Body Blows Other books by Tim Miller: Shirts & Skin Body Blows Six Performances Tim Miller with a foreword by Tony Kushner photographs by Dona Ann McAdams The University of Wisconsin Press The University of Wisconsin Press 1930Monroe Street Madison, Wisconsin 53711 www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/ 3Henrietta Street London WC2E8LU, England Copyright © 2002 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Miller, Tim, 1958– Body blows: six performances / Tim Miller. pp. cm.—(Living out) ISBN 0-299-17680-0 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 0-299-17684-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Gay men—Drama. I. Title. II. Series. PS3613.I56 B63 2002 812'.54—dc21 2001005418 For my partner Alistair McCartney My love for you is beyond boundaries Contents Foreword ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction xv Some Golden States 3 Stretch Marks 35 My Queer Body 79 Naked Breath 123 Fruit Cocktail 169 Glory Box 203 Foreword As a tribute to Tim, I’m typing this naked. No, really, I am. I have never typed naked before. It would no more occur to me to type naked, in the ordinary course of things, than to eat dinner naked, which I have also never done and probably never will. My mother would not have approved, to put it mildly. I grew up in Louisiana, and Tim grew up in Cali- fornia, and that’s probably the difference, nudity being a West Coast kind of thing, or so it always seemed to me. In Louisiana we had too many mosquitoes. But thanks to Tim, here I am typ- ing naked. I am missing my clothes. I am wishing I was twenty- one. Or thirty-one, even. I am noticing ways in which I am forty- five. It’s interesting, typing naked. I am trying not to look down at my ... hoo-hah, as we used to say in Louisiana. Read Tim Miller and you think about your body. Tim per- forms so many functions for his community: artist, hero, griot, goad, gadfly, crush material. One of these functions, somewhere in between artist and hero and goad, is his serving to remind those of us who need reminding that the movement that has transformed