Tim Miller’s ‘Shirts & Skin’: Witty, Wicked and Nude

“Shirts & Skin” is only peripherally concerned with basketball--but much concerned with skin-to-skin contact between men. In this Highways show, Tim Miller, one of the infamous NEA Four, takes an irreverent look at 20 years of gay life from the perspective of a white boy who, “like former President Nixon, grew up in Whittier.”

Taking excerpts from his new book by the same title, which includes some of the material from his previous performances, Miller mixes the superficial with the sublime, the tragic with the peculiar, to produce a wickedly funny and often painfully honest piece. He uses shirts, which he hangs on a clothesline, as reminders of the important men in his life.

He starts at the beginning: fertilization. As “one queer sperm fighting against the odds,” he dodges Jesse Helms, owing to his “superior agility and sense of style,” to meet and merge with a lesbian ovum. Miller covers life as a post-punk, post-hippie kid who awakens to his true sexual orientation.

And, in the age of AIDS, he illustrates the slightly hysterical HIV-negative gay man’s fears and frustrations during a lustful sexual encounter. Love, death, hypothermia, Moonies and wishful dreams of gay utopia under Harvey Milk are assimilated through a charming boy-next-door persona.

Full-frontal nudity and tastefully graphic descriptions of sex and homophobia are an intrinsic part of the show. Only staunch conservatives would take offense to this movingly beautiful, life-affirming piece. But then again, if Jesse Helms were your godfather and male nudity offended you, what would you be doing at Highways?

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* “Shirts & Skin,” Highways, 1641 18th St., Santa Monica. Today and Saturday, 8:30 p.m. Ends Saturday. $15. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.