The egg cracks at 90

You'd never mistake Quentin Crisp's The Last Word for a good book; indeed, you can barely mistake it for a book. Crisp, the last of Britain's old class of professional gay men, and the author of the fine memoir The Naked Civil Servant, dictated it to a friend soon before dying at the age of ninety. It is a very short book with very large type, full of lucid rambling. Nonetheless, the book – published by a small press, eighteen years later, by that same friend – has a purpose, a very specific one, contained entirely in the first chapter. It is to set the record straight about Crisp's actual identity as a trans woman.

Longtime readers will know that I tend to be free with my pronouns; although Crisp used "he" pronouns throughout her life, I'm going to call her "she" for the remainder of this piece. If this is incorrect, it can hardly hurt her now. Furthermore, it's not an insult to suggest that someone was trans, especially when she makes the fact very clear – and in circumstances like this, when most critics put their thumb on the "he" end of the scale, you may as well counterbalance it just to offer an alternative. Lastly, Crisp is from a place and time when the gay "she" – that camp form of address, with its layers of disguise and sincerity – was common. Even if I were inclined to join pretty much everybody in ignoring Crisp's late-in-life final coming-out, it would still be a correct pronoun.

I suppose I should start with the receipts. Crisp (p. 4-5) tells us:

"My daydream as a child was of growing up to be a very worldly, very beautiful woman. Those were my only daydreams. [...] Of course, I never thought I was gay. I never heard the word homosexual until I was about nineteen or twenty, but I knew I was different from other people because they made it perfectly obvious to me. I wasn't worried about it nor did I think, 'What shall I do to seem more like a real person?' Somehow, I accepted my fate. [...] Had I been born a woman, none of my life would have happened and I could have been happy. Well, perhaps that's stretching a point. Let's just say I might not have been quite as unhappy. [...] At the age of ninety, it has finally been explained to me that I am not really homosexual. I'm transgender. I now accept that. All my life, I have wanted to be part of society without having to alter my daydream, my own reality. When it comes to sex, these days I'm asexual. Nevertheless, I'm now convinced that it has been my view of myself and not my view of men that has been my trouble."

And on p. 9: "[...]I can relate to gay men because I have more or less been one for so long in spite of my actual fate being that of a woman trapped in a man's body. I refer to myself as homosexual without thinking because of how I have lived my life. If you are reading this and are gay, think of me as one of your own even though you now know the truth. If it's confusing for you, think how confusing it has been for me these past ninety years."

Crisp's words are familiar enough to any trans person who has waited a long time to come out – the dissociation and sense of unreality, the recognition that the matter turns on embodiment and not on desire, the functional but ill-fitting interim identities. I'd love to know who "explained" trans identity to Crisp, but it must have been someone much younger, because her elaboration on the theme draws from contemporary terms and modes of being, owing nothing to pre-1990 crossdresser culture or to any cultural reference save Jan Morris' Conundrum. The only sign that the speaker is elderly is the fact that she imagines transition exclusively as "the operation," as in "if the operation had been available and cheap when I was young, say when I was twenty-five or twenty-six, I would have jumped at the chance." Crisp's twenty-fifth year was 1933.

Coming out is a remarkable decision given Crisp's place in gay history. Although she is not as well known a figure today, she was famous in her time, and especially from the sixties to the eighties, on both sides of the Atlantic. After early careers as a commercial artist and life-drawing model, she was able to quit conventional work after The Naked Civil Servant became a hit. This was shortly after homosexuality was decriminalized in Britain, a few years after Kenneth Williams and his comedy partner Hugh Paddick first brought overtly gay comedy to British radio. Crisp was known for her openness about her queer life, as well as her style – as high femme as you could get while presenting male, with dyed hair, makeup, and in later years an omnipresent hat and kicky scarf. She became a professional personality and edgelord, touring America with her one-woman show and surviving by being asked to dinner. After moving to New York in her early seventies, she adapted instantly to the role of a certain New York type, a secret millionaire holed up in an biohazardous Manhattan studio.

