"At the age of ninety, it has finally been explained to me that I am not really homosexual, I'm transgender. I now accept that. I no longer see myself as homosexual, though it is a word I have used to describe myself and which others have understandably used to describe me. I don't actually see myself as a man though, of course, I know I'm not physically a woman. The only thing in my life I have wanted and didn't get was to be a woman. [...] I don't dress like a woman ... I think my body is too like a man's body to have lived as a woman with any kind of success. I refer to myself as homosexual without thinking because of how I have lived my life."
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The Last Word (2017, compiled from tape recordings c.1998-1999), as cited in "Quentin Crisp was trans, say activists", The Telegraph (28 February 2026).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Quentin_Crisp
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Quentin Crisp
Quentin Crisp (born Denis Charles Pratt, December 25, 1908 – November 21, 1999) was an English writer, raconteur, artist's model, and actor who was known for his memorable and insightful witticisms. He became a gay icon in the 1970s after publication of his memoir, The Naked Civil Servant (1968), brought to the attention of the general public his defiant exhibitionism and longstanding refusal to conceal his homosexuality.
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