At the Border, No Tip of The Hat for This Dandy
U.S. Officials Cite 'Moral Turpitude' in Barring British Author

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 24, 2008; C01

LONDON -- Sebastian Horsley arrived at the gates of America in a top hat and tails and a red velvet vest.

It's how the London author and artist always dresses, whether attending some rock star's fancy party or just visiting his favorite neighborhood prostitutes.

Horsley stepped off the plane at the Newark airport last week, excited to be back in the United States. Forty-five years old, three years sober after a lifetime of epic drug abuse, Horsley was coming to America to do that most American of things: sell his story.

"I love America," Horsley says. "Everybody gets a chance in America. In England, success only inspires envy, but in America it inspires hope."

Horsley strode across the arrivals hall, a flamboyant confection in a jet-lagged herd of Crocs and fleece. He looked like a cross between a clean-shaven Abe Lincoln and Presto the Magician. Cheerfully, accompanied by his longtime girlfriend, Rachel Garley, a former Page 3 Girl (a topless model) in the British tabloids, Horsley plunked down his British passport and placed his finger on the biometric fingerprint reader.

And then he heard those words.

"Please come with me, sir."

For eight hours, armed agents of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection interrogated Horsley.

Scores of friends, relatives and great-and-goods from the publishing and art worlds were waiting in Manhattan. A party was set to kick off a week of television and radio appearances to promote the U.S. launch of Horsley's autobiography, "Dandy in the Underworld."

It's a squirmingly brutal book that starts with his mother's attempts to abort him, and splatters readers with so much sex and feces and heroin and crack that Chapter 12, in which Horsley has himself crucified in the Philippines as part of an art project, seems to almost make sense.

"I'm an artist -- depravity is part of the job description," says Horsley, who warns readers with a wink at the opening of his book: "I've suffered for my art. Now it's your turn."

In a small airport office, the agents asked about drugs and prostitutes. It's all in my book, Horsley said, offering them a promotional flier that quotes English musician Bryan Ferry calling it "a masterpiece of filth."

"If I had to live my life again," he told them, "I would take the same drugs, only sooner and more often."

They asked about his criminal record. Again, in the book: 25 years ago, when he was 20 and walking around London with his hair dyed bright orange, he was arrested and fined 100 British pounds for possession of a gram of amphetamines.

"Describe your relationship with Kate Moss," they said. Not in the book this time. Horsley said he'd never met the supermodel, who was questioned by police last year over newspaper photographs that appeared to show her snorting cocaine. Silently, he wondered to himself where on earth that question had come from.

He said they made him raise his right hand and "swear on the Bible" that he was telling the truth.

Then Sebastian Alexander Horsley was handed a document telling him he was being refused entry to the United States of America under the provisions of "Section 212 (a) (2) (A) (i) (I) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended."

He was being run out of America for "moral turpitude."

Banned In the U.S.A.

About 1,000 people a day are turned away trying to enter the United States at airports, seaports and border crossings, said Lucille Cirillo, a spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Cirillo said that is a small fraction of the 1.1 million people who try to enter daily. She didn't know how many are turned away for "moral turpitude," which the dictionary defines as vileness or depravity.

But she said that in Horsley's case, agents in Newark properly enforced the requirements of the Visa Waiver Program that allows British citizens to enter the United States without a visa.

She said Horsley forfeited that privilege because of his previous drug addiction and his criminal conviction.

"Even though it was 25 years ago, it doesn't mean that rules don't apply to him," she said. "Obtaining entry to the United States for non-U.S. citizens is a privilege, not a right. We have strict rules and guidelines that we have to enforce."

Cirillo said it was irrelevant that Horsley had stopped using drugs; drug addiction at any point in a person's life is enough for him to be refused entry, she said.

It was unclear why U.S. officials hadn't flagged him on his six or seven previous trips to the United States, including two since security was increased after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"We do these on a case-by-case basis, and it depends on the totality of the circumstances," Cirillo said. "But when you're talking about cases involving moral turpitude or a narcotics addiction, we're very limited in our discretional authority."

Other British citizens who have been arrested on drug offenses over the years, including Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (one of the world's most famous and copious consumers of illegal pharmaceuticals), seem to have no problem coming and going to the United States as they please.

But Horsley is now permanently banned from using the Visa Waiver Program. If he wants to come to the United States, he must apply for a visa and "the State Department will decide," Cirillo said.

Naturally, Horsley's case was seen differently in the artistic community. There, it was viewed as the equivalent of being prosecuted for driving 26 mph in a 25 mph zone -- technically correct, but nutty.

In England, Horsley is widely seen as a fairly harmless eccentric, and hardly a danger to society. His rejection struck many as using a bazooka to kill a fly.

"It wasn't like he came in with a syringe sticking out of his arm and a drink in his hand," said Carrie Kania, of Harper Perennial, the U.S. publisher of Horsley's book.

"He hasn't even had a drink in the last three years," she said. "And if we start looking at everything everyone did when they were 20 years old, who would we let in this country?"

Kania said Horsley's case involves larger issues of free speech and artistic expression. "Art is meant to be provocative," she said. "Sebastian's lifestyle is his art."

If artists who offend were banned from America, she said, foreign or expatriate literary legends such as William S. Burroughs, Henry Miller and Charles Baudelaire would have been unwelcome in the United States.

On the night that Horsley was sent home, his party went ahead at the Housing Works bookstore in New York's SoHo. Artists read tributes to Horsley and some wore top hats in his honor.

A Little Too Dandy

Back in London, Horsley is still reeling, chain-smoking Marlboros in his small apartment on a little side street. He's still wearing the same suit and velvet vest, pacing the worn wooden floor in front of a cozy, crackling fire. The main room of his tiny apartment has no furniture except a small desk and a red velvet throne. An easel sits along one wall holding one of Horsley's huge black and red abstract paintings. Brushes and paints are carefully laid out next to paint-splattered suit jackets.

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."