1983. HIV/AIDS: Quentin Crisp declares AIDS is ‘just a fad’
Despite becoming one of the most celebrated homosexuals on both sides of the Atlantic, Quentin Crisp was no advocate of LGBT rights. Quite the opposite: he built an entire image as the self-hating outcast.
Like a naughty child he sought attention with outbursts that were clearly designed to offend and upset. His view of homosexuality was that it was “a terrible disease”. In 1997 he told the Times newspaper that he would advise prospective parents to abort the foetus if there was some way of demonstrating that it would grow up gay.
In 2009 Peter Tatchell described his one and only encounter with Crisp. It was in the 1970s and Tatchell was wearing a Gay Liberation Front badge. According to Tatchell, Crisp had said:
“What do you want to be liberated from? What is there to be proud of? I don’t believe in rights for homosexuals.”
Upon moving to New York in 1981 Crisp developed his controversial persona to the point where his one-man shows were sold out and the media regularly came to him when they needed a risque sound byte. Possibly because he was seen as the unapologetic homosexual he was embraced by a surprisingly large section of the queer community.
Until one night in Chicago in 1983 when, during his one-man show, he was asked by an audience member what he thought about AIDS. He replied:
“What can be made of it? Homosexuals are always complaining of one ailment or another. AIDS is a fad, nothing more.”
Suddenly Crisp didn’t seem quaint anymore. At a time when gay men were coming down with this mysterious and deadly disease in their hundreds, Crisp’s flippant take on it was that it was just ‘a fad’, a passing pre-occupation of gay men. This time he had taken a step too far and his attention-seeking behaviour was revealed for what it was.
He was, rightly, condemned by queers and non-queers alike and, hopefully, lost some of his fan base for good. Sadly, he was still perceived in some circles as being ‘a community figure’ appearing, for example, in Sally Potter’s film Orlando as well as the film version of Vito Russo’s book The Celluloid Closet. I suspect Russo would have been furious at Crisp’s inclusion, certainly it adds nothing to the film.
Crisp died in Manchester, England in 1999.
He wasn’t alone in downplaying the disease. I remember attending a standing-room-only meeting in Los Angeles in the early 1980s that was called by several physicians in the community to calm people’s fears. They made the point that the incidence of AIDS was statistically insignificant and that people should go about their business. Not the best advice, in hindsight.
Quentin Crisp got a lot of cred from me for inspiring Sting’s song “An Englishman in New York”. Good to learn more about him, one man’s way of dealing with oppression. We will know liberation has arrived when we and our society have got past the jostling to shame and blame each other.
Quentin Crisp was much better as a person in the late 60’s, The World In Action documentary is quite revealing, and he came across as an interesting eccentric character at that time. What went wrong? He became famous for being famous, by the late 70’s/early 80’s he was not so witty and clever anymore, fame had gone to his head, coupled with an incredible ignorance of the changes in the world around him. America embraced him, they just love eccentric English but he soured a lot of his fans there with his awful ignorant remarks about being Gay and the emerging AIDS epidemic. He should be best remembered for his life in London in the 1920’s-1960’s, beyond that. the world had already caught up with him, especially the Gay world, overtaken him, and he didn’t like it.
No – part of this is a simple misunderstanding that AIDS was actually very serious and was going to get much more serious.
He was also afraid of precisely what happened – that the disease would be pushed as an exclusively gay thing and that gays would be seen as dirty and ‘diseased’ giving an further excuse for more and more victimisation, undoing the progress of the preceeding years.
He also was not the gay campaigner the youngsters wanted him to be and had no intentions of being and no obligation to. He had done his bit and suffered for decades when his young critics weren’t even born.
Finally there was always a culture gap. Whilst Americans like his English ‘eccentricity’ they fail to understand that the controversial opinions he held including criticisms of gay culture itself were hard formed in the forges of the pillorying and beatings he took over many years. “I don’t believe anyone has ‘rights’. If humanity got what it deserved it would be starved’ being an example. He meant it. He was never going to simply follow the crowd.
He did make a mistake on this one – it was insensitive and he ended up being wrong – it didn’t just pass quickly. But to chuck him over for the sake of a single comment like that and from a man like Crisp is ignorance itself and quite unjust.
It was an ill-judged comment but outright condemning him because of it is even more so. The determination here to trash one of the most significant, important and unapologetic queer voices of the 20th century reeks of the vile authoritarian ‘cancel’ ‘culture’ so prevalent these days.
Crisp apologised for what he’d said immediately afterward and, as significantly, he donated much of his earnings to AIDS charities up until his death. He was a contrarian in every aspect of his life, particularly against ‘normality’. While I personally disagree with his negative comments about homosexuality in general, its normalisation in culture was bound to be fair game for him. The fact is that this normalisation was something he’d contributed to more than most. A true contrarian.
If you were born in 1908… you can’t develop any feeling for an illness that appeared at the end of the 1970s! He didn’t know how to deal with it!