When word spread that American icon Walt Whitman had fallen ill, The New York Times dispatched a reporter to keep a bedside vigil. Discover what he found in this pop-folk fantasia on sex, death and a queer life lived fully.

DEATHBED EDITION is Charles Ludlam’s CAMILLE for our era: unlike Ludlam’s Maugeritte Gautier, our Walt Whitman’s queer life is not tragically cut short by illness, but greedily hungry for self-produced and self-fulfilled stardom. As Whitman lay dying, he continued to edit the ultimate edition of “Leaves of Grass,” which upon its posthumous publication was deemed the “deathbed edition” of his epic poem, meant to supersede all previous incarnations of the work. But of course Whitman’s legacy exists as a whole, not as one final perfectly-controlled entity. We exist not merely as our final selves, but all the selves preceding and following; not a single “song of myself,” but a raucous, messy, and sometimes beautiful chorus of ourselves.