Tim Miller Goes Shirts & Skins

'NEA Four' Performer Puts the Past in Front of Him

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, as well as to three others, on the basis that their work was "indecent." The four artists-in addition to Miller, they included 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.

Since then, as the world has changed, so has he. Today, gay activism is not so much concerned with screaming in the streets but about more personal struggles-within relationships, our communities and ourselves-to enact change in the world. Tim Miller is still political, still challenging the system. But his focus these days is on the personal, exploring the nuances and complexities of gay life at the end of the millennium.

"It's time, I think, that we as gay men look inside more, look at our relationships and the complex soup of feelings within," he says from his home in Venice, Calif. "We have been through a lot in the last years and it's a good moment to begin looking more deeply at who we are, where we have been and where we might want to go in the future."

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 "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 from 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.

Miller will be in Chicago for a performance Sunday, Oct. 5 at Border's Books, at Clark and Diversey, 3 p.m.

WM: Your book Shirts & Skin draws a good deal from the stories in your recent shows "My Queer Body," "Naked Breath," and "Fruit Cocktail." What's been the evolution from one show to the other and from the stage to the page?

TM: "My Queer Body" was kind of peak, culture-war terrain, highly inflated politics. I think "Naked Breath" was a little humbler. It was made after the demise of ACT UP, with AIDS feeling much more complicated and permanent. In some ways that piece was really about blood, about intimacy-moving away from political cheerleading or prognosticating. It was far more personal in many ways: "I remember the day I cut off the end of my finger and was comforted by my boyfriend John, who's since died of AIDS." I think I was getting more interested in being more literary-the source was more the writing. And then "Fruit Cocktail" was really diving into personal memoir, because I was writing that piece for Patrick Merla's book (Boys Like Us, Avon Books, 1996). It was the first time I'd ever really made a whole show that was around one narrative, a 48-hour period of my life when I was 18 and coming out and having sex. So I think these pieces, this highly literary solo performance work I've been doing, helped me dive more into the writing, getting more specific, and hopefully a little more nuanced and honest with all this stuff.

WM: So it's been an evolution towards the act of writing, finding the power from the written word?

TM: Yeah, I think the impulse for the pieces has become more about the act of writing rather than 'Oh, I want to do this theater image.' Writing is such a sustaining, soul-feeding kind of activity.

WM: More so than performing?

TM: Oh, I don't know, maybe just for me right now, as my life changes.

WM: 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?

TM: 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.

WM: In other words, you don't want to be taking your clothes off and screaming when you're 40.

TM: 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 travelling all over the country doing this new performance also called "Shirts & Skin."

WM: Why "Shirts & Skin"?

TM: 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 a journey through my life and this dirty laundry of these shirts.

WM: In your book, Shirts & Skin, you didn't just gather the scripts of your performance pieces, but you have created something quite different.

TM: 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 300-page 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 self-knowledge 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.

WM: Both with autobiographical writing and in novels, people are curious how "true" is it. They get obsessed with the idea. How much is based on real life? How have you negotiated this particular minefield?

TM: Well, I am firmly in the capital C creative non-fiction wing of things! Just as in my performance work I created a persona named Tim Miller who I then put through various challenges and labors, I felt that at a certain point I was practically writing a novel based on some events in my life. In my mythopoetic world-where I am capable of remembering my first moment as a queer sperm when I encountered the dyke ovum-I have tried to not be oppressively concerned with "truth." I see Shirts & Skin as a kind of magic-real autobiography.

WM: The book deals a great deal with sex and relationships. This seems to be the new frontier for gay men in the '90s.

TM: 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 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.

WM: It seems we're at a moment where we need to tell ourselves some new stories about relationships.

TM: 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 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.

WM: And up until recently there hasn't been a lot of literature about this.

TM: 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.

WM: And create new models.

TM: 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.

WM: 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."

TM: "Old dog." "New trick." (Laughter) 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 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.

WM: So after the book and after the tour, will there be more writing?

TM: 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" characters. 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.

WM: It's good to know we haven't lost the Tim Miller naked body shock theater.

TM: No, no. It may just be dawning.

William J. Mann is the author of The Men From the Boys (Dutton) and Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood's First Openly Gay Star, forthcoming from Viking in February.

Excerpt from 'Shirts & Skin'

In 1975, at the beginning of my senior year, I finally completely figured out that I liked boys. I was the last one on the block to realize this, but better late than never. The understanding finally hit me with all the subtlety of a sixteen wheel tractor trailer. One afternoon during physical education, my U.S.M.C.-trained gym teacher divided us into two teams for touch football. The coach used two time-honored techniques to create these teams. First he had us endure the excruciating process of choosing the teams. This served the purpose of ritually humiliating the scrawny, the sensitive, and the clumsy. I would usually be picked third or fourth from last. I made sure I could play these games well enough so that I could avoid the total obliteration of being picked last. The coach watched the torture of this selection process with a Dr. Mengele-like demeanor. The last boy chosen, Ross-who-only-had-one-kidney, slunk off under the barrage of taunts from his teammates.

Then came the second part of this ordeal: the coach divided us up into two teams, Shirts & Skins. The Shirts got to keep their Lowell High School T-shirts on. The Skins had to peel down to our skinny chests. This system allowed the two teams to identify their opponents without the fuss of different colored jerseys. I would always pray that I would be a Shirt. I was afraid all my secrets would be exposed if I stripped down to bare skin with eight other boys. Of course this particular day, as it always seemed to happen, I ended up on the Skins team. This time it seemed that I had been chosen for something more than a team for football. I felt that somehow that single flip of the coin had exposed me, had marked me for what I was, a young gay man. Reluctantly I peeled out of my T-shirt, folded it neatly and placed it on the bleachers. My skin smarting from the gaze of my the other boys, I ran out to the football field hoping no one called me fag. With that first huddle of the Skins, I felt these other boys heat and smooth bodies against my sides. At that moment, I knew. No more time-outs. No more inchoate groping towards the Ralph Higgs and Roger Blaneys of the world. I was always going to be on the team where the boys took their clothes off and got close to each other. It felt like somehow the die was cast. I was on the Skins team for life. I could cover up and slip into different shirts and disguises, but underneath it all I would always be there with the other boys who were stripped bare. We would always be recognizable as a different team. The rules would always be stacked against us. As we broke the huddle with a grunt and a slap of one anothers' butts, the game had begun. In an hour we would be stripped even more bare when we went naked, except for our desires, into the showers to scrub the mud and grass from our growing bodies.