Rupert Everett

Rupert Everett born 29 May 1959

Rupert James Hector Everett is an English actor. He is perhaps the first Hollywood movie star to have a long, mainstream, and successful acting career while being openly gay, and blasé about it.

Rupert Everett was born in Norfolk, England. From the age of 7 he was educated at Farleigh House preparatory school and later was educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College, but dropped out of school at 15 and ran away to London to become an actor. In order to support himself, he worked as a male prostitute, or rent boy, as he later admitted to US magazine in 1997. After being dismissed from the Central School of Speech and Drama for insubordination, he travelled to Scotland and got a job in the avant-garde Citizens' Theatre of Glasgow.

His break came with the 1982 West End production of Another Country, playing a gay schoolboy opposite Kenneth Branagh, followed by a film version in 1984 with Colin Firth. He began to develop a promising film career, until he co-starred with Bob Dylan in the huge flop Hearts of Fire (1987).

In 1989 he moved to Paris, writing a novel Hello, Darling, Are You Working? and coming out as gay, a move which some at the time perceived as damaging to his career. Returning to the public eye in The Comfort of Strangers (1990), several films of variable success followed. In 1995 he released a second novel, The Hairdresser of St. Tropez.

Everett's career was revitalised by My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), playing Julia Roberts's gay friend. In 1999, he played Madonna's gay best friend in The Next Best Thing (he also sang backup on her cover of American Pie, which is on the film's soundtrack). He has since appeared in a number of high-profile film roles, often playing heterosexual leads. He is also a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

In 2006 Everett published his memoir, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. In it he revealed he had had a 6-year affair with British television presenter Paula Yates. 'I am mystified by my heterosexual affairs — but then I am mystified by most of my relationships,' he said, with the article describing him as bisexual as opposed to homosexual.

But in a radio show with Jonathan Ross, Everett described his heterosexual affairs as resulting from adventurousness: 'I was basically adventurous, I think I wanted to try everything.'

In recent years Everett has expressed the view that his career has been negatively affected by his having come out and gone so far as to advise younger actors against doing so. Whilst his career has seen him achieve varying levels of critical and commercial success through the years, this may be as much due to his limitations as an actor - posh, brittle, slightly camp - as to the industry's view of him as a gay actor.

Gabriel Atkin

Gabriel Atkin born 1897* (d. 1937)

Gabriel Atkin was a British artist.

Born William Park Atkin, Gabriel Atkin was born in South Shields, Durham, the son of a builder. Before the First World War he showed promise as a water-colourist and he studied briefly at Armstrong College in Newcastle with tutor Richard George Hatton.

With the start of the war he enlisted and was based mostly on the south coast. In the summer of 1915 he was sent to Cambridge for officer training. While there he got to know the circle of gay men including the academics Edward Dent and A. T. 'Theo' Bartholomew. Although Atkin could be charming he was also prone to drunkenness and riotous behaviour, which caused those around him embarrassment and anguish. They engaged in some matchmaking and encouraged Siegfried Sassoon to meet Atkin. The meeting took place when Siegfried Sassoon travelled to Margate, where Gabriel Atkin was staying, on 20 November 1918. The meeting went well and they immediately fell for each other. They spent that Christmas together at Siegfried Sassoon's family home at Weirleigh and at Robert Ross's rooms in Half Moon Street in London. Gabriel Atkin almost certainly provided Siegfried Sassoon with his first sexual encounter.

After this Siegfried Sassoon became a minor literary celebrity and got to know a number of well-known people. This meant that Gabriel Atkin also got to know them. Sacheverell Sitwell introduced Siegfried Sassoon to Ronald Firbank. Although Siegfried Sassoon did not find Ronald Firbank's work appealing they met a couple more times mainly because Atkin was a devotee. They had also got to know some of the Bloomsbury Set including Lytton Strachey, Mark Gertler, Duncan Grant, and John Maynard Keynes.

Gabriel Atkin had a show at the London Salon in 1919. He also sent work to the Artists of the Northern Counties exhibits.

