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Come and join the film making team for DO NOT FADE, an upcoming short film reimagining Quentin Crisp as the trans woman he never got to be, this event is a fundraiser to get this important film made!
Quentin Crisp was a pioneer who spent a lifetime being punished for refusing to perform a gender that wasn't his. In the 1930s when it was sinful for women to wear make-up he wore lipstick, eye shadow, and had long henna'ed hair. At the age of 65 he published his groundbreaking autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant that went on to be made into a film starring John Hurt making both Crisp and Hurt famous. In his final posthumous autobiography, he wrote: "At the age of ninety, it has finally been explained to me that I'm not really homosexual. I'm transgender. I accept that now." That sentence is the heart of our film, Do Not Fade.
Co-written by Adrian Goycoolea and Juliet Jacques — whose acclaimed collection Variations imagines trans lives written out of history — and inspired by the aesthetics of Sally Potter's Orlando, we imagine a world where Quentin is transformed into Orlyn Crisp: a figure who moves through time and gender to find herself alive today as a young trans woman.
With an intro by Adrian (Quentins Great Nephew) followed by a screening of the The Naked Civil Servant (1975) which created a sensastion and scandal at the time when it was broadcast by ITV.
Based on Quentin Crisp's autobiography, the once-controversial picture The Naked Civil Servant stars John Hurt as Crisp, a flamboyant character who publicly declared his homosexuality during the brutally homophobic and misogynistic England of the 1930s and '40s - a time when this alternative lifestyle was still an offense punishable by imprisonment in Great Britain.
Find out more about the new film here