The story
Near the end of his life, Quentin Crisp is unmoored from time and gender by an apparition of Elizabeth I. Reborn as a young trans woman today, she finally meets The Great Dark Man, whose love she had believed impossible.
New York, 1999. Quentin Crisp is ninety and his apartment is filthy. He pours water into a dirty glass and looks in the mirror. Where his own face should be, he sees Queen Elizabeth I, and she gives him her line from Orlando.
The phone rings, as it often does. After all these years his number is still listed. As he sees it, the price of fame is infinite availability. A stranger is lost, and Crisp offers what wisdom he can: take what makes you most like yourself, polish it until it gleams, and put it where it will do the most good.
Then he checks himself in the mirror again and sees, at last, what he has always known was there. Young and beautiful, and wearing his clothes far better than he ever did. This is Orlyn Crisp. The phone rings. It is the stranger again. Twenty-six years have gone.
“Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old.” Elizabeth I to Orlando, in the film Orlando. In Do Not Fade she says it to Quentin, from his bathroom mirror.
