Tim Miller


Glory Box, 1999 - present
Location: Santa Monica, CA 34n03, 118w15
I am currently moving my butt all over the United States (from Salt Lake City to Durham, North Carolina!) doing my solo performance "Glory Box." The show deals with the situation Alistair, my Australian-Scottish partner of seven years, and I are facing in a country that gives lesbian and gay couples none of the 1049 "special heterosexual rights" afforded all straight married folks. For binational gay couples like us, the biggie of the rights that gay people are uniformly denied are the immigration rights that all our straight pals get with their vast buffet spread of heterosexual privilege. Alistair and I face the likelihood that we will soon be forced to leave the U.S. when his student visa runs out and seek immigration asylum in Australia or Great Britain, two countries that Alistair carries passports for and who — unlike the U.S. — respect the civil rights of their gay citizens. It is clear to me that my government has declared total war on the most intimate part of my private life as a gay American. As you can imagine, this gives a particular urgency to "Glory Box" and my national art-activism shenanigans!
As I travel all over the United States and perform "Glory Box," I am trying to make my case to the communities I engage that this violence and injustice against lesbian and gay couples must stop. The jury is still out. What I think theater and performance can do quite well is shine a light on such realities that are just so damn unfair — in this case a bright, exposing headlight on the stark reality of the array of U.S. human-rights violations against lesbian and gay couples. The real-time heat of live performing is an especially handy crucible for raising awareness and provoking people to action. I believe the empathy and openness that comes through the seductive strategies of live performance — compelling narrativity, the performer's charisma (hopefully!), the group dynamic that comes with a live audience — are the ideal lab conditions for conversion, the channeling of the audience's psychic and political energies toward fighting for social justice. I think theater is primarily a site for liberation stories and a sweaty laboratory to model possible strategies for empowerment.
When I go into a community to do the show "Glory Box," it's an opportunity to be a ruckus-raising, change agent and lighting rod for the local brew of activists and citizens. This is something that solo performance, the ever lean & mean culture tool, is especially good at. I assume before I get on the plane that I am parachuting into a community where there is precious little awareness about the gross injustice facing lesbian and gay binational couples. I assume the local press has probably never written about the subject. I assume that the local binational couples (and there are always several, even in tiny communities) are feeling isolated and freaked out by the kafka-esque injustice of U.S. law that threatens to destroy every one of these thousands of lesbian and gay families.
This is a job for performance art!
What I have discovered is that I can parachute into Cedar Rapids or Austin and shine a big pulsating light on this injustice. I hit the ground running, ready to raise awareness, anger and action through the performances. The work starts long before I get off the plane, though. I work closely with a national organization, the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force (LGIRTF), to help connect me with local binational gay couples or other folks who have been active on the issue. There are four main practical goals for what the performances can do in that city's extended community: * Get people involved in this fight against US human rights violations against gay people by getting them to join (or start) a local chapter of LGIRTF and to raise money for the fight.
Lobby specific Congresspeople to become sponsors of the Permanent Partners Immigration Reform bill (HR 690) that would make U.S. law consistent with almost every other western country in providing immigrations rights for committed lesbian and gay relationships.
Get virtually every person in the audience to sign the petition in support of the bill which develops a significant data base of people who have spent a night of their lives thinking about this issue as they watch the performance.
Maximize the awareness in their community by having the show serve as a media catalyst for newspaper, TV and radio stories to raise awareness about this issue. I use that crucial tenderized moment at the end of "Glory Box," which is a very raw and emotional piece, to challenge the audience to do something so that this violence against lesbian and gay lives can stop. Those many hundreds of people that see the show wherever I do it are absolutely crucial change agents to get activated around the issue.The road to performance art hell is paved with good liberal intentions. I am well aware that all my grassroots organizing, performance-art agitating and mass-media opining will probably not make the United States join the civilized world any time soon. Most likely Alistair and I ultimately will be forced to leave this troubled country, as have thousands of other gay Americans and their partners from other countries.
However, there is a deeper human goal to all this work, though, beyond the nuts-and-bolts activism that might eventually dismantle the injustice of U.S. laws. I am hoping the show can do some kind of emotional and psychic chiropractic adjustments! I am asking the straight folks in the audience to do some heavy lifting and acknowledge their heterosexual privilege and begin to extend their empathy to lesbian and gay relationships. I am also using the show to ask lesbian and gay people to wake up to the fact that we are second-class citizens in our country and to begin sifting through the millions of signs, signals and laws our culture delivers that tells us our relationships our worthless. This is a touchy, oppression-culture ticking bomb that needs to be defused! My journeys with "Glory Box" have been a real confirmation to me of the potential power of performance and theater to get a loud alarm bell ringing. As I travel the country and abroad doing the show, I have been deeply reassured that what we do in these performance-art spaces and theaters has huge potential impact and ripple-effect on both our inner selves and our social identities.
However, engaging a community in crisis in this way is inevitably really messy and humanly specific. Sometimes — benefit nights especially — the theaters will be sold-out, with practically the whole audience made up of binational gay couples from all over the world: lesbian and gay Americans and their partners from Russia, Thailand, Columbia, Switzerland, Columbia, Holland, Sri Lanka, Mexico. When this happens, it feels so intense to have all these people in the same room who are living the situation that the performance deals with. It makes for the most concentrated feeling of "community-in-the-performance space" that I've ever experienced. There can be so much psychic energy of queer love under attack by the U.S. — so much life in the room. Lots of love and fear, too.
Not long ago, I did two shows of "Glory Box" at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (amusingly, the prop hope chest that I need for the show was going to be one that belonged to Andy Warhol! My "Andy Box" they got me as my prop has since loomed large in my stories about touring the show.) The Warhol Museum took good care of me and my "Glory Box"; the audiences were packed and very energized around the issues in the show. After the final performance, I had a very intense, long conversation with a Pittsburgh binational lesbian couple that had come. They were a U.S. -Japanese couple and the foreign partner of the couple was facing being deported very soon. They were pretty much in crisis and feeling very isolated. I tried to give what advice and comfort I could, but I hope the show and the big public imprimatur of the museum helped them feel less alone. It was a very moving encounter, a good reminder of what we can do as artists and arts organizers. It made me feel so sad and also angry that this sweet young dyke couple are being hurt by our country.
Just like that couple in Pittsburgh who told me their story in the gracious lobby of the Warhol Museum, I also I have a big story to shout right now on stages all over the country as I perform "Glory Box." It's a story of how I met a man from another land and how I want to be with him, but my country doesn't allow such things. I need to tell this story or I will go crazy. When I tell this story, I can howl out the rage I feel, both at our backward government as well as at my own shortcomings as a man and a lover; I can draw attention to this stark injustice. When I tell this story, I can educate, engage and embolden community to action. Telling this story becomes a completely necessary connection with community as a means of negotiating, even securing, a more empowered relationship with an uncertain future.