The foreword and afterword to The Last Word, written by Crisp's editors, make it clear that she was profoundly influential to the generation of gay men who grew up in the sixties and early seventies, both as herself and via the Naked Civil Servant film starring John Hurt. They also make clear the profound grief behind this work. Crisp's friend and amanuensis, Phillip Ward, found himself unable to edit the tapes into a coherent story for nearly two decades; co-editor Laurence Watts ultimately stepped in to help him. Ward and Watts' endmatter uses "he" pronouns, and it only briefly, albeit supportively, mentions Crisp's transness – it's clear that they don't really know what to make of it, and want to respect Crisp's identity without repudiating what she did for them as young gay men. If they are skeptical, or if they struggle to reconcile Crisp's transness with the completeness of the persona they knew, they prefer not to say so. To them, despite her trolling and contradictory politics around gay liberation, she was a banner of gay pride – an out gay man without secrets during the height of the closet. I can't really blame them for not publicly engaging with Crisp's revelation that, far from being out and proud, she was closeted her whole life and felt driven to tell her secret only when she was dying. Crisp came out into the closet.

I believe Crisp when she explains, late in the book, that she only tells the truth and doesn't understand why people think she's funny. I mean, I believe it the way you believe any camp declaration; obviously she was a professional raconteur. But I do think that part of the trans condition is being laughed at, even long before you're out, and then developing a camp sensibility in self-defense. In general, I find it more interesting to take this little book at face value – and by extension, to take everything Crisp has ever said at face value. Another aspect of coming out as trans late in life is that generally there were signs. The blisteringly obvious is just what it seems. I read envy into her famous disgust with Princess Diana (after all, "a very worldly, very beautiful woman"), and I read the homophobia of someone who isn't actually gay into her infamous and genuinely horrible line, early in the epidemic, that "homosexuals are forever complaining of some ailment or other" and AIDS was "a fad." The same is true of her famous scorn for the concepts of "pride" and "liberation." It's shitty, but when you've adopted an identity as an ersatz version of what you really want, you're going to be shitty. People critique trans people sometimes for being too obvious, for taking gender "too literally" somehow, but what else are we supposed to do? We are literally the gender we say we are. It is obviously true. If people prefer us to remain in subtext, that is not our problem.

I also think of trans obviousness, and the ways the public universally ignores it, during the many times when Crisp tells us that she would have been very happy to have been an ordinary straight woman, run a knitting shop, etc. It plays as a joke, because of the sheer incongruity of a professional entertainer of many years' standing – flamboyant, even gratuitous – expressing a wistful desire to marry, settle down, and be good enough at bridge so as not to annoy her neighbors. But I think she means it! It's not even that upside-down nostalgia we sometimes feel for the safe road never taken, the flip side of YOLO. I think Crisp literally spent her life imagining being less remarkable and less depressed. Sometimes people become remarkable because, no matter what they do, they're going to elicit remarks, and they as may get paid for it. The error is imagining that they owe us remarkability, or owe it to themselves. The only thing we owe to ourselves is the truth.

Crisp comes out in three ways in her final book: as a woman who's been closeted for almost a century, and as a person who finds extreme old age physically unbearable, and as a person who's really fucking sad. She tells us repeatedly that she longs for death. It's all pretty raw, and all the more so because it's more or less surrounded by starfucking reminiscence and well-machined bits. I do think it's enormously important and admirable that she decided to put all of this on the record. She deserved to put camp aside for once, and nobody was going to help her do that except herself. After you live for that long in a camp register, people stop believing a word you say, but you still do have to try to tell the truth. Neither Crisp nor I believe in another life after this one, so all I can say is that I hope her daydream, her "own reality," was sustaining and powerful enough to provide her a measure of private happiness. You don't have to transition in any outward way to be trans, but believe it or not, it's the easiest path.