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In the footsteps of Quentin Crisp in New York

As John Hurt reprises his role as the flamboyant raconteur and gay icon, Quentin Crisp, in An Englishman in New York, Ben Walters traces the writer's legacy in the Big Apple

Self-made in Manhattan ... John Hurt as Quentin Crisp in An Englishman in New York

"I don't believe in abroad," John Hurt's Quentin Crisp says towards the end of The Naked Civil Servant, the 1975 Thames Television drama that made Hurt a star and Crisp an icon. Before long, Crisp would revise his opinion: after his new-found fame led to him performing in New York in 1978, he fell in love with the city and, forsaking his self-appointed status as one of the stately homos of England, relocated there in 1981, aged 72. He would remain one of its most celebrated resident aliens for the remaining 18 years of his life.

Now that period is the subject of its own ITV film, An Englishman in New York, which takes its title from the song Sting wrote about Crisp. Hurt reprises his role and, perhaps surprisingly, Crisp is once again presented as an outsider: initially basking in an apparent idyll of self-determination, he soon finds new pressures to conform and is ostracised for crossing party lines in the gay utopia, particularly when he downplays Aids as "a fad". Focusing on his friendships with Phillip Steele (Denis O'Hare) and the performance artist and Warhol protege Penny Arcade (played by Cynthia Nixon), with whom he often performed, the drama opens up the space between Crisp's persona and his private self, probing the limitations of his assiduously cultivated continence.

The city's appeal was immediate. "He walked down the street here and felt that he was part of a society that was eclectic and diverse rather than judgmental and introverted," says director Richard Laxton, speaking in New York at the time of the film's screening at the Tribeca film festival. Producer James Burstall, who has been working in the city on and off for 25 years, agrees. "In the 80s and early 90s, New York was a place where eccentricity and individuality were absolutely paramount and Quentin epitomised that," he says at the converted midtown Manhattan townhouse that is the American headquarters of his Leopardrama production company.

For the film's writer, Brian Fillis, who has also written TV dramas about the inner lives of Fanny Craddock (Fear of Fanny) and Harry H Corbett and the unhappily homosexual Wilfrid Brambell (The Curse of Steptoe), Crisp's philosophy engages with "individualism and its discontents": however essential he considered it to live on one's own terms, "Quentin knew there was a downside and he was very open about it," even though this brought negative repurcussions.

An Englishman in New York shows Crisp out of step with gay New York not just politically but socially: in one scene, he is bullied out of the legendary Anvil club for not being butch enough, echoing similar gay-on-gay discrimination in The Naked Civil Servant. "If you aren't a certain type of gay man, you can suffer on the scene," Fillis tells me when we meet at The Pembroke in Earl's Court – now a genteel pub serving coffee but formerly landmark gay venue The Coleherne, about which Crisp made the comments on which Fillis based the Anvil scene.

"We wanted to draw out that Quentin realises this new gay fascism, this ghettoisation is not desirable or healthy or good for people," says Burstall. "But his determination to be himself transcends any kind of gay agenda: everybody can identify with the idea that you have a right to be here and fulfil your true potential."

Though keen to promote his philosophy, Fillis was determined to avoid hagiography and present Crisp as a fallible human being. "In The Naked Civil Servant, there's no question you're with him but in the 80s he set himself against people you have to sympathise with," says Fillis. "It's not difficult to find people on the British gay scene who find him inspirational but in New York they knew him personally – they're less focused on 'icon Quentin' and more on him as a friend."

For those who were personally close to him, Crisp's memory remains moving as well as meaningful. The film's character Phillip Steele is half based on Phillip Ward, who now maintains the Quentin Crisp archives. (The character's other half, Tom Steele, was one of Crisp's editors.) Ward, a bearish man with cropped hair, glasses and a silver goatee, saw The Naked Civil Servant on TV in Kentucky before moving to New York in 1979. After he met Crisp in the 80s, they remained close until his death. "He was like my mother, father, brother, sister, lover," Ward says over margaritas and corn chips at the Cowgirl, a ginghamy gay bar in Manhattan's West Village. He chokes up as he speaks. "Quentin provided an impetus for us to be ourselves, living without apology. He ran away from what was bad and became the talk of the town."

