In Soho there was no prejudice. My friends and I would sit all day long in cafés talking. Conversations tended to be about thought-provoking ideas, serious and nonsensical in equal measure, as opposed to the fishwives’ gossip that pervaded establishments elsewhere in London. Chelsea was full of gossip. Gaggles of barren women would meet regularly in venues along the Kings Road and talk maliciously about whoever wasn’t there that day.

  Fitzrovia was another area where the bohemians went, although there the conversations tended to get more political. I’ve always tried to avoid politics wherever possible. A lot of the patrons in Fitzrovia were communists. If I say the conversations were philosophical, that makes it sound a bit pompous. It’s better if I describe it as talking for talking’s sake. It was about ideas and it was wonderful.

  When I look back, I don’t really miss my cohorts, the other hooligans. The actress Anna Wing17 was one of them. She ended up becoming rich through playing the part of Lou Beale in the British television series Eastenders. Now she lives in Brooklyn and works at the Academy of Music there. She must be about ten years younger than I am which means she’s been acting for a very long time.

  She telephoned me to tell me she was here and I remember saying in a suitably mournful voice, “I have an enlarged heart.”

  And she replied nonchalantly, “Oh, I’ve got one of those.”

  So, perhaps I’m taking the whole thing too seriously. I would have thought working in Brooklyn was enough to give anyone a heart attack, but somehow she’s managing it.

  There aren’t many hooligans left these days. That’s the trouble with living so long, you watch all the people you once knew fall by the wayside. There was a woman called Mrs. Woolf18 who was the wife of Cecil Woolf in turn the nephew of Virginia Woolf. I don’t know what happened to her.

  There was a woman called Mable McCallister, an actress who was so difficult that she never got any parts. There were various men. The only famous people were Arnold Wesker19 who wrote the play called Chips With Everything, and the painter Lucian Freud,20 grandson of the famous Mr. Freud,21 though he was always rather condescending.

  Certain objectionable people existed as well. There was a man called Iron Foot Jack22 who ran The Caravan Club in the 1930s which was a club of ill repute that was raided often. When I say it was a place of ill repute, I mean that it was a meeting place for homosexuals, which in my time I visited. Although men at The Caravan did nothing more than dance with each other, Jack and a number of the club’s patrons were arrested. It was quite a scandal and he ended up being sentenced to two years in prison, I think, for ‘keeping an immoral place’.

  The Wheatsheaf on Rathbone Place was a pub where all the bohemians went, the sort of people who wrote books and poems or painted pictures. Really, they were all unsuccessful artists. They wrote books which didn’t make any money. They painted pictures which were put in exhibitions but never sold. Basically, they didn’t want to work. Consequently they had no money and if they ever came into any money they drank it.

  Although the people I’m describing were generally friendly towards me, the safe houses weren’t always particularly safe, particularly for me. You see, the English dislike effeminacy and I, of course, was the embodiment the of limp-wristed wistfulness they hated. It wasn’t so much that I was homosexual, more that I behaved like a woman. In those days women were very much treated like second class citizens.

  Englishmen are always saying, “Oh, you know, she’s always asking if I really love her and all that rubbish. She’ll fiddle with her appearance and ask me how she looks. It’s very annoying.” Americans expect their girlfriends to do that. They call their girlfriends ‘sugar’ and ‘honey’ and ‘baby’ and their girlfriends like it and bask in this adoration of their femininity.

  Ms. Monroe23 was an ideal of womanhood because she was so excruciatingly feminine, not only to look at but in every possible way. The English would never have put up with that. They would have said, “Off with her head!” In England, women have to become pseudo-men to get on. When Mrs. Thatcher24 ruled England, I admired her enormously because she ruled a country which fundamentally hates her gender. She had to give up being a woman in order to rule, which was a pity. Had she stayed feminine and still ruled, it would have been wonderful.

  The most famous of the hooligans was a woman called Nina Hamnett25 who was described by Walter Sickert,26 the famous painter, as the greatest woman draftsman of the century. She didn’t do anything except drink. You never saw Nina Hamnett eating. I would never have described her as perpetually drunk, but you would always see her slightly tottering as she walked down the street. She was openly bisexual. She committed suicide in the end. I think she saw a play about her and it made fun of her. I think she didn’t like that and that’s why she killed herself. She threw herself out of the window and impaled herself on the fence below. That takes some nerve. She must have been at least fifty.

  The barkeepers in Soho and Fitzrovia were alright but, of course, they were in cahoots with the police. When I got chucked out of the Wheatsheaf, my friends rushed in and asked, “Why have you turned out Mr. Crisp?” and Mr. Redfuss, who I think was the barkeeper at the time, answered, “I don’t care what Mr. Crisp does, or what he is, but the police have been in and they said to me, ‘You run a funny place.’ And I said, ‘Funny?’ and they looked at Mr. Crisp and said, ‘That kind of funny,’ and he told me I’d lose my liquor license if I’m not careful.”

  I didn’t go there again after that.

