Body Blows

Front matter

SIX PERFORMANCES

WITH A FOREWORD BY Tony Kushner

PHOTOGRAPHS BY Dona Ann McAdams

Contents

Foreword ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction XV Some Golden States 3

Stretch Marks 35 My Queer Body 79 Naked Breath 123 Fruit Cocktail 169 Glory Box 203

Miller, Tim. Body Blows: Six Performances. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, https://doi.org/10.3368/KRWD8051. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Foreword

As a tribute to Tim, I’m typing this naked.

No, really, I am. I have never typed naked before. It would no more occur to me to type naked, in the ordinary course of things, than to eat dinner naked, which I have also never done and probably never will. My mother would not have approved, to put it mildly. I grew up in Louisiana, and Tim grew up in California, and that’s probably the difference, nudity being a West Coast kind of thing, or so it always seemed to me. In Louisiana we had too many mosquitoes. But thanks to Tim, here I am typing naked. I am missing my clothes. I am wishing I was twenty-one. Or thirty-one, even. I am noticing ways in which I am forty-five. It’s interesting, typing naked. I am trying not to look down at my ... hoo-hah, as we used to say in Louisiana.

Read Tim Miller and you think about your body. Tim performs so many functions for his community: artist, hero, griot, goad, gadfly, crush material. One of these functions, somewhere in between artist and hero and goad, is his serving to remind those of us who need reminding that the movement that has transformed

Miller, Tim. Body Blows: Six Performances. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, https://doi.org/10.3368/KRWD8051. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor x / BODY BLOWS our lives—let’s call it the sexual minoritarian liberation movement— is an affair of naked bodies, the bodies of others and Others and of one’s own body as well. Tim reminds us that liberation means trying something new. Well, he doesn’t just remind us: he shocks and exhorts and teases and dares us, he invites/seduces/entices us to renew our understanding of liberation as a politics of eros, cathexis, astonishment, as a willingness to try something new, to make and to be made new. For so many of us sexual minoritarians, for so many of us Americans (all of us heirs to and indebted to various revolutions in the name of freedom) liberation has become a depressingly over-rehearsed, routinized consumption of ossified fetishes, rainbow necklaces, internet porn; and then there are those of us who claim the road to liberation wends a backwards way through membership in the GOP, or through the commodification and marketing of “post-liberation” self-ascontrarian-libertarian internet columnist. For all of us, Tim Miller’s many functions are aspects of one absolutely necessary function: artist /articulator of the two inescapable truths of revolution, of liberation: be brave enough to move forward, and know where you’ve come from.

In this book you will meet (or renew acquaintance with) one of the real originals, a man whose writing and performing, whose epic, Herculean labor is shaping an antithesis to both the shrunken selves of consumerism and the shriveled selves of creeping conservatism. Tim is self-declaring, self-critical, self-analytical, self-celebrating in the full-throated Whitmanic mode, democratically, expansively self-celebrating. Tim sings that song of the self which interrogates, with explosive, exploding, subversive joy and freedom, the constitution and the borderlines of selfhood. He is one of selfhood’s internationalist activists. For the truly imaginative mind, for the truly adventuresome spirit, for the truly living heart, introspection, memory, interiority do not lead one into isolation and implosion. Self-exploration is revealed by work like Tim’s to be only another path, perhaps the highest, truest path, to the

Miller, Tim. Body Blows: Six Performances. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, https://doi.org/10.3368/KRWD8051. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

FOREWORD / xi world at large, to other people, to the communal, the social, the political. Proust knew this, and Tim is in some ways like Proust, a compulsive converter of lived experience into art, of self into art, of memory into art; only Tim is happier and healthier and he likes people more than Proust did and Tim isn’t French and Tim gets out of bed and leaves the cork-lined room.

