A Tribute to Quentin Crisp | This Way Out Radio Episode #1964
- This Way Out
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 8 hours ago
In commemoration of the November 21, 1999 passing of “The Naked Civil Servant,” listen to excerpts from one of his last interviews and a reading of one of his last pieces by publicist Chris Snell at his March 3, 2000 memorial service (produced by Brian DeShazor).
Plus November notes from The Rainbow Rewind including Transgender Day of Remembrance, the Goodridge marriage equality decision and Roseanne’s big kiss (produced by Brian DeShazor and Sheri Lunn).
And in NewsWrap: the Turks and Caicos Islands must recognize the civil marriage of a gay couple by order of the Court of Appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court rejects the marriage equality challenge by infamous former Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis, the lower house of Kazakhstan’s Parliament unanimously approves a bill to ban so-called “LGBTQ propaganda,” gay dating apps Blued and Finka are being removed from the Apple store and several Android app outlets in China, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops directs Catholic-run hospitals to stop providing gender-affirming healthcare, the Most Reverend Cherry Vann is enthroned as the first female and first lesbian Archbishop of the Church in Wales, and more international LGBTQ+ news reported this week by Joe Boehnlein and Tanya Kane-Parry (produced by Brian DeShazor).
All this on the November 17, 2025 edition of This Way Out!
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Complete Program Summary
for the week of November 17, 2025
A Tribute to Quentin Crisp
NewsWrap (full transcript below): The Turks and Caicos Islands Court of Appeal orders the government of the Caribbean British Overseas Territory to recognize the civil marriage of a bi-national gay couple … the U.S. Supreme Court rejects a challenge to its 2015 marriage equality ruling … Kazakhstan lawmakers are on the verge of enacting the Central Asian nation’s version of a “no promo homo” law … China’s government orders Apple to deny access to two popular gay dating apps … the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops orders Roman Catholic-owned hospitals to stop providing gender-affirming healthcare for trans patients … the Most Reverend Cherry Vann is installed as the first woman and first lesbian Archbishop of the Church of Wales [with excerpts from her first sermon as Archbishop at the enthronment ceremony] (written by GREG GORDON and LUCIA CHAPPELLE, produced by BRIAN DeSHAZOR, and reported this week by JOE BOEHNLEIN and TANYA KANE-PARRY).
Feature: On this week’s The Rainbow Rewind, we honor the November 20th annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, and remember the November birthday of lesbian-feminist writer/historian Sarah Schulman, as well as the November 2003 Goodridge ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in favor of civil marriage equality, and the November 1992 airing of one of TV’s first same-gender kisses on the sitcom Roseanne (written, produced and hosted by SHERI LUNN and BRIAN DeSHAZOR).
Feature: “The Naked Civil Servant” himself, the world knows “Dennis” as Quentin Crisp. The flamboyant bon vivant whose memoir became the basis for British television’s historic 1975 bio-pic passed away on November 21, 1999. Just seven months earlier, This Way Out’s BRIAN DeSHAZOR went to the Los Angeles LGBT Center for his maiden interview — an exclusive sit-down with the author of the then-recently published Resident Alien (featuring publicist Chip Snell reading from one of Crisp’s works, with segment intro music from the British/PBS TV adaptation of The Naked Civil Servant and incidental internal music from the film Homo Heights).
[Thanks to Mr. Philip Ward: visit Crisperanto.org for all things Quentin.]
NewsWrap
A summary of some of the news in or affecting
LGBTQ communities around the world
for the week ending November 15h, 2025
Written by Greg Gordon and Lucia Chappelle
reported this week by JOE BOEHNLEIN and TANYA KANE-PARRY,
and produced by BRIAN DeSHAZOR
The Turks and Caicos Islands must recognize the civil marriage of a gay couple by order of the Court of Appeal. Richard Sankar is a citizen of the Caribbean Overseas British Territory who married U.S. citizen Tim Haymon in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 2020. Haymon’s application for a spousal exemption to live and work there was denied by the Islands’ Director of Immigration in August 2021, so the couple sued. The territory’s Supreme Court subsequently ruled in March 2024 that denying a work permit for Haymon violates provisions of the Turks and Caicos’ Constitution that ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. The Court of Appeal rejected the government’s challenge to that ruling in a decision published on October 27th. Haymon told the Washington Blade that he finally received his residence permit on November 10th.
November 24th is the deadline for the Turks and Caicos government to appeal to the Privy Council, the London-based appeals court for British territories.
The ruling of the Court of Appeal applies only to Sankar and Haymon’s case and does not address the laws that continue to deny the Islands’ queer couples full marriage equality.
Marriage equality is safe in the U.S. – at least for now. The Supreme Court rejected the challenge by infamous former Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis on November 10th. Davis refused to issue marriage licenses to same-gender couples soon after the high court’s pro-equality Obergefell decision in 2015. She cited her devout Christian beliefs. Lower courts ruled that her actions personally violated the constitutional rights of those queer couples. Her case failed to get four votes to support hearing her case when the Supreme Court justices met in private, so they passed on it without comment.
