The Naked Civil Servant (1975), a film about Quentin Crisp, makes an interesting contrast with the 2008 Sean Penn film about Harvey Milk.

Both Crisp (1908-1999) and Milk (1930-1978) were homosexuals who came out of the closet when few had the courage to do so.

Crisp was born 21 years before Milk, but outlived him by another 21 years. He was a flamboyant trans-sexual who defied public opinion by dyeing his hair red and wearing it long. He painted his toenails and wore sandals to show them off. His open display of sexual deviance earned him slaps from women and beatings from men, and kept him out of the army during WW II. He was an irredeemable exhibitionist whose core philosopy was that he was what he was and it was pointless to try to hide it.

Crisp spent the first 73 years of his life in his native England. For 40 of those years he lived in a squalid apartment that he never cleaned, and supported himself by writing and by posing as a nude model for art classes. In 1981 he moved to New York City, took up residence in another squalid apartment and became a celebrity. A few weeks before his 91st birthday, he travelled to England with the intention of touring the country with his one-man show, but died shortly after his arrival.

About the time that Crisp left his comfortable middle-class home to take up residence in London where to pursue his unconventional life-style, Harvey Milk was born into a well-off family in Long Island, N.Y. Unlike Crisp, Milk hid his homosexuality until middle age. He served in the Navy during the Korean War, and lived an outwardly conventional life, teaching, selling insurance, and working in Wall Street.

Milk had been in numerous homosexual relationships, the longest of which lasted six years, when he finally came out of the closet in the 1970s and embraced the gay activist cause. When he entered politics as an openly gay man, he predicted that he would be assassinated. His prediction came true on November 27, 1978 when he was murdered by former San Francisco city supervisor Dan White.

John Hurt portrays Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant and Sean Penn won an Oscar for his performance as Milk in the eponymous 2008 film directed by Gus Van Sant. Josh Brolin plays the part of Dan White, who spent only five years in prison for the murder of Milk and Mayor Moscone. Two years after his release, however, White committed suicide.

Except for a six-month stint as a prostitute which left him feeling degraded, sexual intercourse does not seem to have mattered to Crisp as much as posturing in public. Milk, on the other hand, was promiscuous. He did stop going to gay bath houses when he entered politics, a fact that TIME magazine writer John Cloud seems to associate with Milk's apparent good fortune in not contracting AIDS. Cloud speculates that, had Milk lived longer, he "could have guided gay America through the confused start of the AIDS horror."

There must be a moral somewhere in the fact that the in-your-face, self-centered exhibitionist Crisp lived for 91 years, while long-time closet-dwelling, public-spirited Milk died from an assassin's bullet at the age of 42.