On The Q.C.

Just finished reading, for the first time, Quentin Crisp’s first successful book, The Naked Civil Servant, which I must say I enjoyed immensely.

I have not been able to decide, since completing it, whether Crisp was the gay male Zora Neale Hurston or whether he was the 20th century’s answer to Chuang Tzu. I suppose those interpretations are not mutually exclusive.

Regardless of the answer to that question, I think we can agree that if retrosexual is supposed to be a word, Quentin Crisp really ought to be the definition. Which should put paid to that neologism on the q.t. shouldn’t it?

(Speaking of which: all these people talking about the real manly men of the 1950s and 1960s, and how different they were from the over-producted metrosexuals of our era – have you people ever read any Ian Fleming? Do you have any idea what a dandy the iconic civilized macho man of th era was? Sheesh.)