The New Yorker:

By Mimi Swartz
August 16, 1998

The Greenwich Village apartment that my second cousin Alan Groh shared with his lover Buzz Miller could easily have been mistaken for a place inhabited by one person. Occupying the parlor floor of a Federal brownstone in the West Village, it was a relatively small space that always seemed much larger. Whenever I stopped by for a visit, they’d peer out from the open door as I rounded the stairs: two older men with secretive smiles and long, elegant vowels who greeted me with a kiss on the lips. The apartment had nine-foot windows overlooking a garden in the back, so that in daytime the rooms were perpetually flooded with soft, dusty light. It was a setting in which everyone always looked good.

So did the furniture, which had been selected more for its lines than for its pedigree. The back and front rooms were separated by weathered, floor-to-ceiling shutters wheedled out of a warehouse in Galveston. The Biedermeier-style dining-room chairs had been found on the street. It was a long time before I appreciated the painstakingly chosen art work arranged in a way that appeared casual; the whimsical decision to hang an autographed photograph of Marilyn Monroe in the bathroom (“To Buzz—I could watch you dancing forever”).

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