Editing Quentin Crisp (section)

===Middle years===
Crisp attempted to join the [[British army]] at the outbreak of the [[Second World War]], but was rejected and declared exempt by the medical board on the grounds that he was "suffering from sexual perversion". He remained in London during [[The Blitz|the 1941 Blitz]], stocked up on cosmetics, purchased five pounds of [[henna]] and later paraded through the streets during the black-out, picking up [[G.I.s]]. In 1940, he moved into a first-floor flat at 129 Beaufort Street, [[Chelsea, London|Chelsea]], a bed-sitting room that he occupied until he emigrated to the United States in 1981. In the intervening years, he never attempted any housework, writing famously in his memoir ''The Naked Civil Servant'': "After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse."<ref>Crisp, Quentin. ''The Naked Civil Servant''. Penguin Press, 1997, p. 102.</ref>

Crisp left his job as an [[technical drawing|engineer's tracer]] in 1942 to become a model in [[life class]]es in London and the [[Home Counties]]. Crisp wanted to call his book ''I Reign in Hell'', a reference to [[John Milton|Milton]]'s ''[[Paradise Lost]]'' ("Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven"), but his agent insisted on ''The Naked Civil Servant'', an insistence that later gave him pause when he offered the manuscript to [[Tom Maschler]] of [[Jonathan Cape]] on the same day that [[Desmond Morris]] delivered ''[[The Naked Ape]]''. [[The Naked Civil Servant (book)|''The Naked Civil Servant'']] was published in 1968 to generally good reviews, although it initially only sold 3,500 copies. Crisp was then approached by the documentary film maker [[Denis Mitchell (filmmaker)|Denis Mitchell]] to be the subject of a 1968 short film in which he discussed his life and lifestyle. The documentary aired on British television in 1971.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6c7t5c|title=Quentin Crisp - 1968 - video|date=25 December 2017|website=Dailymotion}}</ref>