I never came ‘out’ as transgender or gay because I was never ‘in’ and I’ve never known anything except the life I have. I either lived in the dream world in which I was a woman or else I lived awkwardly in the outside world where I was inadequate. The only difference is that now I live my whole life unified by the fact that I can live in the outer world the way I live in my head. I couldn’t always do that and it’s a freedom I now cherish.

  I don’t think I ever consciously questioned my sexuality, my identity, my gender, or my daydream. It folded around me rather like the dream of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, the last line of which is, “Life that can be cruel, can also be kind.” The dream that meant so much to her finally closed about her. The dream that I am really a woman closed about me entirely. I went through life as though I was a boy in the outer world, but in my head I went on as though I were a woman. This explains why my life has been so strange.

  I never went out in the evening thinking, “Now I must get some sex,” which nowadays most people do. I went out saying, “I must be my glorious self and it will attract people to me.” I didn’t want any results. I just wanted to be admired. I think a lot of women think this way. Ms. Dietrich6 said, “You have to let them put it in, or they don’t come back.” That’s a wonderful thing to have said. She didn’t want sex. She wanted admiration, applause and praise. Sex would have smudged her makeup and spoiled her hair.

  By accident then, I have become a sort of national hero, or worse (because I now realize its misrepresents me as much as how I managed to misrepresent them) a gay national hero. In reality, I was only ever a hopeless case. If I had tried to disguise myself as a real person, everyone would have said, “Who does he think, oh, I beg your pardon, who does she think she is?” I never did it and that gave way to the image that I have, the legend, if you will.

  Ms. Morris7, the man who had the operation,8 once made a wonderful remark. “It was never a question of sex. It was a question of gender.”

  That’s a wonderful thing to have said. He wanted to be a woman. He didn’t want to have men so much as to no longer be one, and he succeeded.

  The trouble is, of course, that if you have the operation and you tell everyone, you are in as bad a position as you were before you had it done. Because before you come into the room, people say, “She was really once a man.” Then when you arrive, no one can look anywhere except at your face because they can’t be seen examining your body to see how different it is.

  No one can ask you, “Does it work?” which, of course, is what everyone is longing to know. And then you become peculiar. They expect something special from you and treat you in a special way. The end result of which is you’re as removed from real life as you were before, which I would have thought rather defeats the point.

  The only thing in my life I have wanted and didn’t get was to be a woman. It will be my life’s biggest regret. 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. My life would have been much simpler as a result. I would have told nobody. Instead, I would have gone to live in a distant town and run a knitting wool shop and no one would ever have known my secret. I would have joined the real world and it would have been wonderful.

  Having said that, and ignoring the biological impossibility for a moment, I wouldn’t have wanted to be a woman with children. I would have accepted children if they somehow came into my life, but the truth is I don’t really like children. I am amused when people say to me, “But you were a child once.” I was, but I wasn’t the kind of child that made you like children.

  Now, for the rest of this book you will have to forgive me. Having labeled myself homosexual and having been labeled as such by the wider world, I have effectively lived a ‘gay’ life for most of my years. Consequently, 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.

  When I was young, I remember swinging about London’s West End with my eyelashes blacked and so on, and the other boys would say to me, “Do you find it’s any help, all that stuff on your face?”

  And I said, “No.”

  “Well then, why do you do it?” they would ask.

  And I would say, “Because I like it. I prefer the way I look now to the way when I wasn’t made up.”

  This they couldn’t really understand. If they wore makeup it was to make them look a little younger, or slightly effeminate. This helped them to meet strange men in the street that they could go home with. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to look like myself, or at least more like myself than nature had made me.

  A man once asked of me, “If you went to a party and there was someone there more outrageous than yourself, what would you do?”

  Flippantly I replied, “Oh, I should scream, or swoon, or both.”

  He said, “No. I’m serious.”

  To which I said, “Do you seriously think I would go to all the effort of making myself look like this, and upon finding out that there was someone more outrageous than me at a party that I would leave?”

  But he obviously did think that. The truth is I am indifferent to what other people look like.

  On one occasion, I was in a room full of people and there was a famous black man there. A woman I know very well said afterwards, “I was terribly worried because I didn’t know whether to take you to meet him, or him to meet you.”

  To which I said, “Do you think I care about that? You think I care whether I’m led to meet somebody famous or whether they are brought to me?”

  That’s like the notion of having a ‘good’ table in a restaurant. I wouldn’t know what a good table was. I don’t expect to be treated in any special way.

  So many people misread me or don’t understand me. They don’t understand how unimportant almost everything is to me except people. In one of the hate letters I received the other day it said, “I understand you now. You’re a lonely embittered old queen and you’re interested in nothing that matters to other people.” And I smiled and thought, “How true.” Well, to be honest I didn’t understand the word ‘embittered’ because I would have said I was less embittered than most people, but it’s true I’m not interested in the things that interest other people. I am not interested in sport or politics or scandal. I would say those are the three things that absorb most people. But I am interested in people themselves.