Ward is doing his bit to keep it that way. One of his duties as Crisp's archivist is "to promote his philosophy of individuality, self-acceptance and tolerance", which is partly achieved online, via a website, crisperanto.org, and a Facebook page, where Crisp has more than 1,500 friends who regularly praise or take issue with the aphorisms Ward posts as status updates. ("If you are shy, pretend not to be shy," he advises at the time of writing, "and in the end you won't be shy." Fillis reports getting into arguments on the page over Crisp's stated views on Oscar Wilde and murder.) Many of these epigrams are drawn from The Dusty Answers, thoughts and arguments recorded on more than 50 audio tapes during the last two years of Crisp's life which Ward hopes to publish as his final book.

Crisp lives on for Penny Arcade, too. Her new full-length show, Old Queen, recounts her younger experiences with role models and mentors, Crisp being prominent among them. In her pink-and-blue-walled Lower East Side apartment, which overflows with vivid paintings and quirky objets d'art, Arcade – short, curvy and pixieish – tells me she and Crisp recognised each other as kindred spirits after friends brought him to watch her perform.

"We both wanted to grow up to be completely ourselves," she says. Like Ward, she describes Crisp in quasi-parental terms, though they are decidedly estranged siblings, rival keepers of the flame sceptical of the other's legitimacy. (Ward, who honours Crisp's polite habit of referring to people as Mr Smith or Ms Jones, won't even mention Arcade by name.) "My last big fag/fag-hag relationship was with Quentin Crisp," Arcade says, reading from the script of Old Queen. "Quentin was like a Zen master and I, like his student, had to answer riddles and koans from my own synthesis, from my own point of view ... it was no longer a question of taking on the value of others I admired, but sharpening one's own."

This privileging of individual thinking, she tells me, was what led to tension between Crisp and the gay establishment. "If you didn't talk about things in the proscribed way, you had internalised homophobia. It was all about status quo and consensus, and status quo and consensus was the last thing Quentin was equipped to participate in." Arcade blames ageism as well as political difference for many New York gays' rejection of Crisp but also suggests that his successful self-fashioning curtailed his ability to engage with a radically changing society. "I don't think he could handle what happened in the world because he would have to care and be angry," she says, "and care and anger were things he had removed from his emotional palette a long time before."

The film's vision of Crisp behind closed doors rankles with both Ward ("Quentin was not sad and lonely") and Arcade ("the depiction of Quentin as this poor, lost soul is absurd"). Arcade is also aggrieved at the rejection of her idea of playing herself ("They said only a movie star or TV star could play Penny Arcade. It's hysterical!"). But both praise the film's transmission of Crisp's ideas to a new audience and acknowledge that he was ready for death.

"I know I have always promised you to live till I am 100 years old," Arcade reports him saying at 88, "but I was wondering if you would give me a dispensation so I only live to be 90." Both friends tried to dissuade him from taking the working trip to England during which he died, on 21 November 1999. "I expressed to him how the cabin pressure would affect his heart and he was very pleased about that," says Ward. "He wanted to die, simply because his body was falling apart. It wasn't providing him with the ability to be who he wanted to be. He had two regrets on his death: one was not to be an American citizen; the other was not to have met Elizabeth Taylor."

Yet Crisp lives on, in his own words, in friends' memories and in others' art. In New York's downtown gay and performance scenes, you don't have to ask around for long before hearing stories of hilarious lunch dates or minor feuds. Last December, a cabaret party was thrown for the centenary of Crisp's birth. And in March, Ward organised another event, The Naked Bon Vivant!, which featured a raft of new performances inspired by his life and work. Veteran British drag act Lavinia Co-op, avant garde dancer Jack Ferver and others read from his writings while neo-cabarettist Adam Dugas conceived a faux-Cockney music-hall act to deliver a number inspired by a line from The Naked Civil Servant. Emulating Crisp's look, guests wore cravats and fedoras – in one case a tower of them – while a shrine in the back of the venue was decked out with photographs, scarves, calling cards and other Crispiana. Another tribute performance event is planned for 14 December 2009.

Crisp might have been gratified to know that he is still provoking affection, argument and art, though Fillis suspects he would have been sanguine. "Were Quentin to be told before he died, 'Do you realise you'll still be being celebrated in 10 years' time, he'd say, 'I don't care. I'll be dead. Do what you like.' Which is wonderful."

• An Englishman in New York will be shown on Monday 28 December at 9pm on ITV1

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