It is the
20th anniversary of the terror attack on the World Trade Centers, the
Pentagon and on fellow citizens of this country. The Bush administration
began planning war even before the tragic events of 9/11/01, but that
it was the causus belli for
which they were waiting and the day after 9/11 they went to work to
weave the web of lies they used to bring us into an unjust and even more
tragically, unnecessary war.
As the
shadows of war slowly began to spread across our country, White Crane
offered an issue devoted to the spiritual idea of “Resistance.”
Performance artist and author, Tim Miller spoke about the role
resistance played in his art.
The rise
of Fascism and Racism and the plutocracy of the Republicans has made
resistance new again. If not “new” then as pressing as ever. The
war that was started twenty years ago still rages on, chewing up blood
and treasure in its belligerent maw. We live in the Chinese curse of
“interesting times.” I don’t hesitate to say it’s scary.
So in
observation of 9/11, now more than a decade later, and in light of
current events, it is a idea and a discussion worth revisiting.
Art of Resistance
Tim Miller
Even more than in
my performances, I think I have been able to explore and dismantle the
worst of our patriarchal legacy as men through the Gay men's performance
workshops I teach. For almost twenty years I have been leading
performance workshops for groups of men all over the world. These
workshops have been a place for men to resist the patriarchal legacy by
physically exploring in full-color real time their most intimate
narratives, memories, dreams and possibilities with one another.
While I have
often done this work with mixed groups of straight, bi-sexual and Gay
men, the majority of my efforts have been within the diverse Gay men's
communities in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. A
constant focus, the base note as it were, of all this work, has been a
commitment to discovering a more authentic and individualized way of
being present within our deeply problematized men's psyches and bodies. I
have taught such workshops in contexts as varied as at the Men &
Masculinities conference that was sponsored by the National Organization
of Men Against Sexism (NOMAS) in Johnstown, Pennsylvania to hundreds of
performance workshops for Gay men in cities from Sydney, Australia to
Glasgow, Scotland. .
In the work I do
with groups of Gay men, I have learned that finding a way to be more
present in our embodied selves and open to the narratives that we carry
in our queer flesh and blood is the quickest route to discovering the
revelatory material about what it just might mean to be human. Claiming
this kind of psychic space to explore our most queeny, spiritual or
erotic selves as Gay men is to me a profound act of resistance.
In 1994 frayed from the culture war and onslaught of AIDS, I made a show called Naked Breath
in which I wanted to write a sexy and highly personal story about how
two men, one HIV-positive and one negative, managed to connect. After
several years in the late 80's and early 90's of shouting in front of
government buildings or being dragged by cops down the asphalt on the
streets of Los Angeles or Houston or San Francisco or New York with
ACT-UP, I felt called to really honor the quiet human-size victories
that are available to us.
To model the
resistance to fear of each other’s bodies across sero-status, but also
to perform the resistance to the virus' negative effects to our psychic
and emotional health as we did this. I wanted to try to locate what has
happened to us during the AIDS era and hold up the hopeful fact that men
were still able to get close to one another there amid the swirl of
blood within and the cum smeared on our bodies. In Naked Breath I am
surrounded by both these bodily fluids; I wanted to get wet in this
performance. I also wanted that we could do this safely and full of
respect for each other's bodies.
My new show Us is
full of nascent little queer boy resistance, but my show GLORY BOX has
my favorite example. I tell a funny story in GLORY BOX about asking a
boy to marry me when I was nine years old. He beats me up and tells me
to "take it back". I do "take it back—that I wanted to marry him—but I
cross my fingers behind me before I do! Maybe that was the beginning of
my resistance and activism! That gave me the basic dissatisfaction with
stuff that just isn't fair.
I do think
though, that Gay Americans are ready to submit to a basic disrespect to
their humanity that Gay people in other western countries would find
unacceptable. We have accommodated to sodomy laws, Gays not allowed in
the military etc. We have that damn radical religious right in the U.S.
that other countries just don't have. It infects everything. If queer
folks in America would actually be prepared to resist we could change so
much that messes with our community. That old devil of internalized
homophobia gets in our way.
I keep trying to
stay close to that little nine-year old who knew that it just wasn't
fair that he couldn't marry another boy! This is very much connected to
the story I tell in Us about relating to Oliver Twist in the film
musical as a little queer activist. He, too, wanted some "more!” That
crucial act: wanting to marry another boy, of claiming space and agency
as a little nine-year-old Gay boy, that resistance to the heterosexual
narrative, is the place from where all my other activism around lesbian
and Gay civil marriage and immigration rights leaps.
Tim Miller is the author of SHIRTS AND SKINS and BODY BLOWS.
In 1990 he was awarded an NEA Solo Performance Fellowship which was
overturned under political pressure from the Bush I White House. As part
of the NEA 4 Miller successfully sued the federal government for
violation of First Amendment rights and won. Though this decision was
later partially overturned by the Supreme Court, Miller continues his
fight for freedom of expression and Gay rights.
