“I climbed up into the enormous letter “O” on the Hollywood sign high in the hills above Los Angeles. This was in 1984 when you could still scamper up the Hollywood Hills goat paths and get close to the huge, world-famous landmark. If you were brave enough to confront the scary precarity and climb up one of the several stories tall letters, you had a perfect moment in time and space that must be recorded. I seem to be wearing hot pants and a crop top, a young gay boy’s uniform of the time when returning home to hot L.A. from chilly NYC and risking his life climbing the decrepit Hollywood sign.”
This excerpt is taken from the introduction of Tim Miller’s newest book, “A Body in the O.” In that “young gay boy’s uniform” he, starting in the late 70s, forged new ground as a performer, activist, and writer who reminds us “the personal is political.”
Miller has been a defining force in queer culture in the intervening decades; his performances have challenged censorship, confronted power, and carved out space for queer voices at moments when visibility itself was an act of resistance. Miller’s work is fearless, embodied, deeply human, humorous, and committed to artistic freedom.
Miller’s work was spotlighted when he was one of four artists whose funding was revoked by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990, a moment that galvanized national conversations around censorship, queer expression, and artistic freedom. This group was dubbed the NEA 4.
Since then, his artistic output has remained expansive and fearless, spanning solo performances, books, essays, and institutional collaborations that continue to shape contemporary performance art.
His newest book and performance, “A Body in the O,” arrives at a resonant cultural moment. Miller will premiere a new performance drawn from the book at Stage 7 in Atlanta on March 14 -15, returning these stories to the live, communal exchange that has always been central to his practice.
This interview with Miller has been edited for length and clarity.
The photo of you inside the O of the Hollywood on the cover of your book is striking. What does the O mean to you?
For a long time after I found this photo, I assumed I was in the O in HO – no smart comments, please! – but another angle shows I am in the O of WOOD. Which actually works better for what I am getting at.
For me the O means the “Wooden O” of the theatre. Shakespeare coined that “wooden O” reference in the prologue to “Henry V,” and he meant the wooden Globe Theatre. Shakespeare asks us to dare to take up the big challenges of our historical moment and cram them into that wooden O. I have always tried to put my body in that O and take on the heavy-lifting of our queer times.
In the foreword to your book, scholar Craig Gingrich-Philbrook calls you the “quintessential example of the performance artists as first responder.” How does performance art lend itself to first responders? What was it about the art form that attracted you to it?
In my opening manifesto in the book, I talk about performers as first responders. I mean this especially around the crucial period in the 80s in the beginnings of the AIDS crisis, when all we were getting from the US government was bigotry and genocide. What we had was one-on-one caregiving and the beginnings of a really vital culture of solo performers taking on AIDS – me included – who began to tell the story of what we were going through from the front lines.
But now, of course, we see the amazing first responders taking on the invasion of our cities by masked ICE secret police in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Chicago. A whistle blows, and within seconds, dozens of people are there to protect members of their community from being abducted and disappeared. When Renee Good was murdered by ICE in Minneapolis, she was also there as an extraordinary poet.
In what ways does today’s climate remind you of the time your art was being prosecuted?
What the current regime in DC is doing now is similar to what was happening in the 90s Culture Wars, but a thousand times worse. Trump has demolished the White House East Wing, destroyed the Kennedy Center in just a few months, and has essentially completely gotten rid of the National Endowment for the Arts.
7 Stages focus on the social, political, and spiritual values of contemporary culture seems a particularly good fit for you with these performances of “A Body in the O.“
Yes, totally. As we see that this unhinged White House is ready to burn U.S. culture to the ground, it makes spaces like 7 Stages even more crucial to get through this current dark time. I have a long history of performing at 7 Stages, and it will be great to be back.
RELATED STORY: Trans actor Scott Turner Schofield discusses new film, visibility
You toured the country for decades with different performances addressing the struggles of same sex binational couples. What is it like for you to revisit the text of these performances in your book now that binational couples have legal rights?
Well, we have those rights for now, at least. This was another space of first response for me. While I was one of many artists taking on AIDS, I was one of the very few battling marriage inequality and advocating for immigration rights for gay binational couples like Alistair McCartney and me. The book and the performance are, in a big way, a love letter to my husband to thank him for enduring the struggle we went through for 24 years to keep him in the US. The photograph in “A Body in the O” of Alistair at his citizenship ceremony is a moment we worked for so hard. Even six years after DOMA was overturned, we still have to pinch ourselves that we made it through the violence of U.S. homophobia and were not forced into exile.
Immigration has featured so prominently in your life, activism, and performances, those performances of love and family being torn apart by government resonate so strongly given all that’s going on. How do you experience the extreme and violent attacks on immigrants of the last year?
It is impossible not to personalize it when legal immigrants are being abducted from their green card interviews and citizenship naturalization ceremonies. In the performance of “A Body in the O,” I tell the story of our interview for a green card through marriage in 2013 at the DHS, and I can’t even imagine how monstrous it would be to be ambushed and arrested at that moment. Yet that is what is happening now and being done in our names and with our tax dollars to immigrants who have done “everything right.”
You currently teach performance at universities across the country. What do you want to convey to LGBTQ+ youth? What would you want to convey to the young Tim on the cover of your book who “risked his life” to climb inside the O?
I travel all over the U.S. working with young performers at universities in 44 states. This is really at the heart of my work now. There is a big theme in the book of tracing my own genealogy, but even more charting how I want to embolden young folks to dive into that O and make the future better. That photo in the Hollywood sign is quite poignant for me because it was taken just a few days before my dad died suddenly in L.A. in 1984. In a way, I want to give my students the message that I was always looking for in my early 20s that led me to climb inside that O. I want to ask all of us to dig deep, climb high, see what needs changing, and do your bit to make it happen.
Tim Miller will perform “A Body in the O” on March 14-15 at 7 Stages in Little Five Points. Tickets are available at this link.