Works by
Tim Miller
(Performance Artist, Writer)

Tim Miller is an internationally acclaimed performance artist and writer who explores the artistic, spiritual and political topography of his identity as a gay man. Hailed for his humor and passion,  His solo theater works have been published in the play collections O Solo Homo and Sharing the Delirium . Since 1990, Miller has taught performance in the theater dept at UCLA and the dance program at Cal State LA. He is a co-founder of the two most influential performance spaces in the United States:  Performance Space 122 on Manhattan's Lower East Side and Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, CA. After a nine-year stint in New York City, in 1987 Miller returned home to Los Angeles, California where he was born and raised. He currently lives there with his partner Alistair McCartney in Venice Beach. -- from Saints & Sinners

Books

• 1001 Beds: Performances, Essays, and Travels (2006) with Glen Johnson, ed, -- Winner 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Drama/Theater
  For a quarter century, Tim Miller has worked at the intersection of performance, politics, and identity, using his personal experiences to create entertaining but pointed explorations of life as a gay American man—from the perils and joys of sex and relationships to the struggles of political disenfranchisement and artistic censorship. This intimate autobiographical collage of Miller's professional and personal life reveals one of the celebrated creators of a crucial contemporary art form and a tireless advocate for the American dream of political equality for all citizens.
  
      Here we have the most complete Miller yet—a raucous collection of his performance scripts, essays, interviews, journal entries, and photographs, as well as his most recent stage piece Us. This volume brings together the personal, communal, and national political strands that interweave through his work from its beginnings and ultimately define Miller's place as a contemporary artist, activist, and gay man.

• Body Blows: Six Performances (Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies) (2002)
  Hailed for his humor and passion, the internationally acclaimed performance artist Tim Miller has delighted, shocked, and emboldened audiences all over the world. Body Blows gathers six of Miller’s best-known performances that chart the sexual, spiritual, and political topography of his identity as a gay man: Some Golden States, Stretch Marks, My Queer Body, Naked Breath, Fruit Cocktail, and Glory Box. In Body Blows, Tim Miller leaps from the stage to the page, as each performance script is illustrated with striking photographs and accompanied by Miller’s notes and comment. This book explores the tangible body blows—taken and given—of Miller’s life and times as explored in his performances: the queer-basher’s blow, the sweet blowing breath of a lover, the below-the-belt blow of HIV/AIDS, the psychic blows from a society that disrespects the humanity of lesbian and gay relationships. Miller’s performances are full of the put-up-your-dukes and stand-your-ground of such day-to-day blows that make up being gay in America.

• Shirts & Skin (1997)
  "Tim Miller became famous for two not unrelated reasons: taking his clothes off during his (critically acclaimed) performance art pieces and being seriously chastised by Senator Jesse Helms for doing so by having his National Endowment for the Arts grant rescinded. Miller's genius has always been his just-folks approach to talking about his life and sexuality. His memoir, Shirts and Skin, which uses excerpts from his performance scripts, is a genial, witty, and engrossing portrait of the artist as a young satyr. Moving easily from tales of school and sex to love and sex to work and sex, Shirts and Skin entertains and illuminates the importance of the erotic in everyday life. Always graphic but never prurient, Miller consistently manages to make sex into healthy, good, clean, American fun. Take that Senator Helms." -- Amazon.com

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• Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture (2001) by Peter Lehman
  Lehman brings together new work on masculinity in film by established film scholars, new academics, performance artists, and cultural critics. The essays analyze such trends as the role of gay men in saving heterosexuality, the emergence of the new queer cinema, the prevalence of the "melodramatic penis" in current film, the resurgence of white masculinity, masculinity in World War II films, and the relationship between nationhood and the male body in 1990s Canadian cinema.  Includes Tim's essay on a residency in Birmingham, England, to create a full-evening ensemble work exploring embodiment.

• Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century (1999) by Jo Bonney
  Features the work of 42 solo artists spanning the century-from Beatrice Herford in 1869 to Dawn Akemi Saito in 1994. Each artists' work is introduced by a journalist, artist, critic, agent, producer or educator who is intimately familiar with the material and its links to other forms such as vaudeville, theatre, cabaret, music, standup comedy, poetry, the visual arts and dance. In Bonney's words, "This anthology documents a part of our literary/stage history and offers the possibility of its being appreciated in a new context, for a new generation."
  
  Includes work by Andy Kaufman, Ann Magnuson, Anna Deavere Smith, Anne Galjour, Beatrice Herford,
  Brenda Wong Aoki, Brother Theodore, Dael Orlandersmith, Danitra Vance, Danny Hoch,David Cale, Dawn Akemi Saito, Deb Margolin, Diamanda Galas, Eric Bogosian, Ethyl Eichelberger, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Heather Woodbury, Holly Hughes, Jackie "Moms" Mabley, Jane Wagner, Jessica Hagedorn, John Fleck, Reno, John Leguizamo, John O'Keefe, Josh Kornbluth, Laurie Anderson, Lenny Bruce, Lily Tomlin, Lisa Kron, Lord Buckley, Luis Alfaro, Marga Gomez, Mike Albo, Rachel Rosenthal, Rhodessa Jones, Robbie McCauley, Roger Guenveur Smith, Ruth Draper, Spalding Gray, Tim Miller (Script of his  performance "Spilt Milk" from the full evening show Shirts & Skin.). Virginia Heffernan, and Whoopi Goldberg.

• O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance (1998), David Roman and Holly Hughes, eds.
  Gay men and lesbians have always taken front and center stage in the theater. From Shakespeare's cross-dressing love interests to Oscar Wilde's witty comedies of mismanners to Eva Le Gallienne and Mary Martin's portrayals of the androgynous Peter Pan, homosexuality and gender blending have found many manifestation in theater. In the mid-1980s, as the New York performance-art scene began to flourish, scores of queer artists launched careers in tiny storefronts, church basements, and empty lofts. By breaking down traditional ideas of "acting," and by being unafraid of dealing with queer sexual content, they changed the style, form, and substance of alternative and mainstream theater. O Solo Homo is a collection of scripts and texts by the most important of these performers. Some of the material is overtly sexual, as in Tim Miller's "Naked Breath" or Holly Hughes's slyly titled "Clit Notes." But the performers are often as interested in politics and culture as in sex. The late Ron Vawter's exploration of art, betrayal, and the cult of personality in "Roy Cohn/Jack Smith" is brilliant, and Peggy Shaw's treatise on what it means to be butch in a world that celebrates manliness in "You're Just Like My Father" is both deeply shocking and hilarious.

• Sundays at Seven: Choice Words from a Different Light's Gay Writers Series (1997), James Carroll Pickett, Compiler and Rondo Mieczkowski, ed.
  Includes complete text of Tim's performance "C.D. Weekend".

• Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories (1996), Patrick Merla, ed.
  In stunning essays written especially for this collection, twenty-nine noted gay writers recount their true "coming out" stories, intensely personal histories of that primal process by which men come to terms with their desire for other men. Here are accounts of revealing one's sexual identity to parents, siblings, friends, co-workers and, in one notable instance, to a stockbroker. Men tell of their first sexual encounters from their preteens to their thirties, with childhood friends who rejected or tenderly embraced them, with professors, with neighbors, with a Broadway star. These are poignant, sometimes unexpectedly funny tales of romance and heartbreak, repression and liberation, rape and first love defining moments that shaped their authors' lives. Arranged chronologically from Manhattan in the Forties to San Francisco in the Nineties, these essays ultimately form a documentary of changing social and sexual mores in the United States--a literary, biographical, sociological and historical tour de force.

   Includes narrative-version of Tim's performance, Fruit Cocktail.

