Alan Cumming on His Father, His Memoir & Mourning His Dog

Photography by Jake Chessum courtesy of Backstage

"I don't [have any regrets] in my life in any way actually," Alan Cumming recently told Out's Jerry Portwood. "I really believe if you're happy with where you are, everything that's happened to you leading up to that has contributed to that regretting anything would mean it would change that." It's an important point now that Cumming -- who is currently starring in both the Broadway revival of Cabaret and filming CBS's The Good Wifesimultaneously--has published his memoir, Not My Father's Son, opens up about his troubled relationship with his father, a man who abused him both physically and emotionally, as well as disturbing revelations about his grandfather, a man he never knew.

In a new interview with FourTwoNine's Kevin Sessums, Cumming--as brutally honest in person as he is on the page--talks more about his parents, mourns the passing of his dog Honey, and his activism around circumcision.

On his late dog, Honey:

For the last couple of weeks, I haven't been eating the way I should. My dog Honey died, and I've been in mourning. Because of that, I haven't been eating proper meals. I've been grazing. She was fourteen. A collie/shepherd mix. She was lovely. She had a great life. She had cancer, and it got really awful toward the end. But she had this really beautiful last weekend. I had all the Kit Kat Klub boys up to my house in the Catskills, and you could tell she was really happy to have them around.

On what he hopes people glean from his memoir:

In the course of documenting it all and writing it down, I realized that what is really weird about abuse in any form is that for the abuser and the person who is abused, the more it goes on--the more it goes unchecked and is not commented on or dealt with--it becomes regular. It becomes normal. It becomes acceptable. So what I am doing with my story is that by putting it out into the world, it will never be acceptable. People will be reading it and going, "My God," and maybe some people will realize that their own abuse in their own lives is not acceptable either.

On his father:

He will, in a way, be part of my life forever. And he will become a presence once more, and it will all become churned up again, because people will talk about it once the book is out. But I don't know why my mother and brother and I have to continue to protect him, which is what I discovered we were doing as I was writing the book. It was such a huge thing that happened to us. We should acknowledge it.

On Monogamy:

[Cumming and his husband, Grant] don't have an open relationship. What I do believe is that monogamy is not a natural state, and it is not something we are conditioned to do as animals. So in my own life, I realized it's not possible, and I don't pretend I can do it. And also if you are kind and you are honest and you are faithful in a true way, then it is not the worst thing that could happen--that you have a little something on the side.

On Foreskins:

I think circumcision is genital mutilation. There is a reason you have foreskin. It was only when I came to America that I realized what a common practice circumcision is. I'd show my penis to people, and they'd go, 'Oh my God! What's that?' They were so amazed and utterly unused to and unexposed to the natural body of a man. I thought that was a shocking thing. I was gobsmacked by that. I mean, you lose sensation there if you're circumcised. From my point of view as a sexual and sensual person, the idea that you would hack away at that and lose sensitivity and nerve endings on the most pleasurable and sensitive part of your body is terrible. It all builds into my idea of America being shameful about sex and so puritanical."

Not My Father's Son is available now.