  In addition, I have never understood those who fail to understand when I make a distinction, in my parlance, between real people and gay people. They seem to take offence at my phraseology. I once made the distinction at a meeting of a lot of elderly people in The Center on West 13th Street, and a woman, whom I presumed to be a lesbian, rose and angrily announced, “Well, I’m real.” And doubtless in her mind she was. To my mind, and again in my parlance, she was not, but I now see that my point of view originates from my transgender predisposition.

  As I have said before, the life I’ve lead has not been one lived in the real world. It has been one long daydream. I wish I had been born a woman and one attracted to men, as I myself once was. That is my definition of real. It’s the reality I wished for myself.

  Now, I have made it a rule never to recant or apologize in life, so if my phraseology has offended or disadvantaged you or someone you know, all I can do is ask for your forgiveness. Please know that it has never been my intention in this life to hurt another human being.

  I’m also aware that my views on gay sex may have also caused hurt in certain circles. To comprehend my views you really have to remember the context in which they were formed. My view of homosexual sex was certainly tainted not only by my experience in London as a rent boy, but by the times during which I was sexually active. When I was young and swanning about the West End of London, men would look at me and smile and I would think, “Oh, this is wonderful. I’m the cat’s whiskers.” It never occurred to me what I would have to do once I’d won their attention. By the time I realized, from my perspective, it was too late.

  With hindsight I would have been happier being celibate in a monastery than in degrading myself before strangers as I did. I thought it would bring people to me and that they would like me and they would be happy, but, of course, they despised me because their interaction with me made them ashamed.

  When I was young, no homosexual had an affair with another homosexual because that was just seen as shadowboxing. It wasn’t the real thing. Why? Because more often than not the objects of our affection believed themselves to be heterosexual and there just weren’t enough openly gay men to go around. So, you had sex with straight men who despised you. Of course, looking back they weren’t straight at all. They were just closeted homosexuals, hence their loathing not only of you but of themselves. Typically one eventually tired of the negativity and lack of happiness and realized that it simply wasn’t going to work.

  I actually preferred sex with these ‘straight’ men as it seemed to me to justify my existence. It made me feel like the real woman I was in my head. When I was young, my friends and I all thought that homosexual men were effeminate because those were the only ones we could see. Because all the closeted gay men led quiet, hidden lives, we didn’t have them as a reference. Instead we pooled our misery, shared our lipstick, combed each other’s hair and talked about our woes. It was a sort of uneasy camaraderie mixed with a lot of bitchiness which in reality was mostly stylized and staged.

  Now, of course, I am not attracted to anybody, but when I was young, I was attracted to older, larger more masculine men than me. Men who could take command of the situation. I think what I really wanted was an authority figure and I think I wanted one because it would absolve me of responsibility. I would be able to say, “He drove me to it. He commanded that I do this or that.” And I would feel I had been coerced into sinning, which promises all of the associated joys and none of the consequences.

  Looking back, I would have liked to have had an affair which nowadays we call a relationship. Only I wouldn’t have wanted it to last very long. I don’t ever think I wanted an affair to last all night, let alone for weeks or months or years. My dream date would have been a brief affair that was over in under a couple of hours with someone I was never going to see again. I have a sad feeling that’s called anonymous sex, but the truth is what it is, I suppose.

  Because I am ninety, I can no longer remember when my first sexual experience was, but it probably took place before I was twenty. I went out from my parents’ home into the West End and there I trotted about until I had picked up some man or other from whom I tried to get money. This was always very difficult. I didn’t really know what I was going to have to do. I think I thought I would be taken to an expensive hotel or apartment, but really I was only going to be taken to a dark doorway in the street whereupon the man would say, “This’ll do.” Those were the only words of physical love I have ever heard.

  It was all so instantaneous. It was with people whose names I never knew. They made sure I didn’t know. And I can’t remember who was the first or where or why, but the idea behind it all was to justify my existence. I had thought to prove to myself I was really a woman by having sex with a man. I think I only demanded money because that’s what my other hooligan friends did.

  Since I thought of myself as feminine, the kind of men I wanted to meet were masculine, typically either men in uniform or men of the working class. I believe there exists in homosexual life what I call ‘the confection complex.’ By it, I mean to describe how many middle and upper class homosexuals want to know boys of lower class because they think of them as more rugged. The confection complex explains why Mr. Forster9 got to know a policeman and Mr. Ackerley10 got to know a sailor.

  In my case however, I can say simply that I didn’t know any wealthy men who thought I needed to be tamed. I knew well-off people, but, of course, when you have nothing, everyone seems to be well-off by comparison. They wouldn’t have wanted to know me anyway because the disgrace would have been so great. If you were going to be the friend of a wealthy man, you had to be his nephew at any moment and I was nobody’s nephew.