  What happened at The Wheatsheaf wasn’t typical of Soho however. I think there were only one or two pubs I wasn’t allowed in. It was much easier for me to enter an establishment in Fitzrovia. I wouldn’t have attempted to go to a pub in a normal, respectable district. I wouldn’t have been allowed in.

  I once went into a restaurant and having sat down, the waiter came up to me with a red face and said, “I’ve been told not to serve you.” And so as to not create a spectacle, I got up and left. Not indignantly. They couldn’t help it. They just didn’t want to lose their license.

  I used to go to a tacky café called The French where a lot of my friends used to go. One day I went in and greeted everybody and smiled and a man whose name was, I think, Livingston suddenly turned on me and said, “You like being here, don’t you? At least the other people know they should be somewhere else, but you actually enjoy it.” He was quite angry.

  Although his outburst surprised me, I told him, “I wouldn’t come here if I didn’t enjoy it.” Which I think may have irritated him further.

  I left home at the age of twenty-two in 1931 when I moved to London and began living with the terrible man whom I described in The Naked Civil Servant using the lines: ‘We were not friends. We were not lovers. And soon we were not friends.’ But he was good enough to take me in. He had only the dole27 to live on, so we ended up both living on it. It was a very tough time. I nearly starved. He was two or three months younger than I was and his name was Mr. Anthony Greene. I suppose he could still be alive, but I doubt it so I don’t think it matters if I reveal his identity now.

  By 1931 I had been to an art school in High Wickham which is where my parents moved to after living in Sutton. Art school taught me nothing that was of any use. Back then the object of all commercial art was to make a drawing look machine made. You used an air-o-graph and instruments like ink pens and compasses. My art school never had any of those things so I didn’t know how to use them. As such, even with my art school education, I was unqualified to work in a commercial art department.

  I only became an art school model because I was familiar with the work environment and I felt I could do it. I could bear the pain. I could keep still and I could keep quiet. It seemed like the profession I was born to do. I didn’t long to display myself. I’m lucky in that the best parts of me are the bits you can typically see: my head, my hands and, if necessary, my feet. The rest of me is a mess, but on the occasions where full nudity was required I disrobed and obliged the class. I’ve never liked my body.

  Students were typically very embarrassed by and contemptuous of art models. If you ever met them in the street, they pretended like they hadn’t seen you. They were embarrassed by your existence. Come to think of it, I think they were forbidden when I was first a model to speak to me. They never did, except to say, “Rest. Thank you,” or, “Shall we start again? Thank you.”

  Sometimes they would talk to you so they could inform you what you were doing wrong. Models typically had various reactions to this. I can remember one model, to whom a student complained, “You had your left foot much further back last week.”

  The model replied, “I know I did, and what a damn fool I was.”

  Comfort was of the most importance to models, though we did try our best to please the students. It was a thankless task however. You couldn’t please any student because all of them, for whatever reason, hated models.

  I worried a lot when I was in my twenties though I’m sure I couldn’t tell you what I worried about. When I was about twelve or thirteen, I think I realized I was never going to be able to be a real person. I also worried about what I was going to do when I ‘grew up’. I remember going with mother down to the station to meet my father who was coming off the train. Alongside him any number of men disembarked all in navy blue suits with briefcases and folded umbrellas. I didn’t say anything to my mother but I remember thinking, “I’ll never be one of them. I simply don’t know how to do it.” I didn’t despise them. I just thought it was a world I could never enter.

  You see, I have always carried with me a great feeling of inadequacy. I have always felt unable to join the real world. When I went for interviews for office work they would ask me difficult questions like, “Why do you want this job?”

  And I would say, “Only to live.” Which was the truth, but not the answer they were looking for. I’m not sure I ever worked out what the right answer should have been.

  I know other people would boast and say things like, “Well, I wouldn’t mind occupying the chair you’re in now in twenty-five years time,” but I could never have uttered those words.

  I knew I would never be the head of an office or department. All the interviews I attended were uncomfortable, which over time made me dread them even more. I didn’t really want to make a living and I didn’t know how to make a living. What I wanted was a job but I knew that if I was given the job of making tea for the rest of the staff, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I didn’t even know how to make tea. If I had been tasked with sweeping the office, I would have done it badly.

  Had I been in America at the age of twenty-three, I would probably have sought out a job in show business since that is the kind of job that everyone in America wants. I’m also aware that I’m showy by nature. I would never have been a star, but perhaps I could have made a living by appearing in crowd scenes in various films and television shows or something like that. I know from what little movie work I’ve been involved in, that it’s something I like. I wouldn’t go as far to say that I’m any good at it, but I can’t have been that bad at it because I’m still asked from time to time to do more.

  In my view, I remain an outcast, someone who can’t fit in, but I mind it less now because I have the answers which an outcast can give. An outsider is not the same as an outcast. An outcast has literally been cast out. He has been reviewed, judged by society and then sent away for some reason. An outsider starts on the outside, or chooses to move to the outside which typically means he’s in some way superior, or thinks of himself as superior. That doesn’t describe me.

