Quentin Crisp

Tim Fountain came to know Quentin Crisp intimately during the last year of his life whilst researching his stage play about him, Resident Alien. Crisp died before he got a chance to see the play. Here he tells the story of that year; looking at the life and lasting legacy of one of the wittiest and most controversial figures of the last century, and shedding light on the intriguing events leading up to his death. It is a compelling portrait of what Fountain calls a ‘great, glittering contradiction’: a man who flaunted his sexuality at a time when the penalty for homosexual activity was jail, a man whose very name epitomized style, yet who lived alone in abject poverty in a room he simply refused to clean, and a man who confidently declared at the height of the AIDS epidemic that he didn’t believe it existed.