In 1920 Atkin was living in a studio flat in Tite Street in Chelsea, London, and Siegfried Sassoon gave him an allowance of £300 so that he could continue painting. They began to see much less of each other, although Siegfried Sassoon continued to send money for some years.

Gabriel Atkin travelled to France and for a while was a male prostitute in Lyon and then the south of France.

In 1928 he met the minor writer Mary Butts, and they married in London in 1930. For the first two years of their marriage they lived in London and Newcastle. They then settled in Sennen in Cornwall and bought a cottage that they called Tebel Vos. They both relied on drink and drugs. The marriage was troubled and Gabriel Atkin left in 1934. By 1937 they were both dead.

*actual birthday unknown

Mark Morrisroe

Mark Morrisroe born 1959 (d. 1989)

Mark Morrisroe was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1959 and was a photographer.

His mother was a drug-addicted prostitute. He left home at the age of 13 and began hustling. One of his disgruntled contacts shot him and he carried a bullet in his chest for the rest of his life.

He won a place at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but he was disruptive as his lifestyle involved drugs, cross-dressing, and exhibitionism.

Many of his photographs were self-portraits and formed a visual diary of his life. He photographed himself, friends and lovers in dark, grainy, distressed colour, integrating Super 8 stills and black and white Polaroids. His work is 'decadent' and his subject matter inseparable from his life. His work is technically experimental and takes on a sketchbook quality which includes titles and comments scrawled on the edges of his images.

Morrisroe used a 195 Polaroid Land camera and a film donated by the Polaroid company.

He assumed various identities including Mark Dirt, fanzine editor, and Sweet Raspberry, a maudlin drag queen down on her luck.

In 1997 an exhibition of Morrisoe's work My Life. Mark Morrisroe: Polaroids 1977-1989 was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. The exhibition included 188 portraits. Captured over a twelve-year period, Morrisroe's naked body in these photographs depicts the changes to his body cased by HIV infection as he transforms from youthful beauty to near-skeletal wasting. The photographs carry great self-awareness and poignancy.

Towards the end of his life he spent so much time in hospital he set up a dark room in the ward shower.

When he died 2000 Polaroids were found along with Super-8 films.

The estate of Mark Morrisroe (Collection Ringier) is currently located at the Fotomuseum Winterthur

John Rechy

John Rechy born 10 March 1934

John Rechy is a Mexican-American author

Born in El Paso, Mexico, John Rechy studied journalism in Texas and New York before serving in Germany in the US Army. Returning to New York, he drifted and spent some time hustling, which inspired his early writing.

He is best known for his earlier novels City of Night (1963) and Numbers (1967) which may seem dated now, but were significant in an era when gay behaviour was evolving its identity and moving towards gay liberation and community; his novels capture the gay sexual underworld in the pre-Stonewall, and pre-Aids, years.

Although almost all of Rechy's novels contain gay characters and themes, his only two other novels to deal primarily with them are This Day's Death (1969), which tells the story of a man caught in a police vice raid in Griffith Park, and Rushes (1979), which tells the bleak story of a group of friends in an urban leather bar. Rechy also has written a nonfiction 'documentary' about three days in the life of a gay hustler, The Sexual Outlaw (1977).

Yet despite these obvious examinations of gay male identity, Rechy himself has consistently derided the label of 'gay writer'; indeed, his more recent novels, Marilyn's Daughter (1988) and The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez (1991), adopt heterosexual women as their protagonists.

Rechy will most likely be remembered in the tradition of gay male writing as a brutal and lyrical chronicler of the pre-Stonewall sexual underworld.

Visit the John Rechy website here

Herbert Huncke

Herbert Huncke born 9 January 1915 (d. 1996)

Herbert Huncke was a rare blend of sub-culture icon, writer, homosexual pioneer (he participated in Alfred Kinsey's studies), drug addict, common criminal, friend and enemy to America's most important social movements of the 20th century. He lived a remarkable, and yet all-too-human life, spending decades incarcerated and decades more writing and contributing to the Beat Generation among other artistic endeavours.

