At the Border, No Tip of The Hat for This Dandy

His girlfriend Rachel Garley pads around in a fluffy brown bathrobe, making coffee. The mantelpiece is full of her modeling photos -- and when she's out of earshot, Horsley pulls out her topless pictures from The Sun to show a reporter.

"I'm not bitter," he says of his experience in Newark. "They were very nice to me. They were just doing their jobs. But do I look like a terrorist?"

Horsley comes across as polite and gracious, charming and witty, an overdressed version of the wealthy and educated upper-class Brit that he is.

If you didn't know that he would probably try to seduce her, he almost seems like the perfect young man to bring home to mother.

He was born into a family that owned a large dairy company. His alcoholic parents sent him off to boarding school at 11.

"This was England," he writes. "The dogs were kept at home and the children sent off to high-class kennels to be trained."

He made and lost a fortune in the stock market and tried his hand at punk rock before settling on his true passions: painting, drugs and sex with prostitutes, which he calls the only "real sex."

He boasts of patronizing more than 1,000 of them, and his descriptions of sex in the book are sometimes stomach-churning. He estimates that he spent more than $200,000 each on drugs, hookers and clothes, including handmade suits with a special pocket for his syringes.

In 2000, Horsley traveled to the Philippines and had himself crucified so he could better paint Christ's crucifixion. The video is still on YouTube.

The scars on his palms are almost faded, but in a glass case on his studio wall he still keeps the 3-inch-long steel nails that were driven through his hands. Just over the fireplace, beneath a display of 36 human skulls, he also keeps a display of steel syringes and lipsticks.

To the charge of moral turpitude, Horsley enthusiastically pleads guilty. He freely admits that his life provokes, insults and offends. But it is a life he has created, he says, specifically to do those things. He regards his life as a work of art -- and sometimes art shakes people up.

"I am a dandy," he says. "And dandyism is a way of performing your life."

Whether that art is any good has been vigorously debated in Britain. Some dismiss Horsley as pretentious and pathetic, some call him sick, others say he makes the world a more interesting place.

Horsley can live with all that. What he doesn't understand, he says, is how his morals might not be up to snuff for New York. He mentions former governor Eliot Spitzer with a wry smile.

Tuesday night, as he was escorted to a British Airways flight bound for London, Horsley says he donned his top hat and left the immigration agents with one final thought:

"America, the land of the free but, sadly, not the home of the depraved."