  At the age of thirty-two, I moved into the bedsit let to me by Miss Vereker28 who was among saints. She believed in freedom, love and all that, and all sorts of cranky ideas. She went and protested against battery hens and in support of free-range eggs. Everything that she could care about, she did. Everything that she could be against, say the atom bomb, she was. She even marched to the place in England where the bomb was manufactured. I don’t know why.

  I suppose I must have been one of her causes, one of the things she cared about because she never turned me out and I lived in that room on Beaufort Street for forty-one years. When I first arrived the rent was two pounds a month, or ten shillings a week. By the time I left I think it had gone up to about six pounds a month, or thirty shillings a week which was still remarkably cheap.

  Back then, if you wanted to dance with another man it was practically impossible. In the Palais de Dance, girls could dance with one another, but not men. If they tried someone would come and tap them on the shoulder and they would have to get off the dance floor. I don’t know why it was more acceptable for women to dance together then, but I think more women went to public dances so they often ended up having to dance together.

  Instead there were subscription dances for which men would pay half a crown for a ticket and all meet up in some large room. I remember there was one such room over Woolworth’s29 in Edgeware Road. Some men would wear evening dress while others would be dressed in drag. The events were held in secret, which means of course that everybody knew about it and they were always raided by the police.

  When you bought your ticket you were told, “Don’t tell anybody. Nobody knows about it,” but you knew perfectly well that the police had bought their own tickets for the event as well. Then they would arrive in the middle of the night in their black Marias30 into which all the people in drag would be bundled in their tiaras and furs.

  They would probably spend the night in jail, or what was left of the night since the raids never seemed to take place until about three in the morning. Then they would appear in court the next day, still in drag and looking like they had been pulled through a hedge backwards. The public humiliation was considerable. In court they would try and defend themselves by saying, “Well, it was like this, Your Honor…”

  But the judge would interrupt them with a cry of, “Six months.”

  Because your manner alone was considered enough to convict you.

  I was never at one of these drag dances, but many of my friends were. I’ve never danced in the whole of my life, let alone been held in anyone’s arms and been twirled about the room. I don’t think I would have been very good at it. Consequently though, I’ve never spent time in jail although I have spent time in a cell in a police station, but only because of the arcane method by which the police would contact the person you sought to come and post your bail.

  Back then they asked you to give them the name of somebody, and if he or she didn’t answer they would just keep ringing the same number until they eventually got through. I can remember saying, “If they’re not in, I can give you a list of alternative people you can call.”

  But they told me, “We don’t want a list. Give us one name.”

  I wasn’t really uncomfortable with the situation since I knew I had done nothing wrong. If I remember correctly I had just been picked up off the street. Ultimately, my friend arrived at about midnight to collect me and I went home and went to bed.

  London is a wonderful place. It is only the people that are so awful. When I finally tired of the people, which I think only came after they had tired of me, I decided to leave. That’s when I came to America.

  These days, I understand The Naked Civil Servant is being taught in schools in England. This can only be a good thing. I have come to learn however, that all homosexuals are not alike and of all of them I am probably the least representative, not least because it turns out I am transgender rather than gay. Nevertheless because I and the rest of London thought I was gay at the time, my experience of growing up and living in England is representative of how gay men were treated in the past.

  Of course, sex is never mentioned in England. Sex and money are never spoken of in polite society or public forums. I imagine the teachers will focus on my exclusion from society and my reaction to that exclusion. I have no idea how students will react to it. A lot of people over the years have praised my autobiography and claimed it helped them in one shape or form. I hope it has, but I can’t help thinking that any formal classroom study of The Naked Civil Servant will simply lead to a lot of laughing and giggling. I hope I am proved wrong.

  I think D.H. Lawrence31 said, “It wasn’t life that mattered, but watching it being lived.” I would say it wasn’t watching life being lived that mattered, but saying what you saw because you convert history to your own use by writing about it.

  Writing The Naked Civil Servant changed my life because it brought me fame and enabled me to move to America on my own terms. Over the years, many people have thanked me for writing the book because it helped them to come out to friends or come to terms with their own sexuality. That was not my reason for writing it but any positive effect my writing has had on the happiness of others is to be welcomed.

  When The Naked Civil Servant was first published, The Times Literary Supplement said it was quite an interesting book, but that it was “…a pity it was written in such a jaunty style.” As far as I’m concerned, the jaunty style was the only thing which made it acceptable. But I have to admit it was written in a jaunty style. Would it have been better if it had been written straight? I don’t think it would because mine was such a trivial life.

  I’m not offended by criticism. It would take a lot to offend me. I suppose if people accused me of being obsessed with my sexuality which I have tried not to be obsessed with, then I would be offended. But I am obsessed with appearing in public as more like myself than nature has made me, so I suppose I have to put up with that.

  I don’t think I dress like a woman but I accept that I look like a woman to some people. A lady once wrote to me and said she had seen the video that Sting32 made for the song An Englishman in New York in which I appear. In her letter the lady wrote, “I had thought you were a woman, so I didn’t understand why you were in the video or why the song Sting had written was about you.” I can understand her confusion though I don’t see it myself. I don’t think she meant any offence by what she wrote and I wouldn’t have been offended even if she had.