Born in Greenfield, Massachusetts and reared in Chicago, Herbert Huncke was a street hustler, high school drop out and drug addict who lived the lifestyle described by Jack Black in his autobiography You Can't Win. The book — and Huncke's life — was centred around living as an outlaw hobo, jumping trains across the vast expanse of the United States, bonding through a shared destitution and camaraderie with other hoboes of all walks of life. Although Huncke later came to regret his loss of family ties; in his autobiography, Guilty of Everything, he states his lengthy jail sentences were a partial result of his lack of family support. Huncke left Chicago as a teenager after his parents divorced. Despite the fantasies the largely college-educated beat generation had about Huncke, he was from as much of a middle-class background as they were.

Huncke arrived in New York City in 1939 and headed immediately for 42nd Street. For the next ten years Huncke was a 42nd Street regular and became known as the 'Mayor of 42nd Street'.

At this point, Huncke's regular haunts were 42nd Street and Times Square, where he associated with people of all kinds including prostitutes (both male and female) and sailors. During World War II, Huncke shipped out to sea as a United States Merchant Marine to ports in South America, Africa and Europe. He landed on the beach of Normandy three days after the invasion.

Aboard ships, Huncke would kick his drug habit or keep it up with morphine supplied by the ship medic. When he returned to New York, he returned to 42nd Street, and it was after one of these trips where he met then-unknown writer William S. Burroughs, who was selling a sawed-off shotgun and a box of morphine syrettes. Huncke took an immediate dislike to Burroughs and thought he was 'heat', slang for undercover police or FBI. Assured that Burroughs was all right, Huncke bought the morphine and, at Burroughs' request, immediately gave him an injection.

Thus began a long career of drug use by Burroughs, and Huncke became a lead character in William Burrough's first pulp novel, written under the pseudonym Bill Lee, JUNKIE: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. After Huncke first exposed Burroughs to both jive talk and morphine, these elements became central to Burroughs' writing. In the late 1940s Huncke was invited to Texas to grow marijuana on the Burroughs' farm.

Huncke was a bisexual hustler, drug user, thief and burglar. His autobiography, titled Guilty of Everything, was lived in the 1940s and 1960s but published in the 1990s.

During the late 1940s, Huncke was recruited to be a subject in Alfred Kinsey's research on the sexual habits of the American male. He was interviewed by Kinsey, and recruited fellow addicts and friends to participate. Huncke was a writer, unpublished, since his days in Chicago and gravitated toward literary types and musicians. In the music world, Huncke visited all the jazz clubs and associated with Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon (with whom he was once busted on 42nd Street for breaking into a parked car). When he first met Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, they were interested in writing and also unpublished. They were inspired by his stories of 42nd Street life, criminal life, street slang and Huncke's vast experience with drugs. Huncke told them stories of life on 42nd Street, his life on the road prior to New York City and, obligingly, turned them on to drugs.

Although it was his passion for thievery, heroin use and the outlaw lifestyle which fuelled his daily activities, ultimately, when he was caught, he never ratted out his friends. In the late 1940s, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Melody and 'Detroit Redhead' flipped a car in Queens, New York, while trying to run down a motorcycle cop. Although Huncke was not at the scene of the crime, he was picked-up in Manhattan because he lived with Ginsberg, and Huncke received the heavy prison sentence.

'Someone had to do the bit.' Huncke said years later.

Huncke himself was a natural storyteller, a unique character with a paradoxically honest take on life. Later, after the formation of the so-called Beat Generation, members of the Beats encouraged Huncke to publish his notebook writings, which he did with limited success in 1964. Huncke used the word 'Beat' to describe someone living roughly with no money and few prospects. Huncke was considered to have coined the phrase that eventually came to describe an entire generation. Jack Kerouac later insisted that 'Beat' was derived from beatification, to be supremely happy. However, it is thought that this definition was a defence of the beat way of life, which was frowned upon and offended many American sensibilities.

Huncke died in 1996. He had been living for several years in the basement of a building on East 7th Street near Avenue D in New York City, supported fiancially in old age by his many friends. Prior to this, his rent at the Chelsea Hotel came from financial support from Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead, whom Huncke never met.

David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz born 14 September 1954 (d. 1992)

David Wojnarowicz was a gay painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s.

