Hats off to Sebastian Horsley, the British writer and self-described “dandy,” who may have been barred from the U.S. for wearing a hat.
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To be sure, the customs office cited reasons of “moral turpitude” for keeping Horsley out on March 18.
That’s believable, as Horsley has fashioned a career out of chronicling his own enthusiastic (former, he says) use of drugs.
He’s also eagerly open about his time as a male escort and his frequenting of prostitutes. Indeed, he claims to have spent the equivalent of $200,000 in purchasing sex from 1,000 prostitutes.
He also insists his memoir is true, which, if so, would separate it from a recent line of true memoirs that have proven to be false.
“I’m not a politician, I’m an artist,” Horsley told the New York Times a day after his eviction. “Depravity is part of the job description.”
But the Times reported Sunday that Horsley is now saying that the real reason for his being sent home after landing at Newark International Airport was his trademark stovepipe hat.
“They asked my girlfriend, ‘Why is he wearing that hat?’” he told Times staffer David Colman. “And she told them, ‘Because it wouldn’t fit in his suitcase.’”
It was downhill from there. After eight hours of questioning, Horsley was gone.
Expulsion on moral grounds from the land of Eliot Spitzer and Larry Craig is an author’s dream if his book, Dandy in the Underworld: an Authorized Autobiography, is now available in the U.S. in paperback and in need of promotion.
Americans who won’t be able to see Horsley and his hat on book tour, can go to his MySpace.com page for blurbs on the volume that London’s Sunday Times calls, “One of the strangest, funniest and most revolting memoirs ever written.”
Not surprisingly, Horsley uses his MySpace page to rant about his forced departure from Newark.
Sample: “God Bless America, land of the free, but sadly not home of the depraved.”
On his own behalf, he also links to a supportive London Independent editorial. It suggests that Horsley, who once had himself crucified in the Philippines for no apparent reason, could have had better timing, as he came to American during Easter week.
“Although he has no religious pretensions other than ardent self-worship – far from dying for the sins of others, he lives for his own – such behavior tends to go down rather badly in America, particularly among immigration officials,” the Independent wrote.
Horsley, 45, was born to wealth and family dysfunction.
His father, the late Nicholas Horsley, was the millionaire chairman of England’s Northern Foods.
“A self-confessed champagne socialist, he enjoyed gambling and drinking and parties,” The London Times wrote upon Nicholas Horsley’s death in 2004.
In an interview with The Sunday Times last year, Nicholas Horsley’s first wife, Valerie, said that she and her husband drank continually, even during her pregnancies.
“I was not a great mother to Sebastian,” she said. “I’m not being hard on myself, or even reveling in guilt. It’s just true.”
Sebastian’s brother, Jake Horsley, is a film critic.
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