British Memoirist Is Denied U.S. Entry

Sebastian Horsley, a British author who has written an eyebrow-raising memoir detailing a life of rampant drug use and voluminous encounters with prostitutes, was turned back at Newark Liberty International Airport on Tuesday as he tried to enter the United States for a book party and New York news media tour.

Mr. Horsley, whose memoir, “Dandy in the Underworld,” was published last week in paperback by Harper Perennial, a unit of HarperCollins, said he was detained by United States customs authorities for eight hours and questioned about his former drug addiction, use of prostitutes and activity as a male escort.

“I’m absolutely shattered and upset and gutted about not being able to come to America,” Mr. Horsley said in a telephone interview from London, where he had returned on Wednesday. “I was very much looking forward to meeting everybody.”

Lucille Cirillo, a spokeswoman for the New York office of United States Customs and Border Protection, said she could not comment on specific cases. But in an e-mail message, she said that under a waiver program that allows British citizens to enter the United States without a visa, “travelers who have been convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude (which includes controlled-substance violations) or admit to previously having a drug addiction are not admissible.”

In “Dandy of the Underworld” Mr. Horsley, who is notorious in Britain, writes of being raised by alcoholic, sexually promiscuous parents and bouncing through several schools. He details a debauched life of cocaine, heroin, opium and amphetamine use, writing that he spent more than £100,000 (nearly $200,000) on crack cocaine and £100,000 to consort with more than 1,000 prostitutes. He also chronicles his trip to the Philippines to be hung from a cross, an event that was recorded by a photographer and videographer and formed part of an art exhibition that was extensively covered by the news media in his home country.

Carrie Kania, publisher of Harper Perennial, said Mr. Horsley’s party, which was scheduled for Wednesday in Manhattan, would go on without him. “I believe this book is very important,” Ms. Kania said. “It certainly moved me, and we’re going to continue to back it 100 percent.”

British public records are not available in the United States, and it was not possible to verify independently many of the details in Mr. Horsley’s memoir.

In interviews, though, he has been repeatedly coy about what is real and what is contrived. “It’s better to be quotable than honest,” he told Time Out London in February. In an interview with The Independent last September, he said: “I don’t speak, I quote. I am a fraud. I have cobbled together my personality from hundreds of little bits. I am simultaneously the most genuine and the most artificial person you will ever meet.”

In his interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, Mr. Horsley insisted the memoir was true. “I’m a dandy, so I like to play with words,” he said. “I am real, but in an artificial way, because I like to play with language. But my story is completely true.”

Ms. Kania said that the book, published in Britain in September by an imprint of Hodder Headline, had been through a “lengthy legal review” by the British publisher. But Harper did not independently fact-check it.

Mr. Horsley said he was surprised he was deported, since he had previously traveled to the United States six times, twice to visit relatives in Boston and four times to New York.

“God bless America, land of the free, but sadly not the land of the depraved,” he said. He referred to the recent resignation of Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York, in the wake of revelations that he had frequented prostitutes. “I’m not a politician, I’m an artist,” Mr. Horsley said. “Depravity is part of the job description.”

He added that he regarded his memoir as “a very moral book in the same way that Bret Easton Ellis’s ‘American Psycho’ was a moral book.” He added, “I’m not a bad person.”

Jack Begg contributed reporting.

Posted at 11:36 PM | Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341d715453ef00e5514f58448834

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference IT'S OFFICIAL : I AM ILLEGAL:

Comments

Are we to understand that you didn't get into America AGAIN? Why don't you just spring for a proper visa?

But I suppose if you did that, it wouldn't make headlines, would it?

This ought to be a lesson to you and your publishers. No matter how you spin it in the press, you just can't polish a turd. The people who succeed are generally the people who deserve to succeed. You've been smacking your greasy head up against the brick wall Fame for many years now, and all you've succeeded with are cheap publicity stunts. Maybe it's time you threw in the towel and moved back home with mum? You'll always be a failure.

Posted by: Alma Mather | May 09, 2008 at 11:09 AM

What's the matter, Basti? I thought you of all people understood the importance of free speech. So then why did you feel the need to delete my last comment?

For someone who's supposed to be so totally outrageous, you certainly are a coward.

Posted by: Alma Mather | May 09, 2008 at 07:58 PM

Begging your pardon, I see that you haven't actually deleted my comments.

I wish I could say I respected you more for leaving them here, but nothing could ever make me respect you in the first place.

Posted by: Alma Mather | May 09, 2008 at 08:03 PM

John Lydon showed extremely good taste when he snubbed you, sir. That you thought he would do anything else is laughable. He saw you for what you are.

Posted by: Ted | May 17, 2008 at 06:29 PM

I've been reading up on you. As an American, I'm proud that you were denied entry into my Nation. We have all kinds of riff-raff wandering loose, in my defiled land, and I'm bitterly pleased that they stopped at least one dreg from dripping slime all over American soil. You are a complete degenerate, and your life is utterly worthless. Harmful, in fact, as you encourage degeneracy in weak-minded, aimless syncophants. Yes - your parents were disgraceful, reprobate booze-hounds - but you could have risen above their idiocy. You chose not to. You chose to throw every asset birth bestowed right into the gutter, and then wrote about the sordid spectacle of your gifts mixing and vanishing down the drain of History with the refuse and slime. SHAME on you! Should you be remembered at all, whenever you do slither out of your tacky mortal coil, it will only be as a vaguely distastful foot-note - a sad example of the utter collapse of the English Nation. And you are not a dandy! Your clothes are dreadful. The Shade of Beau Brummel will clutch your collar, when you die, and bitch-slap you, twice, before your final descent into your miserable slot in overhead-flourescent-lit Hell.

Ewwwww.

Posted by: PearlGirl | December 04, 2008 at 04:30 AM

A professional London Escorts agency booking service with more than 50 girls available 24/7 for high class elite girls for in call and out call availability. Escort London For professional dating of London Escort girls. Escorts London

Posted by: London Escorts | June 23, 2009 at 06:34 AM

Why they denied your entrance to USA ? That's pretty unfair, you're a great memoirist and definitely you don't deserve that kind of treat.

Posted by: buy viagra | July 16, 2010 at 04:05 PM

Just for today I will be unafraid. Especially I will not be afraid to enjoy what is beautiful，and to believe that as I give to the world, so the world will give to me.

Posted by: coach suitcase | July 17, 2010 at 08:58 AM