An Englishman in New York

I don't watch Logo, the MTV owned gay channel, often.
Most of what they show, movies, reruns of Queer as Folk and L Word, are edited for content.
They had a halfway decent news show but canned it.

But the other night I watched An Englishman in New York, the first feature film produced by and for the network.
The film details the last 18 years in the life of the great gay wit/actor/writer Quentin Crisp (1908-1999), who lived out the final, and happiest chapter of his life, in New York City. John Hurt, who played Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant (1976), reprises the role.

Quentin Crisp was one of the 20th Century's greatest gay figures. In 1931 he said "I wish to live in the world, not in a closet", coining the phrase "coming out of the closet". The film Naked Civil Servant, based on his memoir, told the story of his courageous life as an out gay man in the London of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, where he endured many beatings and false arrests. He never lost his dignity or his sense of humor.
The book Naked Civil Servant and the subsequent film made him a celebrity and an icon~~during his New York years he published many other books, was an in demand public speaker and a cult film star.

During my New York years, I knew the real Quentin Crisp rather well, so I can attest to how brilliant John Hurt's performances are in both the first film and this new one.

An Englishman in New York touches upon the themes that have recently been the main subject of this blog: what Nelson at NG Blog calls gay on gay hate.
In one brief but unforgettable scene, Crisp and his friend Mr. Steele (Dennis O'Hare) are thrown out of a gay bar because they don't "play the game": i.e. they're not young and buffed.
In another scene, Crisp and his friend, performance artist Penny Arcade (Cynthia Nixon) sit in a bar and watch the gay male parade of arrogant, buffed gym bunnies.
Arcade comments on being "cast out by the outcasts."
Both scenes are an honest look at an accepted, but shameful gay subculture in which anyone over 30 and with a less than perfect body ceases to be human.

In a beautifully done 20 minute subplot, Crisp befriends and mentors the late gay artist Patrick Angus (a scene stealing Jonathan Tucker). Angus, who died of AIDS in 1992, has been beaten down and emotionally destroyed by the aforementioned gay subculture. One of the film's most powerful scenes entails Angus being laughed at and called a "freak" for doing nothing more than smiling at another gay man. Actor Tucker captures Angus' pain and anguish magnificently.

It's a scene that's played all too often in the gay community~~it's how we've been treating each other for decades. It's become our social norm to hurt & reject each other.
And make no mistake about it: a lot of us are hurting from this.

Yet anyone who stands up and demands something better, as I'm trying to do, is labeled an "anti-gay bigot" by the self-appointed "gay elite".

Well, the truth is the truth.
Those who call me a bigot can add the late Quentin Crisp, the Logo Network, and the entire cast and crew of An Englishman in New York to their list of "bigots".
I, however, tip my hat to the filmmakers for telling the truth: by re-enacting these scenes they show the behavior for what it is. In their own way, they've asked for something better.

David Alex Nahmod
Oct 2009
SF CA