  So, I never really had what you would call ‘a love life’. Well, not one that involved other people. I gave up sex at thirty, but continued to masturbate for many years, which is a cozy form of sex in which you are not defiled. You don’t run into any danger, you know what you want and it is entirely satisfactory. In this respect, I have enjoyed a long and happy sex life for many years now. It’s also a form of sex that sits more easily alongside my daydream.

  Had I been born a woman with a vagina, sex would have been quite different. A friend once asked of me, “What’s the difference between taking a penis into your mouth and taking it into your vagina?”

  I couldn’t understand that. Vaginas and penises are both parts of the human body that are never mentioned in polite society. To me, your mouth is your own. You doll it up and poets write about it. It’s very different real estate from anything ‘down there’.

  I don’t masturbate at all now because it takes such an effort. In any case, I generally feel ill enough without a hard-on, so why make matters worse? I suppose I masturbated up until the age of sixty, or something like that. After that, it becomes too much of a chore.

  No one, of course, needs to be taught how to masturbate. What should happen however, is that the lies surrounding masturbation should be debunked. When I was at school everybody masturbated and everyone was terrified. How much was too much? Was once a day too much? Was once a week too much? Would you go mad? Would you go blind? We would all have been very happy had someone in a position of authority said, “Don’t think about it. Masturbating once a week does no harm to anybody.”

  And it does you no harm, provided you don’t try any weird things. Occasionally you hear stories of people strangling or suffocating themselves in the middle of sex. I never understand all that, but I recommend masturbation whole-heartedly.

  People always ask me, “When was the last time you had sex?” You can’t answer. Because you don’t know when it’s the last time. You don’t get out of bed and think “That’s that.” and then wipe your hands clean of it. Instead you find that the friends who used to come and see you once every two or three days start to come once every two or three weeks, and then once every two or three months, and then once every two or three years. And then not at all. And you don’t think about it again until their name comes up in conversation.

  Having given up sex at thirty, imagine my surprise when an African-American man tried to pick me up the other day. I’m now ninety. He was a taxi driver who had just brought me back from the airport. When we arrived outside my house he asked me, “Are you a man or a woman?”

  When I told him, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not a woman,” he asked if I would give him a blowjob. I politely informed him, “I’m afraid I’m too old for any of that sort of thing.”

  It passed pleasantly and he wasn’t angry. He just accepted the fact. I didn’t pretend to be shocked or anything like that. That’s the only time in America anyone has ever propositioned me.

  * * *

  1 Gertrude Stein, American novelist, poet and playwright, 1874-1946

  2 Donald Carroll, Quentin’s literary agent, 1940-2010

  3 Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS, British poet, 1809-1892

  4 Sir Walter Scott, Scottish playwright, novelist and poet, 1771-1832

  5 Quentin Crisp was born Denis Pratt, changing his name in his twenties

  6 Marlene Dietrich, German actress and singer, 1901-1992

  7 Jan Morris (formerly James Humphrey Morris), Welsh historian and author b. 1926

  8 Known at the time as a sex change

  9 E. M. Forster OM, CH, English novelist, essayist and librettist, 1879-1970

  10 J. R. Ackerley, British writer and editor, 1896-1967

  CHAPTER 2

  Influence

  I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ve had any influence on anything. Not on modern life. Not on society. The idea that I have had is purely an idea in other people’s heads. I have become a self-apparent, elderly foreigner of dubious gender and I don’t think anyone’s ever really aspired to be that.

  More importantly, I am only one person. I’m detached from the world and I never engage in civic activity. Had I started movements and made speeches then perhaps I could claim to have had an influence on the world. I have never done any of that. I have never lived a civic life and I have no political identity or ambitions.

  When people claim I have influenced the world, I’m polite. I smile and nod, but I don’t really believe it. I can say with certainty however that I haven’t allowed the world to influence me, so it seems only fair that the reverse should be the case as well.

  I have no regrets for living my life the way I have. I’m very glad that I have lived my life singly because I believe the strain of living with another person would have been so great that I would have broken down. Doubtless, I would have made the mistake of choosing the wrong time to say what I actually thought and that would have been the end of it.

  Other people are such a strain. I don’t think they realize it, but they nag you all the time. They say, “You’re not going to sit around looking like that all day, are you?” Then before you know it you find yourself grooming and beautifying yourself for somebody you already know, which is ridiculous.

  However, people who ask if you have any regrets fail to realize that you can only have regrets if you had alternatives. A man who says, “Why did I live with that wretched woman? Why didn’t I leave her and marry all those wonderful people over there?” can be sincere in his regret because he believes he genuinely made the wrong choice.