wales, and her attempts to gain public sympathy following her divorce from Prince Charles.

"[15] Following her death in 1997, he commented that it was perhaps her "fast and shallow" lifestyle that led to her demise: "She could have been Queen of England [sic] - and she was swanning about Paris with Arabs.

"[19]Crisp died of a heart attack on 21 November 1999, at age 90, while staying at the home of a friend in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, on the eve of a nationwide revival of his one-man show.

[20] He was cremated with a minimum of ceremony as he had requested, and his ashes were flown back to his personal assistant and travel companion Phillip Ward in New York.

[citation needed] In the two years before his death (1997–1999), Crisp had been compiling a work that was initially to be titled The Dusty Answers with Philip Ward.

A chance meeting with Laurence Watts, who interviewed Ward for Pink News, led them to co-edit Crisp's remaining work.

In it he recounts several previously untold stories from his life, walks the reader through his journey from obscurity, reflects on his philosophy and gender identity.

In And One More Thing, Crisp primarily shares his views on other people, their lives and their opinions, from flapper girls to Monica Lewinsky, and from the British Royal Family to Walt Disney.

Sting dedicated his song "Englishman in New York" (1987) to Crisp, who had jokingly remarked "that he looked forward to receiving his naturalisation papers so that he could commit a crime and not be deported."

In late 1986 Sting visited Crisp in his apartment and was told over dinner, and over the next three days, what life had been like for a homosexual man in the largely homophobic Great Britain of the 1920s to the 1960s.

In his 1995 autobiography Take It Like a Man, singer Boy George discusses how he had felt an affinity towards Crisp during his childhood, as they faced similar problems as young homosexual people living in homophobic surroundings.

That same year, Crisp's great-nephew, academic and film-maker Adrian Goycoolea, premiered a short documentary, Uncle Denis?,[26] at the 23rd London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.

[28] In 2014 Mark Farrelly's solo performance Quentin Crisp: Naked Hope debuted at the Edinburgh Festival, before transferring to the St. James's Theatre in London and subsequently touring.

[29] In the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, Bill Murray explicitly based the dress style of his character (Martin Heiss) on Crisp.