GAY EOPLE'S CHRONICLE

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eveningsout

A funny, sexy hope chest for partner immigration rights

by William J. Mann

Cleveland-Imagine for a moment that you lived in a country where your boyfriend or girlfriend could be deported at any moment. There would be a knock at the door and your lover would be pulled from your bed and taken away.

Imagine that you and your lover would both have to quit your jobs, sell the house and leave that nation to make a life together in a more civilized country.

What country is this? Russia? Iran? Nope. That country is the United States of America, and that is the situation that all bi-national lesbian and gay couples face here.

Solo performer Tim Miller dives into this charged material in his new show Glory Box, which is being performed at the Cleveland Public Theatre from October 11 to 14.

In a work that is disarmingly funny, pissed off, sexy and challenging Miller explores his relationship with Australian boyfriend Alistair McCartney. Glory Box charts their struggles to make a life together in the United States, a country that has no immigration rights for committed long-term gay relationships.

William Mann: So, what's a glory box? It sounds nasty.

Tim Miller: Well, it's not what you think it is! A glory box is what people in Australia call a hope chest. I looked at my life and pulled out some of the funny and sexy narratives of how my sense of relationships was shaped (i.e. fucked up) by the culture I grew up in.

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The piece dives into all kinds of juicy stuff from a wild story about asking another boy to marry me in third grade he beat me up and jammed a Twinkie down my throat-to the harrowing travails of being in a bi-national relationship with my Australian partner Alistair the U.S. government beats me up and jams its homophobic laws down my throat. I think I preferred the Twinkie.

Why Glory Box now?

Well, the clock is ticking on Alistair's student visa and we don't know what to do next. I have been so freaked out and challenged in the last couple of years by our struggle to keep Alistair in the U.S., that I decided to fight back and make a kick-ass piece that I really hope will let the audience know how completely without civil rights lesbian and gay relationships are.

I feel like people really don't understand how completely gay people`s relationships are in a second-class position to those of straight people. It is the way I've felt my rights be most challenged as a U.S. citizen. the fact that I may be forced to leave my own country to be with the man I love.

Tell me about the piece. How do you get at this very hot material, which is probably news for lots of people? And how do you make it entertaining?

Glory Box is both the most emotionally intense and the funniest piece I have ever made. There is something about the urgency of the material that brings all this out. The humor comes up in the show just as it does in life as a way of dealing with the stress of the situation.

I know that many gay people really don't

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realize that if you fall in love with someone from another country you have no ability to include that person in your life under U.S. law. Any heterosexual person can fall in love with someone of the opposite sex, marry him or her and make them a citizen. Unless their partner blew up a bridge in Bolivia or something, all heterosexual marriages are given immigration rights. On the other hand, no gay person may have the same special right that straight people take for granted. I think it's a very tangible way that we can see how unfairly U.S. culture treats our committed relationships.

Ultimately Glory Box is a hyper-romantic love story and audiences, straight and gay. relate to the show in that way. We Americans are so soppy and sentimental-it's one of the things that might save us.

What about people who say, Why should we fight to have this heterosexual institution?

I always felt that way in the past. I would say to myself, "I don't want to support a corrupt bourgeois institution, et cetera." Well, I understand that point of view, but it really rings hollow when you are facing your lover being deported, or can't get into the hospital to see your partner, or the immediate family takes away the house you left your partner because your will was not acknowledged.

The General Accounting Office in D.C. just released a list of 1,049 [federal] special rights and privileges that straight people get when they get married. I don't want anybody to feel like they have to get married. On the other hand, I want every dyke and fag who wants to marry their partner to be able to and have the same equal right of relationship that straight people have.

You are notorious for getting naked in your shows. What role does nudity play in performance?

In my own work I am more interested in exploring the most vulnerable and fucked up parts of myself in a naked performance section.

In Glory Box I get naked in a sweet section about how I used to take off all my clothes when I was a little kid, climb in my mom's wooden hope chest and snuggle info the fake chinchilla jacket to breathe in that cedardrenched world. My adult naked body in the

The Homes of Edgewater Park

Tim Miller

performance becomes sweetly redolent of childhood longing and memories and invites all the metaphors that we can cram in that hope chest with me naked.

Now, I've written this naked-in-the-hope chest stuff as a short story for the page, but there is something about my naked body in real time in the theater crammed into that hope chest on the stage that totally changes, deepens the text. It gets the words sweaty! As long as I don't get splinters in my butt, that's what I want to do: get those words to become flesh.

What will you and Alistair do to stay together?

Right now, couples like Alistair and I are offered three scenarios: your partner is deported, you break up, or you both leave the country and make a life in a more civilized nation than America.

Fortunately, Alistair has passports from two countries [Australia and the United Kingdom] that give gay people and their partners immigration rights. I have this completely romantic thought that art can change the world and that something is going to change. The unfairness of this situation is so outrageous, even President Clinton had come out last year in favor of immigration rights for lesbian and gay couples.

Meanwhile, I'm going to work my little performance art booty off to raise awareness, money and trouble with Glory Box. I want the piece to conjure for the audience a new glory box, a new kind of hope chest, that can be an alternative site for the placing of memories, hopes and dreams of gay people's extraordinary potential for love.

Glory Box plays Thursday through Sunday, October 11-14 at Cleveland Public Theater, 6415 Detroit Ave.; 216-631-2727. Performances are at 8:00 p.m.. with Sunday's matinee at 3:00p.m. Tickets are $15 and $10 for seniors and students. Discounts are available for purchasing a pass to the complete Gay Artist Series of four productions.

William J. Mann is the author of The Men From the Boys and Wisecracker. Tim Miller can be reached through his web site, http:// hometown.aol.com/millertale/

timmiller.html.

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