12 GAY PEOPle's ChroNICLE OCTOBER 23, 1998
EVENINGS OUT
The queer mind behind Tim Miller's queer body
by William J. Mann
In 1990, Tim Miller-naked butt and all-was spread out in Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair and nearly every gay magazine around the country, as well as on the evening
news.
That's when John Frohnmayer, then the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, denied funding to him and three others on the basis that their work was "indecent." The four artists-Miller, Holly Hughes, Karen Finley and John Fleck-decided to sue, and promptly launched a nationwide debate over the public funding of art, not to mention a drawn-out series of court cases.
Tim Miller's work has always been both intensely political and deeply personal. Known for getting naked on stage and sitting on the lap of some unsuspecting audience member, he's never had a reputation for subtlety.
When he performed his performance piece My Queer Body to standing-room-only crowds all over the country, it may have been his "NEA Four" notoriety that sold tickets along with the promise that he'd reveal his adorable butt, legs, and stomach but it was the fierce message of noncomplicity that one walked away with.
That message reverberates strongly in his first book, Shirts and Skin, published this fall by Alyson Books. As part of his more personal approach to his art and activism, Miller has penned this memoir/novel/ essay collection to take stock of gay life in the 1990s. He charts, with insightful and hilarious passage, the tumultuous ride we've been on for the last ten years.
Even more importantly, he points a direction towards the future.
William J. Mann: Do you feel you're moving from being a performer to a writer? You were always a writer, obviously, in that you wrote your own pieces, but are you getting to a place where you'd define yourself as a writer over a performer?
Tim Miller: I would say that this book is by far the most exciting and creative thing I've ever done. You know, I'm also 39, and realizing there's a real frustration in making all these performances that then disappear. I love the fact that I can write the stories down and people can then read them and I don't have to run around and take off my clothes and scream to make it happen. That's actually quite appealing for me right now.
In other words, you don't want to be taking your clothes off and screaming when you're 40.
Oh, I hope I'll still be doing that. But I also like the idea that people will be able to read this stuff too. It just feels like a new focus. My writing has always been a strong part of my work. It's just really jumped forward. The performing is still a huge part of who I am. In fact, I've created a new performance of excerpts from my book and
I'll be traveling all over the country doing this new performance, also called Shirts & Skin.
Why Shirts & Skin? What does the title draw us towards?
As I worked on the stories, I was struck by how important it seemed what kind of shirt I was wearing in each time of life, Patti Smith T-shirt in one year and Silence = Death in another. These shirts became big identity markers for me.
This mixed in with a powerful memory of a day during phys ed in high school when our coach divided us boys into the two teams, the Shirts and the Skins, which at the time hit me like a cinder block of being exposed as a shirtless queer boy. The book is journey through my life and this dirty laundry of these shirts.
In your book Shirts & Skin, you didn't just gather the scripts of your performance pieces, but you have created something quite different.
When I looked at my performance works over the last dozen or so years, I wanted to not just create a book of scripts but to pull out the big chronological narrative through line.
Since 1985 I've made these eight solo autobiographical pieces that have been charting, in an idiosyncratic way, my life story. So I've ripped all the pieces apart and rewritten everything and formed it into a kind of picaresque novel of my adventures. I've even subtitled things with "In which . . .” So it's really the stories from the shows and a bunch of new stuff-which I hope make this interesting life journey around being a queer man in the last 20 years.
In Shirts & Skin I wanted to dig deeper in the writing. You have very little time in a performance to make your point. In a 300page book I am able to write the stories in a much more detailed way, get more precise with the feelings and images that I am working with.
For example, in the comparative roominess of the book I can enjoy the proper leisurely, literary description of a man's cock as I compare it to a particular curving bit of Interstate 35 north of Austin, Texas for a couple of paragraphs! Just like they taught us to in creative writing in high school! It's fun.
More importantly, I hope at this point in my life I have acquired a little bit more selfknowledge about my life than I had a decade ago too that I can bring to the writing. I wanted to take all the narratives in my shows and weave them into a kind of picaresque memoir that is a unified work.
The book deals a great deal with sex and relationships. This seems to be the new frontier for gay men in the '90s.
In my life sex and love have been the site of my greatest learning and change.
