Please join WWI president Karen Karbiener and board member Triston Pullen for a conversation with Gil Cole, a writer and performer who has just returned to the theater after thirty years in practice as a psychoanalyst. This Garden Plot (which premiered at Theatre Row, NY, in October 2021) draws on the poetry of Walt Whitman and Thom Gunn to trace the experience of being Gay in America from the Civil War through AIDS. Gil will discuss how his life’s journey led him to the writing and performance of this one-man show, borne out of times of trouble but offering messages of hope, healing and love.

Gil Cole trained as an actor at The Juilliard School and worked in theater for nine years, appearing on Broadway in Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy’s A Meeting by the River, Off-Broadway in the Roundabout Theater’s revival of William Inge’s Dark at the Top of the Stairs, and in Joseph Papp’s Henry V at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.  Toward the beginning of his life with AIDS, he returned to school and eventually trained to be a psychoanalyst.  He was in practice for thirty years upon retirement in February 2021.  He is the author of Infecting the Treatment: Being an HIV Positive Analyst and many articles on sexuality and gender.  This Garden Plot, a one-many show that developed out of Gil’s experiences with two pandemics (AIDS and COVID-19), marks his return to the theater and debut as a playwright.

Karen Karbiener, president and founding member of the Walt Whitman Initiative, is a Whitman scholar and teaches at New York University. Winner of the Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress and a Fulbright recipient, she has published widely on Whitman (most recently working with Brian Selznick on Live Oak, with Moss, a new illustrated edition of Whitman’s secret same-sex love poems).  As a cultural activist in her hometown, Karen has been working on the campaign to preserve 99 Ryerson Street since 2017, and gave testimony at the hearing to landmark 227 Duffield Place, Brooklyn, last year.  In 2019, Karen participated in the Canadian Whitmanites’ marathon reading of “Song of Myself” in Bon Echo Provincial Park, Canada.