Tim Miller Bares Queer Body In Original Stage Performance

My Queer Body, performed by Tim Miller on October 4 and 5

Appropriately chosen Morrissey music hummed in the background, while the audience, primarily composed of gay male couples, filtered in. There was a certain sense of isolation involved in being in the midst of a group where everyone knew everyone else, and greetings between them flew thick and fast.

While waiting for the self-proclaimed "activist [and] slutty queer point of light," Tim Miller, to appear on stage, people cracked loud jokes about this being "such the family night," and these being "the real family values."

Miller entered from the back of the theater with a line that was a fair indication of what was to come. "I guess you could call this a rear entry," he declared blandly. Those familiar with Miller's work should know that, with this highly personal performance, he has taken a step in a new direction.

Of course, there was an unabashed political overtone to this event, sponsored by GLAD (Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders): Miller exhorted his audience to vote, and to vote Democrat, with the pithy observation that we "really can't take four more years of shit." Nevertheless, the overall focus was firmly on being gay and being Tim Miller.

Miller was dressed with conspicuous informality; almost as a self-parody, with his black jeans, black leather jacket and, naturally, the metaphorical heart on his sleeve: a pink triangle, stark against the black.

Working on the premise that homosexuals have a far greater awareness of the flesh--having been taught since childhood to suppress its desires and control its longings--he began by "summoning the body," and traipsed his way through the audience, extolling the praise of one man's foot, a woman's fingers. Then, towards the end of the show, he summoned the body again. But this time, these were the fingers of a friend, trampled and broken by policemen at a gay rights rally, or the smashed arm of someone victimized in a "queer-bashing" incident.

But since this was essentially Miller's own story, he began at the beginning--as a queer "spermlet" swimming upstream in search of an egg to fertilizer. Then, having in a sense created himself, he passed through an infancy surrounded by "mini dykes and fags" to puberty, when he "tried to use Noxzema to jerk off," to AIDS and the election of Ronald Reagan. By this time, he was spitting out his words in an angry spray of saliva that drifted over the first few rows of the audience.

Miller's performance was intensely physical: He snapped his suspenders incessantly, or gripped frenziedly at his mouth when describing his first kiss, speaking raptly of the meeting of tongues, the taste of gums, the feel of the roof of the mouth. And then, under the glare of a red light, he stripped off his clothes, trying to erase the disgust and guilt instilled in him as a child. However, this act was slightly spoiled by our haunting certainly that he might not have been so ready to bare his childhood "shame" if he had not had such a slender, youthful, muscular body to take pride in.

Miller often used four letter words, and offensive terms such as "dyke," "fag," or "half-man," but his method of delivering them, and his acceptance of them as a matter of course somehow reclaimed them from obscenity...when he talked about his experience as "a young fag in love, scared shitless," it was touching and funny, never discomfiting.

However, Miller's habit of blending comedy with tragedy was often oddly unsettling. He crooned about his teenage boyfriend over the sway of ironically wailing violins. Or he waxed philosophical about the fact that "our bodies are only good for death"--stopping every ten seconds to adjure his penis in a harsh whisper to "get hard" and provide him with the grand final be that he needed.

Miller's minimal use of props was also interesting. A silver cross slung around his neck jingled against the high school ring given him by his boyfriend "from Anaheim." He also cradled a piece of solidified lava to his chest as he talked about the "eruption" of AIDS that had buried so many of his friends.

But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Tim Miller's performance was the effort he made to break down mental boundaries: between himself and the audience as he perched naked on a young man's lap, or asked a woman to stroke his chest, right above the heart. He broke down the boundaries between male and female, in a surrealistic fantasy scene where he visualized himself giving birth (Via the anus) to the bodies of all his dead friends, as he recreated them by talking about them.

And, above all, Miller dissolved the line dividing truth from fallacy. At the end of his performance, the announced: "I lied," without specifying what he had lied about. It is not important, surely, whether the details of his life which he mentioned were fact or fiction--it was enough the to know that they could have been true, and that such things had almost certainly happened to someone else.

There are certainly times when Miller's monologue is a little too full of slick lines: when he asks God rhetorically why he has been spared death from AIDS while so many of his friends have died, or when he, as the spokesman for all gay men, urges them to "bare our souls and our buttholes." But his vision of life and love is enduring: lovers are "naked in the sight of each other, who are the only ones who matter," or, more bluntly: "We can't let these right-wing fuckheads tell us how to fuck."

Miller, aware of the fragility of life, told the audience to "savor your body's blink between being born and dying," which in the context of AIDS and the death of religion is one of the few options left to anyone anyway.