The first American gay artist to respond to the AIDS crisis with anger and moral outrage, he used his art as a polemical tool with which to indict those he held responsible for the AIDS epidemic and to document his own suffering.

Wojnarowicz had no extensive formal training. Born in Red Bank, New Jersey into a severely dysfunctional family in 1954, he dropped out of high school soon after acknowledging his homosexuality as an adolescent. He was a street kid in New York City at the age of sixteen, turning tricks in Times Square and keeping company with hustlers and other outsiders.

Wojnarowicz found salvation in making art and writing. Yet the rawness of his life experiences would always be the stuff of a highly personal and confrontational art.

As a young man, Wojnarowicz hitchhiked across the United States and lived in San Francisco and Paris for several months. In 1978, he settled in New York.

By the early 1980s he had become, like graffiti artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, a vital fixture in the East Village art scene in lower Manhattan.

Wojnarowicz had his first solo exhibitions in New York in the early 1980s. In 1985 he had a major exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His growing prominence as a nationally recognised artist is witnessed by invitations to participate in the 1987 and 1991 Whitney Biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Wojnarowicz came to maturity as a contemporary artist and writer during a decade when the arts sought increasingly to address issues of gender, race, and ethnicity. A younger postmodern generation of artists gave expression to these concerns in non-traditional media and often worked in multimedia.

For example, Wojnarowicz expressed himself in film, installation art, sculpture, photography, performance art, painting, collage, drawing, and writing. Indeed, he became as fine a writer as he was a visual artist.

Before being diagnosed HIV-positive in 1987, Wojnarowicz tracked in his confessional art a life that vacillated between sensual abandon and despair, bringing into focus a dark vision of existence that drew upon the examples of Arthur Rimbaud and Jean Genet.

Also influenced by Pop Art and the example of the writers of the Beat movement of the 1950s, Wojnarowicz drew upon images of popular culture and uniquely American idioms, though often rendering them ironically or satirically.

With the onset of his disease, Wojnarowicz turned fiercely political. The tragedy and injustices of the AIDS epidemic within the gay community became the central subject in his art and writings. He took to task the medical community and the federal government for their indifference to the pressing health issues of gay men. He passionately protested the fact that, as he put it, so many people were dying 'slow and vicious and unnecessary deaths because fags and dykes and junkies are expendable in this country'.

Wojnarowicz took a public stand against homophobia in published interviews and essays that earned him the vitriolic ire of the conservative religious right, specifically Reverend Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association, Senator Jesse Helms, and John Cardinal O'Connor.

Wojnarowicz was the first American gay artist to step forward in anger and give expression to his moral outrage. His 'post-diagnostic art', as he called it, indicted all those he held responsible for the social and private horrors of those dying from AIDS, including himself. Toward the end of his life, his defiant art was a polemical and poignant record of his cruel demise.

Of all the media and formats for which Wojnarowicz is known, the works that combine image and text are the most complex and moving, offering the best summary of his art.

The buffalo imagery from the famous video for One by U2 is taken from a David Wojnarowicz image.

Wojnarowicz died of AIDS on July 22, 1992.

Joe Dallesandro

Joe Dallesandro born 31 December 1948

Joseph Angelo (Joe) Dallesandro is an American actor and Warhol icon.

Joe Dallesandro was known for his voluptuous physical beauty, flesh-baring film appearances, and openness about his bisexuality. Although he never became a major mainstream star, Dallesandro is generally considered to be the most famous male sex symbol of American underground films of the 20th century. According to biographer Michael Ferguson, Dallesandro was 'the first openly eroticized male sex symbol of the movies to walk naked across the screen'. As well as beauty, his on-screen presence has an enigmatic quality. This derives from what often seems (especially in his appearance in several Warhol films) a bored or surly withholding, and almost comical physical inertia.

As a teenager, Dallesandro supported himself by nude modelling - including sessions for Bob Mizer's Athletic Model Guld and Bruce of Los Angeles - and prostitution, and appeared in at least one gay porn film.

Dallesandro met Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey in 1967 while they were in the midst of shooting The Loves of Ondine, and they cast him in the film on the spot.

