About
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
