Column:
An Invitation That Opened (Some) Minds
An Invitation That Opened (Some) Minds
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A 1989 photo of British actor and author
QuentIn Crisp. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
For the Valley News
Saturday, July 29, 2017
That same year, I entered Yale
Divinity School ,
and during that school year, the most famous transvestite in the world gave a
one-man show nearby in New Haven Britain
It ran for weeks at Long Wharf Theater; I attended the production with another
divinity student, Carol Brock (who later became a Unitarian minister), and we
both were impressed by Crisp’s wit and articulateness.
We invited him to speak about transvestitism at the divinity
school and to our surprise, he accepted. I later learned that one of his
guiding principles was, “Never turn down an invitation.”
Brock and I put up posters around the school and on the Yale
campus in downtown New Haven
We had no idea if anyone would attend, especially since
transvestitism wasn’t exactly a household word then.
The day arrived (I believe it was a 2 p.m. event), and about 30
people showed up.
Zero faculty from the divinity school attended, and most of the
students were from other departments.
Surprisingly, to Brock and myself, several faculty from the Yale
Department of Psychology attended, which made Crisps’ opening remark, spoken
with his British accent, all the more notable.
Let me set the scene. Crisp had white hair dyed purple, as was
the fashion of older American women at the time — by intention or through bad
hair coloring. His fingernails were painted red and he wore lipsstick and
makeup. He wore a black velvet fedora hat and spoke in impeccable, elegant
sentences. He said he spoke in “Crisperanto.”
(Note: I have created a blog detailing his appearance at the
divinity school and listing many of his quotes:
http://crisperanto.blogspot.com.)
Here is the first sentence he uttered: “Are we all agreed, then:
Psychology was a mistake?”
Like Oscar Wilde before him, he spoke epigrammatically, all the
better to imprint his words on others’ minds. Like Wilde, too, he was
heretical. When asked questions about God, he said he preferred to refer to him
as “You know who,” fostering the impression that no one in truth exactly knows
who God is or isn’t, anyway.
This was definitely not what divinity school folk wanted to
hear.
Since they had mostly ignored the event and were not in
attendance, they got their wish — they did not hear heresy. Their
non-attendance was an Ivy-league way of putting their hands over their ears. As
religious intellectuals and academics, they were much too polite to protest
Crisp’s speech on their campus, but made their feelings clear by their absence.
The faculty from the Psychology Department, on the other hand,
did exactly the opposite (despite his opening quip). They made their
professional interest in transvestitism clear by their presence at what was
certainly a controversial speech.
They were tactful but forthright in asking Crisp questions about
what it was like to be a transvestite. They even invited him to participate in
future interviews at their department to help them better understand the
phenomenon. Adhering to his guiding principle, Crisp accepted their invitation.
Forty years later, society is only just beginning to acknowledge the reality of
gender fluidity.
Crisp performed his one-man play in New York
He wrote several books and was a columnist for the Village Voice
and other publications. He was still accepting every invitation offered him
until he died a month before his 91st birthday in 1999.
I am proud that I had the foresight to invite Crisp to Yale. He
told Brock and me that he was surprised by the invitation. He did not think a
divinity school would be interested in what he had to say.
It wasn’t.
But maybe psychology wasn’t such a mistake after all.
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Paul Keane lives in Hartford
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