Longtime performer Tim Miller returns to 7 Stages to ‘be here and be queer’

Ever since he was in high school, Tim Miller has been creating solo performance pieces in response to the world around him as a gay man, and that motivation is still going strong. He returns to Atlanta’s 7 Stages this weekend for a two-day performance of A Body in the O, based on his book of the same name.

This is Miller’s 11^th show at the Little Five Points company, but the first since 2011, when he staged his Lay of the Land, dealing with themes of marriage equality and queer citizenship in the aftermath of Prop 8, which denied California couples the right to get married. “I was on the cusp of my Australian husband, Alistair McCartney, and me being forced out of the country,” Miller says.

After moving from Los Angeles to New York as a teenager, Miller began making what he calls queer, funny and sexy political performance pieces, some with him in the buff. “Those first performances when I was 19 were full of gay agency and point of view. It was something that was unusual at the time, even in New York.”

His early shows included Paint Yrslf Red/Me and Mayakovksy, Survival Tactic and Live Boys. 

Two years later, matters had swung differently. “When we had a Supreme Court that actually took the Constitution seriously, we got the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) overturned, Alistair and I got a green card and he is now a U.S. citizen.” A Body in the O jumps off from that point: The two on the brink of getting married in New York in 2013 the day the Supreme Court overturned DOMA, followed by their ongoing process with citizenship and green card interviews. The material has an eerie timeliness, especially with what Miller calls “our masked gestapo abducting people, the same spaces Alistair and I have occupied.”

At age 21, he co-founded Performance Space 122, now called Performance Space New York, which is based in the East Village of Manhattan and one of the most important centers for interdisciplinary performance in the world.  He also curated the first ever gay performance art festival in 1980 — called Men Together — in the same space. “There had never been a festival of original gay performance art anywhere in the world. It was raising a flag, raising the gay Jolly Roger that we are here and queer.”

That was a year-and-a-half before the arrival of AIDS in New York, which impacted what Miller wanted to address in his shows. “So much of my work as a young queer artist and activist was responding to AIDS. Most of the pieces I performed at 7 Stages were about HIV/AIDS, because that was our subject at hand from 1982 to 1997.” 

Miller was one of the infamous NEA Four, a group of queer performance artists who had their grants from the National Endowment for the Arts voted down in 1990. He’d won an NEA Solo Performer Fellowship, but it was overturned by the White House under George H. W. Bush due to its gay themes, prompting him and the others to sue and eventually win a settlement. Miller is sad to see that the organization still faces scrutiny. “It barely exists anymore. There’s a shell and tumbleweeds blowing around the office; Trump has destroyed the culture. It was never a great funding agency compared to any other industrialized country, but it did help.”

He calls his new show funny and moving and hopeful. It ends in front of the Department of Homeland Security in downtown Los Angeles, which, a few months ago, was occupied by thousands of National Guard soldiers deployed against Gov. Gavin Newsome’s wishes. 

Miller still writes frequently and is a guest speaker and lecturer at college campuses across the country. Returning to the area means a lot to him. He has close friends here, and Atlanta is also the home of Alternate Roots, an organization with a mission to support the creation and presentation of original art in all its forms. The organization has long been one of Miller’s inspirations.

“It felt like everything hopeful — how art can change the world and how we can engage social issues. Alternate Roots changed my trajectory, and I think I brought a lot back. I’ve worked in the Southeast more than any other part of the country for a long long time.” After his Atlanta gig, he will spend time at Auburn University and then the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Miller especially enjoys discussions about the evolution of arts in the area. “The late North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms was leading attacks against me, and it made Southeastern arts organizations bond with me. They were angry that government figures were attacking the arts — and started bringing me in.” 

Where & When

A Body in the O, written and performed by Tim Miller, is onstage at 7 Stages Theater March 14 and March 15. Tickets, $36.
1105 Euclid Ave. NE.

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Jim Farmer is the recipient of the 2022 National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Award for Best Theatre Feature and a nominee for Online Journalist of the Year. A member of five national critics’ organizations, he covers theater and film for ArtsATL. A graduate of the University of Georgia, he has written about the arts for 30-plus years. Jim is the festival director of Out on Film, Atlanta’s LGBTQ film festival, and lives in Avondale Estates with his husband Craig.