Dallesandro was the obvious choice for the part of a teenage hustler in Flesh, where he had several nude scenes. To a large extent, it was because of him that Flesh became an internationally successful film. Dallesandro became the most popular of the Warhol stars. He quickly drew a devoted cult following that savoured his long sandy hair, distinctively muscular physique, large, thick penis (which is often directly alluded to in the Warhol films), and his utter unselfconsciousness in baring these attributes on camera.

Dallesandro also appeared in Lonesome Cowboys, Trash, Heat, Andy Warhol's Frankenstein and Andy Warhol's Dracula, also directed by Morrissey. These last two films were shot in Europe, and, after the films were completed, Dallesandro chose not to return to the US. He continued to star in films made mainly in France and Italy for the rest of the decade, returning to America in the 1980s. He made several movies without Warhol and Morrissey, and is known for his portrayal of 1920s gangster Lucky Luciano in Francis Coppola's The Cotton Club. He also appeared as a religious zealot in Cry Baby by John Waters.

Dallesandro has a famous tattoo on his upper right arm that reads 'Little Joe', and was portrayed as the money-minded 'Little Joe' in Lou Reed's hit 1972 song Walk on the Wild Side, which was about the characters Reed knew from Warhol's studio, The Factory. A Warhol photograph of the large crotch bulge of Dallesandro's tight blue jeans graces the famous cover of the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers.

The Smiths would later use a still photograph of Dallesandro from the film Flesh as the cover of their eponymous debut album.

John Waters has praised him as, 'A wonderful actor who forever changed male sexuality on the screen'. He is considered an underground film and gay culture icon, and still has a large cult following.

Dallesandro has been married three times and has two sons. He currently manages a hotel in the heart of Hollywood, where he lives with his cat Booky. He has said: 'I've lived such a full life. I've had such great things. There were some hardships, but overall everything has been great.'

Joe Dallesandro - official site

Quentin Crisp

Quentin Crisp born 25 December 1908 (d. 1999)

Quentin Crisp was an English writer, artist's model, actor and raconteur known for his memorable and insightful witticisms. He became a gay icon in the 1970s after publication of his memoir The Naked Civil Servant brought to the attention of the general public his defiant exhibitionism and long-standing refusal to conceal his homosexuality.

Born Denis Charles Pratt in Sutton, Surrey, he changed his name to Quentin Crisp in his twenties after leaving home and cultivating his outlandishly effeminate appearance to a standard that both shocked contemporary Londoners and provoked homophobic attacks.

By his own account, Crisp was effeminate in behaviour from an early age and found himself the object of teasing at Kingswood Preparatory School in Epsom, from where he won a scholarship to Denstone College, near Uttoxeter in 1922. Whilst in the sixth form, Crisp served in and eventually commanded a squad in the Officer's Cadet Force. 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 Regent Street Polytechnic.

Around this time, Crisp began frequenting 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. For six months he worked as a prostitute, looking for love, he said in a 1999 interview, but only finding degradation.

Crisp left home to move to the centre of London at the end of 1930 and, after living in a succession of flats, found a bed-sitting room in Denbeigh Street, where he held court with London's brightest and roughest characters. His outlandish appearance – he wore bright make-up, dyed his long hair crimson, painted his fingernails and wore sandals to display his painted toenails – brought admiration and curiosity from some quarters but generally attracted hostility and violence from strangers passing him in the streets.

Crisp attempted to join the 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 paraded through the blackout, picking up GIs, whose kindness and open-mindedness inspired his love of all things American.

In 1940 he moved into the bed-sitting room he would occupy for the next forty years, the first floor apartment at 129 Beaufort Street, London. Here he stayed until he emigrated to the United States in 1981. In the intervening years he never attempted any housework, saying famously in his memoir that the dirt didn't get any worse after the first four years.

He left his job as engineer's tracer in 1942 to become a model in life classes in London and the Home Counties, and continued posing for artists for the next three decades. 'It was like being a civil servant,' he explained in his autobiography, 'except that you were naked.'