Tim probably doesn’t even have a cork-lined room. Does he actually have a fixed address? He is Johnny Appleseed, the Wandering Jew, he’s not only gotten out of bed, he seems never to sleep, he’s traveled all over the country and the world, he seems always to be in a new town, he must have met more gay men than Kinsey. Tim’s writings—what to call them? I hate calling them “pieces,” they’re too complete; “plays” implies fiction, lying, so that’s no good; “essays” conjures visions of tweed jackets patched at the elbows, of professional opinion-mongering mutts like, oh never mind; “monologues” is uncomfortably redolent of stand-up comedy, auditions, of monofocus, solipsism, monotony—anyway, Tim’s writings form a history of what it is to be one kind of gay man, one kind of queer, one kind of sexual minoritarian in America from the days immediately preceding the advent of the plague, from the days of the plague called Reaganism through the plague years of AIDS and into the present, when both of those plagues are still with us, political and biological viruses ceaselessly mutating to evade our defenses. Tim is a veteran of both wars, the war against AIDS, the war against the Reaganite /Gingrichite /Bushist counter-revolution. He is the quintessential artist-as-activist, proof that you can do it and live to tell about it (if you’re lucky). Tim has come to us, in 2001, scarred but not bowed, and his presence in this impossible time—who believed some of us would still be here?—at this impossibly advanced calendar date, Tim Miller in 2001 is, to me and I would imagine to many of us, a paradoxical figure of grieving and action, of mourning and resistance. His work promises: the viruses will be stomped. And it ceaselessly reminds/cautions: but only through our efforts.

Miller, Tim. Body Blows: Six Performances. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, https://doi.org/10.3368/KRWD8051. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor xii / BODY BLOWS

I saw Tim’s Paint Yrself Red/Me & Mayakovsky at PS 122 in Manhattan more than twenty years ago. I went because he looked cute on the poster and because I was so excited to find a gay man making art about Mayakovsky! I found not the revolutionary nostalgia I imagined but an amalgam of that tradition and everything that was contemporaneously cool, smart and sexy, progressive— I found Mayakovsky’s animus in Manhattan, the hots I’d carried for the doomed wildman of Red October smoldered afresh. I encountered an artist capable, at his best, of eliding the ostensibly insuperable barrier separating the political and the personal, the political and the aesthetic, whirling incommensurables into a vortex from which new meaning flows. And I discovered that one could be multitudinous even when alone onstage.

So what else to say? You think you don’t need to hear such singing? You think you don’t need to type nude? You think Tim won’t make you do it? He will! You do! You must! Read the book! Turn the page already and get started! Finish the book already and get active! Tim is here to tell us: Our work is far from finished. And our lives depend on our action, on our engagement. Here is a reasonable manual for engaging: the heart, the mind, the spirit, the body. Go forth and be like Tim.

I have to put my clothes back on. Without pants, my butt is sorer than I think it would otherwise have been from this much sitting. So I have discovered that pants apparently cushion the butt. Who knew?

Tony Kushner

Miller, Tim. Body Blows: Six Performances. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The Universit Downloaded on behalf of University of Mic f Wisconsin Press, 2002, https://doi.org/10.3368/KRWD8051. zan, Ann Arbor

Acknowledgments

Though this book now hangs out on a shelf or bedstand, it really was birthed on the stages of theaters, universities, and performance spaces all over the world. I feel lucky to have had these works nurtured by so many heroic arts organizers who gather their communities and make events happen on a dream, a song, and sometimes even out of their own checkbooks. Each of these venues— and there are hundreds I could mention—is gathering the artists, energies, audiences, and activists in their communities to make the fiercest culture possible. I thank them all.

I want also to thank a few of the friends, co-conspirators, and colleagues who have helped bring my performances and writing forward. I am deeply grateful to David Roman, Glen Johnson, Holly Hughes, Jeff McMahon, Annie Sprinkle, Mark Ball, Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, Mark Russell, Ken Foster, Jill Dolan, Martin Sherman, Linda Frye Burnham, Joan Hotchkis, Ian McKellen, Donald Hutera, William J. Mann, Danielle Brazell, Abe Ryebeck, David Schweizer, Robert Pela, Rhonda Blair, Mel Andringa and

Miller, Tim. Body Blows: Six Performances. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, https://doi.org/10.3368/KRWD8051. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor xiv / BODY BLOWS

I am eternally grateful to my dear friend Dona Ann McAdams and thank her for twenty years of photographic and psychic support. All the images in this volume are used with her kind permission.

Finally I thank my partner Alistair for his open heart and constant support in my work and in our life together over the years. I dedicate this book to him in gratitude for the love, grounding, and inspiration he offers me so generously.

Miller, Tim. Body Blows: Six Performances. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, https://doi.org/10.3368/KRWD8051. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor