1001 Beds: Performances, Essays, and Travels

Miller, Tim. "1001 Beds: Performances, Essays, and Travels", University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. Body Language Amos Lassen and Literary Pride Just announces as a Lambda Book Award winner is Tim Miller's "1001 Beds". Miller is an internationally acclaimed performer as well as a gay rights activist and his artistry is based upon a combination of performance, politics and identity. He entertains with material based upon his own personal experiences to relay to others about gay American life. Nothing is beyond his touch. He tackles gay sex, relationships, political disenfranchisement and artistic censorship. This book is a look at his professional and personal life and we see the real Tim Miller. The volume includes scripts of his performances, essays, interviews, entries from his journal, and photographs. Also included is the test of his most recent stage piece, "Us". The book has been edited by Glen Johnson and what the editor has dome is to bring us the Tim Miller experience, something that seems almost impossible to do. It is the most difficult of tasks to put charisma on paper but Johnson has managed to do just that. Miller uses his body in his performances and this book is rooted in body. Miller began his career in performance art with skits about growing up gay. When the AIDS epidemic became a part of our lives, Miller became attracted to the militant Act Up and his focus became much more pointed politically. Merging performance and politics, Miller found his place.

Editor Glen Johnson has done what I would have thought was just about impossible, between covers, and that is to bring the Tim Miller experience in extraordinary and full dimension. I've seen several of Miller's performances and despaired of finding a book that would adequately capture the range of his interests and imagination, let alone something of the fire of his person, his charisma perhaps. But here it is at last, the real, the unexpected and the splendid thing. Cannily Johnson deploys a full spectrum of the different sorts of documents that make up a man, not only the texts of the performances, but occasional prose, some candid interviews, full-on essays, and a barrage of photographs, some of them very beautiful indeed, some just slapstick perhaps. Like Red Skelton, Tim Miller has always been about more than the tears of a clown, he's really all about the body, even the body of comedy. 1,001 BEDS, as its title implies, is rooted in the body and its vain attempts to rest between taking on another, often agonizing day. The effort of living, particularly in the benighted political circumstances of our world today, exhausts the electorate, and Miller is honest and forthright about his attempts to harness energy to fight the combine. Some strategies work, some don't, but Miller's fearless and in the end that's what really matters. He began in the golden age of performance artists (remember Daryl Hannah in LEGAL EAGLES) with some spectacular and colorful, and very personal work about growing up gay in Southern California, often with a partner, John Bernd, another very talented young fellow. Around him, like popcorn, issues began exploding in the heat. AIDS and ACT UP claimed his attention and his work became even more pointedly political, leading to the famous revocation of his HEA grant by rightwing forces marshaled in panic and cruelty. Freedom of expression, another huge issue, became the focus of subsequent work. Finally his meeting with the Australian artist and poet Alistair McCartney sparked a new avatar of the poet of gay immigration rights, for McCartney is still very much a victim of antiquated policy and lives and writes without security, homeland or otherwise. These issues all come alive in the pages of the book. I asked some of my students, who had never seen Miller perform, to read one of his essays, and it electrified them. It soon became clear that, just like ARTHUR Miller, no relation I assume, was the "thinking man's playwright," now Tim Miller has assumed a similar status, the objective correlative for the images and emotions not only of gay men, but for a Kinsey-like spectrum of embodied world citizens.