Crisp had published three short books by the time he was commissioned by the director of Jonathan Cape to complete what would become The Naked Civil Servant. Having heard Crisp interviewed on radio in 1964 he was keen to produce something of his in print. The book appeared in 1968 to respectable reviews. When the book was reprinted in 1975 on the strength of the success of the television version of The Naked Civil Servant, Gay News commented that the book should have been published posthumously. Quentin said this was a polite way of their telling him to drop dead.

Subsequently, Crisp was approached by documentary maker Denis Mitchell to be the subject of a short film in which he was expected to talk about his life, voice his opinions and sit around in his Beaufort Street apartment filing his nails. The broadcast brought enough attention to Crisp and his book that he soon entered talks about a dramatisation of his book starring John Hurt as Quentin Crisp [below].

The successful screening of The Naked Civil Servant launched Crisp in another new direction: that of performer and lecturer. He devised a one-man show and began touring the country with it. The first half of the show was an entertaining monologue loosely based on his memoirs, the second half was a question and answer session with Crisp picking the audience's written questions out at random and answering them in an amusing manner. In 1978 Crisp sold out the Duke of York's Theatre in London, then took the show to New York, where he eventually decided to move. His first stay there, in the Hotel Chelsea, coincided with a fire, a robbery, and the death of Nancy Spungen. He set about making arrangements to move to New York permanently and in 1981 he arrived with few possessions and found a small apartment in Manhattan's Lower East Side.

He continued to perform his one-man show, published books on etiquette and supported himself by accepting social invitations and writing movie reviews and columns for US and UK magazines and newspapers. He said that provided one could exist on peanuts and champagne, one could quite easily live by going to every cocktail party, premiere and first night to which one was invited. As he had done in London, Crisp allowed his phone number to be listed in the Manhattan telephone directory and saw it as his duty to converse with anyone who called him.

In addition to his listed phone number, Mr Crisp would accept dinner invitations from almost anyone. While it was expected that the inviter would pay for dinner, Mr Crisp did his best to 'sing for his supper' by regaling his hosts with wonderful stories and yarns much as he did in his theatre performances. Dinner with Quentin Crisp was said to be one of the best shows in New York.

During the 1980s and 1990s Crisp gained worldwide recognition when Sting dedicated his song Englishman In New York to him. Sting wrote the song not long after Crisp moved from London to an apartment in New York's Bowery. In late 1986 Sting visited Crisp in his apartment in New York and was told over dinner — and the next three days — what life had been like for a homosexual man in the homophobic Great Britain of the 1920s to the 1960s. Sting was shocked and fascinated at the same time and decided to write the song. In his 1995 autobiography Take It Like A Man Boy George tells about how he had always felt very close to Crisp during his childhood since he was facing similar problems as a young homosexual living in a homophobic surrounding.

Crisp remained fiercely independent and unpredictable into old age. He caused controversy and confusion in the gay community by calling AIDS 'a fad', and homosexuality 'a terrible disease', and famously commented 'disrespectfully' on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. However, he was continually in demand from journalists requiring a sound-bite, and throughout the nineties his commentary was sought on any number of topics.

The year after The Naked Civil Servant was broadcast on British and American television and made both actor John Hurt and Crisp himself into stars, the former nude model & prostitute, now theatre-filling rancoteur, himself made his debut as a film actor in the Royal College of Art's low-budget production of Hamlet (1976). Crisp played Polonius in the 65-minute adaptation of one of Shakespeare's greatest works, in support of Helen Mirren, who doubled as Ophelia and Gertrude. It would be nine years before his next turn before the cameras, in the 1985 film The Bride, which brought him into contact with Sting, who played the lead role of Baron Frankenstein.

In 1992, he was persuaded by Sally Potter to play Elizabeth I in the film Orlando. Although he found the role taxing, he won acclaim for a dignified and touching performance. Crisp next had an uncredited cameo in the controversial 1993 AIDS drama Philadelphia. He was chosen by Channel Four to deliver the first 'Alternative Christmas Speech', a counterpoint to the Queen's Christmas speech, in 1993.

