GLR September-October 2025

TM: Your book is the opposite of dreary! Like in your plays, I was so impressed by how deeply you dug and also with such amaz ing humor and spit-takes. But let me beall lachrymose. I was really struck by how large your hometown of Camden looms in your memoir. Especially since it is the town where Walt Whitman lived the last fifteen years of his life and is buried. Did this proximity to queer history carry any meaning to you grow ingup? MS: No meaning whatsoever. There was a hotel in Camden named after Walt Whitman and eventually a bridge, but he was just thought of as some old poet with a long white beard. He was never discussed. In twelve years of public school, I never heard his name mentioned once. No one read his work. As he was basically a non-person, his queerness was not an issue. I had no idea he was queer, but then I had no idea I was ei ther. I basically didn’t know anyone who was queer, not in real life anyway. This was the ’50s, remember. Homosexuality of any kind was never discussed because on the surface it did not exist. Because no one was out of the closet, no one was exactly in it ei ther. There was no closet. It kills me now to know his tomb was relatively close to my house. I always bemoaned the fact that Camden was so gray, an unimportant city

TM: Amid all the chaos and complexity of your family dynamic growing up in Cam den, what did theater mean for you? Did it save your life? What do you hope readers will glean from this fantastic memoir you have written? MS: These aren’t easy questions to answer. I wrote the memoir because I felt I had to tell that particular story. Which means I had to get it off my chest. Which means I didn’t imagine anyone reading it. Actually the idea of people reading it is shocking. It means they are enter ing my private world. But of course I have in vited them in. I didn’t realize when I invited them in that they would know almost every thing about me. But of course, how could I not have known? And actually it’s not a bad feeling. I’m really old, so my overwhelming attitude is what the hell. And when I finished it, I also realized that it was interesting. And unusual. And worth reading. I suppose what I mainly want people to come away with is the fact that life is constantly surprising and that sometimes things really do get better and that you need to hold on, and hold on, and hold on, and try to somehow know who you are, or at least guess who you are, and honor that. I want people not to give up. Tim Miller is a writer, performer, and author of A Body in the O .

where nothing happened. Nothing hap pened? Edward Carpenter fucked Walt Whitman in Camden! I was sitting in the epicenter of gay American history and didn’t realize it. It’s like growing up now in Liver pool and knowing nothing about the Beatles. TM: Or an LGBT person in 2025 living under Trump not knowing about what the Nazis did to gay people! Uncovering and re claiming history is so important. It strikes me that another reason why your play Bent is so crucial is how it reclaimed the history of queer people in the Nazi period and what the pink triangle meant. In 2025 how does Bent speak to us now amid the mess we are in? MS: As for how Bent speaks to us in the nightmare world we are currently faced with, I suppose it’s not dissimilar—the need to be true to yourself and for that self to have room for others. I can’t say that it means love con quers all, because actually in the play it does n’t. It doesn’t conquer the outside world, and at the moment the outside world doesn’t even know how to spell love, but rather [the play says] that love can do something magical to your inside, to that elusive thing known as your spirit, and can therefore bring you some form of inner peace—which at the moment is the most we can ask for—and bring you to genuine pride.

September–October 2025

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