Tim Miller has been fighting the government for 25 years. Perhaps most famously, the queer solo performer was one of the “NEA Four” who, in 1990, successfully sued the National Endowment for the Arts to reinstate their censored arts grants. Miller has also been a full-time culture warrior since the Culture War got its name. Having soldiered through not one but two Bush regimes, he’s witnessed many of our government’s most chilling feints and machinations, regularly wrangling his political concerns into the solo performance that is his life’s work. Still, when we chat on the morning after the State of the Union address, two days after the appointment of Samuel Alito, I have to ask: Did he ever think it would get this bad?
“My stock answer is no,” says Miller, “But let me make sure that’s true…” (Such contemporaneous internal fact checking, I imagine, will be a byproduct of the James Frey debacle.) “When I was an out gay teen in ‘70s California, if anyone told me it would one day get this bad, I never would’ve believed it. But in 1978, after Harvey Milk was assassinated, you got the idea it could. Now, to be living in 2006, with this level of lying and insanity… Five or six years ago, I assumed most vexing thing would be immigration.”
As the American half of a gay bi-national couple, Miller is denied the right to legally wed—and thus earn a Green Card for—his Australian partner. “Making the show, never sure how long Alistair can stay, I kept coming back to the feeling of not being welcome. The working title was What's Wrong with Us? I meant it literally. What’s wrong with Alistair and me, partners who want to live in the same country? And what’s wrong with us, the United States? Were we beaten as a child? We’re at least one or two generations behind all other advanced nations…”
Miller stops his rant midstream. Stridency, he knows, is the enemy of art, and throughout his career, he’s balanced political fury with two of the most reliable tools in the performance artist’s shed: humor and nudity. All of Miller’s shows have moments of good humor, and if he’s not nude in every one, he’s stripped often enough to place the image of a naked Tim Miller alongside Spalding Gray at his desk and Karen Finley covered in something brown in the hall of performance-art archetypes.
To balance the rhetoric in Us, his latest piece, Miller drew from a classic repository of cheer during wartime—musicals, a lifelong obsession Miller credits with instilling his lefty activism. “The world of the great American musicals feels infinitely more forward-thinking than the world of George Bush,” says Miller. “The mixed-race South Pacific, Fiddler’s gay-marriage sympathies… if the world felt more like a musical, I'd be happier about paying taxes.”
(Us will be at Consolidated Works Feb 16-19: 500 Boren Ave N, 800-838-3006. $12–$20. Thurs–Sat at 8 pm.)
daves@thestranger.com
