GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE March 14, 2008

evel

Doing the math

Hundreds of hotel beds have affected Tim Miller's life on the road, and a few have changed it a lot

by William J. Mann

Throughout the '90s and into the new millennium, performer and writer Tim Miller has worked at the intersection of performance, politics, and identity, using his personal experiences to create fierce and funny explorations of life as a gay American man.

His performances and books have ricocheted from the perils and joys of sex and relationships to the struggles of political disenfranchisement and artistic censorship. In his new book 1001 Beds (University of Wisconsin Press, edited by Glen Johnson), we have the most complete Miller yet—a raucous collection of his performance scripts, essays, interviews, journal entries, and photographs, as well as his recent stage piece "Us."

1001 Beds-and the performance based on the book that Miller will be touring in Ohio the next few weeks brings together the personal, communal, and national political strands that have fueled his work from its beginnings and ultimately define Miller's place as a contemporary artist, activist, and gay man.

This intimate sometimes really intimate-autobiographical collage of Miller's professional and personal life reveals one of the celebrated creators of a crucial contemporary art form and a tireless advocate for the American dream of political equality for all citizens.

Miller is no stranger to controversy. He was one of the notorious "NEA 4" performance artists who had their National Endowment for the Arts grants taken away in 1990 for the content of their work, a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. His performances have been at the center of the culture wars, the fights against AIDS, the battle for marriage equality and the struggle for lesbian and gay culture for all of the 1990s and into the new century.

Miller's partner Alistair McCartney will be touring with him, promoting his new novel The End of the World Book. This amazing queer encyclopedic novel heralds the arrival of a daring new voice in queer literature, the literary equivalent of Todd Haynes collaged post modern films, Slava Mogutin's edgy urban photographs, Hernan

Bas' paintings of decadent dandies, and the Magnetic Fields' music, merging irony and classic poignant pop.

As Dennis Cooper, author of The Sluts and God Jr wrote of the book, "If I've read

a more deeply impressive, beautiful, sweeping, mindful, and innovative first novel than Alistair McCartney's The End of the World Book, I have no memory of it. McCartney is a writer of peerless, brilliant originality and pure, giant talent.”

Miller's performance 1001 Beds is a raucous and rowdy exploration of Miller's adventures in his travels through love, politics and art. From a gay teen's head-on collision with life in a sleazy hotel across the street from the Hollywood Bowl to an ecstatic queer vision of a sex-positive future on a mattress in a police holding cell, Miller's 1001 Beds is a fiercely funny, sexy and

Dykes Towatch Out For by Alison Bechdel

parental unit

524

OUR CAREER GALS HAVE TAKEN THE SAME BUS AFTER WORK.

YOU NEED TO TALK TO HIM EVERY DAY! I CAN'T

DO THIS ON MY OWN.

TONI, I DO TALK

TO HIM EVERY DAY!

I SAID I'D CALL

BACK. HE WAS WITH HIS FRIENDS.

211

HIS STONER FRIENDS. OH. I GOTTA GO, GLORIA'S CALLING.

inspiring story about the transforming power of art and the richness of gay identity lived out loud.

William J. Mann: So tell us about 1001 Beds.

Tim Miller: 1001 Beds is a collection of my essays, performances, manifestos, performance touring stories from Tokyo to Chattanooga and my tell-way-too-much journals. There is also a fun and fierce new performance based on excerpts from the book which will be touring all over the place, including my shows in Cleveland, Miami University and Ohio Wesleyan.

A thousand and one beds... You have been a busy man! It sounds nasty. Does that mean what we think it means?

It is a kinky and funny journey through the beds and hotels and life on the road as a traveling salesman-oops, I mean a performance artist! I was doing the math recently and I figured that if I continue to tour as a performer for another twenty years, I will end up sleeping in at least 1,000 hotel beds in my lifetime on the road. For maximum poetic oomph, let's say a thousand and one.

TROUBLE?

Do you "do the math" in your life a lot? It's always dangerous to do that.

Yes. We like imagining the 25,000 or so sunrises you get to greet, but try pondering how many swimming pools of coffee you will drink or rooms full of hot dogs you will suck down in a lifetime. Swimming pools of coffee! Weenie infinity!

It is this dangerous love of life-statistics that made me calculate, when I was seventeen, how much semen I was likely to ejaculate over the course of a lifetime. I figured, based on a reasonable per-orgasm average of 1 tablespoon, cumming at least three times each day until I was 35, somewhat less since then, I was going to fill two large Hefty garbage bags with cum. Not a sexy thought!

What do all these beds and travels mean to you?

It seems important to think about those beds. To let them wash over me, crush me with their rusty springs, dust mites and polyester comforters that Holiday Inn will never once wash! When I was a kid, I once saw, in a Ripley's Believe it or Not book, a monument to a bed. The image was a four-poster Continued on page 10

SNEP

SOUNDS APPEALING.

DON'T GET ME WRONG, I MISS RAFFI, BUT I DON'T MISS THE NUCLEAR FAMILY MADNESS.

IT'S SO NICE TO KNOW I HAVE THE WHOLE EVENING TO MYSELF. NO RELATIONSHIP DRAMA? NO KID ANGST!

Hill 08

OBA

CBAMACE

VOTE

STAND FOR

OBAMA

Hillary

CHANGE

WHY NOT? YOU DID IT

THAT WAS A TOTALLY DIFFERENT SITUATION. PLUS I WAS IN COLLEGE! YOU'RE ONLY SIXTEEN!

YOU'RE SUCH A HYPOCRITE! HOW DO YOU EXPECT ANYTHING TO EVER CHANGE?

STOMP

UH... DRUGS?

OR SEX?

WHATEVER.

NEITHER.

NOT AS MUCH AS I HAD LIVING THERE. I KINDA LIKE PARENTING VIA REMOTE.

SHE WANTS TO JOIN THE SPEAKER'S BUREAU OF THE QUEER YOUTH GROUP AND GO INTO SCHOOLS TO TALK ABOUT BEING TRANS.

www.DykesToWatchOutfor.com

WHAT'S THE

PROB-

GOD, A HIGH SCHOOL'S THE LAST PLACE YOU'D

WANT TO SEE JANIS.

THANK YOU, CLARICE. I'M GLAD SOMEONE GETS IT.

LEM?

STOMP

SLAM!

BOTH.

UHH... SO

WHAT'S THE

PROBLEM?

TEN 10% TRIB

CALIFORNIA HATE CRIME: 15-YR. OLD GENDER NONCONFORMING BOY KILLED BY

CLASSMATE

UHH..SURE, JASMINE.

10% TRE