By continuing to appeal, Davis has avoided paying upwards of $360,000 in compensatory and punitive damages including attorney fees to David Moore and David Ermold, one of those license-seeking couples.
So-called “LGBTQ propaganda” may soon be banned in Kazakhstan. The lower house of Parliament unanimously approved a bill on November 12th that outlaws the “dissemination of information containing propaganda of pedophilia and/or non-traditional sexual orientation … performed in public or via mass media, telecommunications, or online platforms … intended to convince an unspecified group to form a positive public opinion of said practices.” It calls for hefty fines for violators, and up to 10 days in jail for repeat offenders.
The Central Asian nation borders both Russia and China and was once a Soviet Republic. Its population is predominantly Muslim and conservative, although its government is secular. Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has called for the protection of “traditional values” and supports the ban. Perhaps not coincidentally he was in Moscow meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin when the vote took place. The measure mirrors Russia’s “no promo homo” law and similar measures enacted in Hungary and other eastern countries.
Kazakh Education Minister Gani Beisembayev told lawmakers, "Children and teenagers are exposed to information online every day that can negatively impact their ideas about family, morality, and the future."
Human Rights Watch charges that the measure “blatantly violate(s) Kazakhstan’s international human rights commitments, including children’s rights to education, health and information.” Amnesty International warns the ban “[institutionalizes] stigma, fear and censorship.”
President Tokayev will certainly sign the bill into law after its predictably easy win in Parliament’s upper house.
However, its legality could be challenged. Kazakhstan’s Constitutional Court overturned a similar law in 2015, according to qnews.com.au.
Two popular gay dating apps are being removed from the Apple store and several Android app outlets in China. The estimated 56 million users on Blued and the 2.7 million who have downloaded Finka can reportedly continue to use them, but they are no longer available to new users.
An Apple spokesperson told Wired in an email, “We follow the laws in the countries where we operate. … Earlier this year, the developer of Finka elected to remove the app from storefronts outside China, and Blued was available only in China.”
Blued is described as “not only the largest dating app for gay men in China but also in the world” by the news and business-service platform The China Project. It calls Finka the “second-largest dating app for gay men in China.”
China decriminalized same-gender sex in 1997, but lately there’s been a crackdown on LGBTQ visibility. Queer content has been deleted in imported TV shows and movies, international LGBTQ dating apps are blocked, and any positive portrayals of LGBTQ people is utterly forbidden in domestic productions.
Catholic-run hospitals in the U.S. are being directed to stop providing gender-affirming healthcare to trans patients by the Conference of Catholic Bishops. The November 12th meeting in Baltimore, Maryland cited last year’s Vatican pronouncement that virtually denies the existence of transgender people. The Bishops’ directive reads, in part: “In order to respect the nature of the human person as a unity of body and soul, Catholic health care services must not provide or permit medical interventions, whether surgical, hormonal, or genetic, that aim not to restore but rather to alter the fundamental order of the human body in its form or function.” At the same time, Catholic health care services are to somehow “mitigate the suffering of those who experience gender incongruence or gender dysphoria” in other ways. More than one in seven of the patients treated every day in the U.S. are seen at Roman Catholic-run hospitals, according to the Catholic Health Association.
The directive was sharply criticized by the leaders of transgender-supportive religious groups, including the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Episcopal Church, the Union for Reform Judaism, the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, Metropolitan Community Churches, and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
New Ways Ministry is a Maryland-based LGBTQ Catholic organization. Its executive director Francis DeBernardo declared in a statement, “In a church called to synodal listening and dialogue, it is embarrassing, even shameful, that the bishops failed to consult transgender people, who have found that gender-affirming medical care has enhanced their lives and their relationship with God.”
Finally, the Most Reverend Cherry Vann was enthroned as the first female, first lesbian Archbishop of the Church in Wales. The history-making November 8th ceremony at Saint Woolos Cathedral in Newport was packed with clergy, civic leaders, and members of the public.
Vann has made her mark in various positions in the Church since her ordination as a deacon in 1989. She was the first woman to be ordained as a priest in the Anglican Church of England in 1994. The 67-year-old is well known for championing social justice, human rights, and inclusion.
After taking her seat in the Archepiscopal Chair in front of the High Altar, Vann preached in part:
[SOUND: Vann]
We live in troubling times. Division and hate, mistrust and disinformation are rife across our world and in our societies here in Wales. There seems to be an increasing tendency, an encouragement even (from some at least) to define ourselves over and against others in ways that significantly threaten the community cohesion that many have spent decades trying to build.
…Whilst the church cannot solve the world’s problems, we can and are called to model a very different way of going on, which holds out another way of being and the hope that is the Kingdom of God. … And so, in the decisions we take and the values we espouse, in the way we live and relate to one another, there is to be no ‘them and us.’ For all are created by God and made in God’s very image and that is our starting point. Hard though it may be sometimes, we are invited by God to celebrate the diversity of our global humanity and to embrace it as a gift. In God’s economy, all are invited and all are welcome as children of the same Heavenly Father. We are one in Him.”
That was the newly-enthroned first woman and first lesbian Archbishop of the Church of Wales, the Most Reverend Cherry Vann.