Nelson Sullivan was a highly talented and prolific videographer, who documented New York’s art, club and youth scene of the 1980s. His filming style was fluid, raw and breathless, with jump-cuts and in-camera editing, all fabulously complimented the city’s dynamism, as it focussed on luminaries Keith Haring, Michael Alig, John Sex and RuPaul.

Just as he was about to produce his own cable TV show, Sullivan died of a heart attack in 1989. It was a sad demise to such a genuine talent

Back in December 1988, Sullivan filmed Quentin Crisp at the Flaunt It Club.

The Flaunt It Club was another brilliant publicity stunt created by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey to promote their disco act The Fabulous Pop Tarts. It was was presented every Sunday night at LImelight NYC and gave other aspiring performers the chance to appear alongside established personalities in a talk show format broadcast, broadcast later that week on Manhattan public access television. Quentin Crisp was the celebrity guest this night, and the event was documented on video by Nelson Sullivan. Robert Coddington edited this from Nelson’s original videotape.

The brilliant Fenton Bailey once pitched a documentary on Nelson, where he described “Nelson’s epic canvas of Downtown” as an:

“...anthropological documentary that takes us beneath the fashionable surface and shows us the reality.

The reality is that Downtown is a tribe, a loose-knit collection of cultural refugees socially bonded by their rather anti-social ambition to make it. Although not an apple-pie Main Street nuclear family, it is an extended family much like a chorus line. Indeed Nelson’s work shows us, in addition to the glorious highs when the show goes on, the individual lows when its all over, the lonely moments of vulnerability. He was able to do this because most of those he filmed were his friends who trusted him, and who - given that Nelson’s camera went wherever he went and was for at least ten years as natural an extension of his body as his arms or legs - simply forgot that the camera was there.

And so the most captivating and poignant part of Nelson’s work is not the famous who have emerged from Downtown, but the people who are left behind and who strive in vain for the limelight. One of them himself, Nelson filmed the wannabees, the never-will-bees and the has-beens. While he captured the glorious orgy of self-invention of those seeking fame and fortune, he also captured the price it often exacted, the despair and self-destruction that followed repeated frustration and failure.

This is Sullivan’s film of Quentin Crisp at the Flaunt It Club, which reveals a delightfully at ease Mr. Crisp, enjoying the company of NY’s young things.

DM’s Richard Metzger writes about Nelson Sullivan here.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Inside Quentin Crisp’s Apartment

Quentin Crisp on Gay Kiss-In

Nelson Sullivan Pioneering Chronicler of NYC Nightlife in the 1980s

 
Part 2 of Quentin Crisp at the Flaunt It Club, after the jump…
 

Above, Mister Merlin, in his youth, and Quentin Crisp… well past his.

Reacting to the Facebook “gay kiss” scandal, Dangerous Minds pal Jesse Merlin, currently appearing (headless!) as Dr. Carl Hill in Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator: The Musical at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood, sent us this droll example of the Crisp wit.:

Right before I started hanging out with Quentin Crisp on a weekly basis, there was a gay scandal at the little greek-owned restaurant he frequented: The “Cooper Square Restaurant” on 2nd ave at 5th street.  He ate there every day and the owners were very kind and respectful.

Well, apparently a gay couple was kissing there (when quentin wasn’t around, presumably) and the owner snapped up their menus, said “No sex in this restaurant!” and threw them out.  It may or not have been a messy kiss depending on who you ask.

Well, they organized a huge kiss-in at the restaurant and embarrassed the hell out of the owner, who eventually apologized with seeming-sincerity.  But my favorite part of the whole episode was when one of the two kissing troublemakers (who happened to be the doorman at my drama school nearby) called Quentin to ask for his support on the subject.

“I only eat there.  I don’t know what you want from me.”

He was totally unimpressed with the protest idea and wanted nothing to do with it.  But he did laugh about the owners possibly throwing *him* out:

“They can hardly throw me out.  They’re Greeks.  They invented the beastly thing.”

Photo of Quentin Crisp by Martin Fishman

Wise. witty and wonderful, England’s “stately homo,” Quentin Crisp was a familiar—and always delightful—figure seen frequently around New York’s East Village during the latter part of the author’s life (1981-1999). Crisp famously made sure his phone number was listed and would accept nearly every dinner invitation that came his way, with the understanding that the tab would be picked up and Mr. Crisp would basically do an up-close version of his famous one-man show. On two occasions I dined with Mr. Crisp at the Odessa Diner on Avenue A and these are memories that I will always treasure.

For the majority of his life, Crisp lived in two small apartments. One, a bedsit in London where he lived for 41 years and steadfastly refused to clean, and one on Third St. in Manhattan that I doubt was ever cleaned, either. (In his autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant, Crisp quipped. “After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.” He says the line about 2 minutes in).
 

 
The London apartment can be seen in the above clip from Denis Mitchell’s fascinating 1970 Granada TV documentary, and visitors to the MIX Festival in NYC this past weekend could see a recreation of Crisp’s small New York flat, lovingly recreated by Philip Ward, curator of The Quentin Crisp Archives. More photos at Butt Magazine’s website.
 

 
Via World of Wonder

John Hurt is appearing as Quentin Crisp in a film about the cultural icon’s time in New York?