In 1996 he was among the many people interviewed for the historical documentary on how Hollywood films have depicted homosexuality, entitled The Celluloid Closet. In his final volume of memoirs, Resident Alien, published in the same year, Crisp stated that he was close to the end of his life. However, a humorous pact he had made with Penny Arcade to live to one hundred, with ten years off for good behaviour proved prophetic.

In June 1996 he was one of the guest entertainers at the second Pride Scotland festival in Glasgow.

Crisp died shortly before his ninety-first birthday in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Greater Manchester, on the eve of a nationwide revival of his one-man show. His body was cremated with a minimum of ceremony, and his ashes flown back to New York and scattered over Manhattan.

Quentin Crisp's comment following the death of Princess Diana was as follows --
"She could have been Queen of England -- and she was swanning about Paris. What disgraceful behavior. Going about saying she wanted to be the queen of hearts. The vulgarity of it is so overpowering." (Atlanta Southern Voice, 1 July 1999).

Denham Fouts

Denham Fouts born 1914* (d. 1949)

Denham Fouts was an American prostitute, socialite and literary muse. He served as the inspiration for characters by Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Christopher Isherwood and Gavin Lambert.

From Jacksonville, Florida, he was the son of a baker. In 1926, 12 year-old Fouts submitted a letter to Time Magazine, protesting the abuse of animals in the making of movies. In his teens, Fouts was sent north by his father to Washington, having asked the boy's uncle, who was the president of Safeway, to give him a job. Fouts later left for Manhattan, working for a time as a stock boy and attracting a good deal of attention. Fouts was 'thin as a hieroglyph, he had dark hair, light brown eyes, and a cleft chin', and Glenway Wescott considered him 'absolutely enchanting and ridiculously good-looking'.

He became the companion of a series of wealthy male and female patrons. His friends, who called him Denny, included Christopher Isherwood, Brion Gysin, Glenway Wescott, Truman Capote, George Platt Lynes, Jane and Paul Bowles, Cyril Connolly, and Michael Wishart. Something of a mythic figure, Isherwood called him 'the most expensive male prostitute in the world' and Capote considered him the 'Best-Kept Boy in the World'. Fouts was an opium addict, and at one time boyfriend of arts patron Peter Watson.

In 1938, Fouts introduced Brion Gysin to Jane and Paul Bowles, later shocking them by 'shooting flaming arrows from his hotel window onto the busy Champs Élysées below', having spent some time in Tibet, learning archery. Fouts' occasionally outrageous behavior made some uncomfortable. Michael Shelden remarked that Fouts' '"Deep South" charm masked a volatile, sometimes nasty temper. There were rumours about his past and tales of erratic, dangerous behaviour.'

During World War II, Watson sent Fouts to the US for his safety. He met Christopher Isherwood in Hollywood in August of 1940. Isherwood's guru, Swami Prabhavananda, refused to accept Fouts as a disciple despite his interest in Vedanta. Isherwood, nonetheless, had Fouts move in with him in the summer of 1941 to 'lead a life of meditation'. This period is described in Isherwood's Down There on a Visit, where Fouts is represented as the character Paul.

Some time into the war, Fouts, who was a conscientious objector, was drafted for the Civilian Public Service Camp. He later completed his high school diploma, studied medicine at UCLA and then settled in Europe. While in Paris, he sent a blank cheque to Truman Capote with only the word 'come' written on it, after becoming enamoured of the Harold Halma photograph of Capote on the original back dust jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms. Capote rejected the cheque, but accepted his offer to visit, and would spend hours with the Fouts in his dark apartment on the Rue de Bac, talking and listening to Fouts' stories.

Fouts was the lover of numerous notable figures, including Prince Paul I of Greece (later King) and, allegedly, French actor Jean Marais.

Fouts spent much of his later life dissolute, spending time 'in bed like a corpse, sheet to his chin, a cigarette between his lips turning to ash. His lover would remove the cigarette just before it burned his lips.' Fouts died in 1949 in Rome at the age of 35 of a heart attack, and his body was buried in Protestant Cemetery. It is said that he died on the toilet, and his death year has also been reported as 1948.

Gay author and screenwriter Gavin Lambert's 1966 roman-à-clef Norman's Letter is about Fouts.

*actual birthday unknown