• Caught in the Act: A Look at Contemporary Multimedia Performance (1996) by Dona Ann McAdams, Photographer
  Caught in the Act is an exhilarating look at multimedia performance with front-row-center photographs by Dona Ann McAdamns. Her unique vantage is in part due to the enormous respect she has earned from the performers, and it is her key to documenting this ground-breaking type of theater that continuallly challenges the definitions of all the arts. Caught in the Act seizes the energy of paint-squirting, media-mixing Blue Man Group drumming into oblivion, while it resounds with the passionate rants of Karen Finley, and quivers with Pat Oleszko's dazzling costumes of ever-moving appendages.
  
  Covering performance art since is nasence at the East Village's Pyramid Club, the WOW Café, 8BC, and other clubs in the early eighties McAdams became the in-house photo archivist at the infamous performance space, P.S. 122, the home of cutting-edge theater that eschews convention as it draws energy and inspiration from all media. At P.S. 122 and other alternative performance spaces such as The Kitchen and Dance Theater Workshop, McAdams developed her long-term relationships with many performers.
  
  C. Carr is a Village Voice writer and a long-recognized cultural critic of the New York underground arts movement; in her personal and insightful introduction to Caught in the Act, she writes, "The key to McAdams's work is the relationship she has with the artists. She empathizes. They trust." It is this collaborative approach that has allowed McAdams to faithfully represent the rage, courage, integrity, and creative force of such varied artists as Diamand Galás, Holly Hughes, Ishmael Houston-Jones, John Kelly, DANCENOISE, Ethyl Eichelberger, and David Wojnarowicz--and this is only a small sampling of the performers featured here.
  
  Caught in the Act celebrates the spirit that links all artists across their different disciplines and aesthetics. The wonderful coexistence of disparate sensibilities in this publication underscores the very nature of this hybrid art. At the same time, it features many artists who, while focusing primarily on a particular medium, have expanded the context for that medium and pioneered the boundlessness, the marvelous sense of possibility that so distinguishes this contemporary manifestation of performance.
  
  This sleek book of black-and-white photographs printed in duotone includes contributions of words, drawings, and scores from some of the pictured performers, including many of those listed above, as well as Penny Arcade, John Bernd, Eric Bogosian, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Tim Miller, and many others.
  
  A performance poet in the beat tradition who has been reading and performing since the early seventies, Eileen Myles also contributes a moving Afterword with her poem, "the Troubador." Taken altogether Caught in the Act is as much of the artists as it is about them. This Aperture publication is an entirely original and broad collection of work by some of the most gifted artists of our time.

• Out of Character: Rants, Raves, and Monologues from Today's Top Performance Artists (1996) by Mark Russell
  Includes text of "The Maw of Death"

• His: Brilliant New Fiction by Gay Writers (1995), Robert Drake and Terry Wolverton, eds.
  See Short story, "Tar Pit Heart.

• Sharing the Delirium: Second Generation AIDS Plays and Performances (1994) by Therese Jones
  The first ten years of the AIDS epidemic brought the first generation of playwrights' and performance artists' responses to it. Now the epidemic is into its second decade and artistic responses to it continue to shift and mature. The eight plays in this collection contain some of the most harrowing, most humorous, most human, and most humane work being done in theatre today in response to a crisis that affects an everwidening circle of society who must all share the delirium.  Includes complete script of "My Queer Body."

• Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1992) by James Davison Hunter
  Includes "An Artist's Declaration of Independence" July 4, 1990 -- A manifesto written the day after NEA 4 defunding.

• Amazing Grace: Stories of Lesbian and Gay Faith (1991) by Malcolm Boyd with Nancy L. Wilson, ed.
  Includes "Jesus and The Queer Performance Artist", bTim's essay on gay identity, theater and spirituality.

• Blood Whispers: L.A. Writers on AIDs (1991), Terry Wolverton, ed.
  Includes Complete text of Tim's performance, "Vigil/Manifesto".