I have discovered a lot about myself through the sweaty sex places I have gone to. Shirts & Skin is really a tribute to the men who have journeyed with me, fought with
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me, fucked with me. I have tried in this book to chart the shifting ways I have intimately related to other men in my life. The book is a lot about relationships and what we call them and how we create them and define them.
It seems we're at a moment where we need to tell ourselves some new stories about relationships.
I agree. The old narratives told us that you would meet your dream man. Or that you or your boyfriend would get sick and die. These were very important stories for us to tell in books and performances, but a much more complicated narrative is that we keep living, keep having complicated relationships.
Your book The Men From the Boys explores this space in a way that I found incredibly useful. I was also going Tim Miller through changes in a relationship of many years and I needed to read that story you told in your book.
Shirts & Skin is about that too-how our relationships become more complicated as we get older but how we don't exile them, or sever them. How we meet new people who challenge us in new ways. How we discard old formulas because they don't work. Millennial things like that.
And up until recently there hasn't been a lot of literature about this.
You know, in a way, AIDS put that whole discussion on hold. I think you're right, it is a new frontier, something we need to be talking about, writing about. People are living longer. It's almost shocking how little writing there is out there around the intricacies of our relationships-how they change, what they mean, how we feel. And create new models.
Yes. I'm looking at how relationships don't have to be about merging totally into another person. A relationship could be about being a teacher, having loving intimate lovers, or about having a hub of friends. Although it's interesting how much being a lover-having a relationship-really is centered around sharing a space together, creating a daily routine. That's very important. I've lived in that kind of "marriage mode," and it's a good way to live life. But it's full of very hard places and feelings too.
The last chapter of Shirts & Skin is the most revealing, where the book goes into your current relationships with writer Doug Sadownick and Alistair McCartney, a young performance artist from Australia. They're both in your life today. It gets into the whole struggle gay men have about defining our relationships. "First lover." "Ex-lover." “Current lover."
"Old dog." "New trick." [Laughs] This final chapter doesn't have the distance in time that much of the other work has. It was the hardest part to write. Shirts & Skin ends with the story about my situation in the last three years where the old model of my marriage with Doug—with lots of men on the side-no longer worked for me.
I feel like I've entered a time that is more sober and complicated. A time where I am more deeply in relation to myself at the same time as in two very different relationships: my changed yet ongoing 15-year connection with Doug and my relationship the last three years with my boyfriend, Alistair.
The final chapter in the book is also
called "Shirts and Skins,” which is about
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DONA ANN MCADAMS
this very bizarre coincidence that when I met Alistair in London he was wearing the exact same shirt that was Doug's favorite, a most consecrated shirt portraying the Jewish Kabalah. I've only seen two of these shirts in my life, and it was Alistair's favorite shirt as well.
I have been in a relationship firestorm these last years that has really challenged and changed me. Today, we all three do our laundry at my house, and so often these shirts are right next to each other. It's actually quite a lovely image. The shirts of these two men feel quite alive.
I live by myself these days in relation to both these men, though still with the increasingly sage-like dog Buddy. Doug refers to me as his "Former Current Boyfriend" or "Soul Buddy." I am extremely close to Doug. He's the man I grew up with. But I've also opened myself to Alistair, a young man who has shaken my world in many good
ways.
There is lots of loss and hurt in all of this but a great deal of new life as well.
So after the book and after the tour, will there be more writing?
Yeah, I'm working on another book, without having the burden of telling my sprawling life story. It's a novel with a real limited time span and thinly veiled “fictional" char-
acters.
I also teach a lot. I'm a professor at Cal State Los Angeles, and still artistic director at Highways [a performance space in Santa Monica], battling the odds of nonprofit surviving into the new millennium.
Alistair and I have been creating a performance duet called Carnal Garage that premiered in San Francisco last spring. It's full of great physical performance stuff like burning body-hair and hooking our cocks together with battery jumper cables. It's good to know we haven't lost the Tim Miller naked body shock theater. No, no. It may just be dawning.
Tim Miller's solo performance work based on Shirts and Skin will be at Cleveland Public Theater, 6415 Detroit Avenue, October 29 through November 1. For more information, call the theater at 216631-2727.
William J. Mann is the author of The Men From the Boys and the forthcoming Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood's First Openly Gay Star.