Love Knows No Boundaries

The richly colored interior of the Venice beach duplex is filled with artworks ranging from whimsical to lyrical, heavily laden bookshelves, the occasional antique or objet d’kitsch and myriad other signs of creative and eclectic tastes. The plants are well-tended, and the kitchen brims with implements that suggest that someone who can cook lives here. There’s even a modest yet lovingly trimmed Christmas tree lingering, although it is mid-January, in the front entryway.

Look closer and you see the signs of the happy couple whose home this is. There they are, in a snapshot on the fridge, arms around each other during a during recent holiday celebration. On the bedroom wall, there’s a portrait of one of the lovers. And in an adjacent room, photographs of the other. Elsewhere, there are images of the twosome face to face.

Everything about the place tells you that this is not so much a house as a home, and a cherished nest at that. But it is a nest where the clock is ticking. For unless the laws change soon, the two people who live here may have to leave the country to stay together because one of them is not an American citizen. If this were a heterosexual couple, they would be able to marry and gain immigration rights for the noncitizen partner. But these are two gay men, and they have no such option.

This is the situation facing veteran performance artist and activist Tim Miller and his Australian partner of five years, Alistair McCartney. And it is also the topic of Miller’s latest solo, “Glory Box,” which opened Friday at Highways.

“There was something just so graphic about realizing that because I’m a gay man, I couldn’t access the same special privileges that are reserved for heterosexuals in terms of immigration,” says the winsome Miller, during a midday conversation in his home. “Growing up middle-class and believing what they say in civics class and the Declaration of Independence, it’s still bizarre to me that our country is so unfair. I’d always known that intellectually, but suddenly it really felt like the U.S. government was trying to blow my house up and was going to force this huge violence and abuse on me, taking away my life partner. My relationship wasn’t acknowledged.”

Creating art about his life is nothing new to Miller, 41. For nearly two decades he has been crafting solo theater works, noted for their poignancy and humor, that explore issues of gay identity such as coming out, sex, relationships and HIV/AIDS. With such recent pieces as “My Queer Body” (1992), “Naked Breath” (1994), “Fruit Cocktail” (1996) and “Shirts and Skin” (1997, based on his autobiographical book of the same name), he has performed at such prestigious venues as Yale Repertory Theatre, London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He also co-founded two of the country’s key performance-art spaces, Manhattan’s PS 122 and Highways, where he recently stepped down as co-artistic director to focus on his new show.

Nor is Miller a stranger to controversy. Apart from his long-standing recognition in gay and performance circles, he is best known to the public as one of the NEA Four, along with John Fleck, Karen Finley and Holly Hughes--all performance artists who address gay, lesbian or feminist themes. The four had their NEA grants overturned in 1990. Subsequently, they successfully sued the U.S. government, only to have the decision partially overturned by the Supreme Court in 1998.

But “Glory Box,” which is titled after the Australian term for a hope chest, may be Miller’s most topical piece yet, and the most heartfelt.

“I think that ‘Glory Box’ is one of Tim’s most focused shows,” says Vicki Wolf, executive director of Sushi Performance and Visual Art in San Diego, which has presented Miller since the early 1980s and hosted “Glory Box” last month. “Whether that’s a product of age or wisdom or the fact that he and Alistair are fighting for their lives and driven by the passion of love is no matter. He is an artist who uses words as ammunition against prejudice and apathy.”

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In “Glory Box,” Miller weaves together tales both remembered and imagined. Childhood memories of yearning to marry another little boy mix with a nightmare of being separated from his current lover at an international airport. When he performed the piece in New York in December, the Village Voice’s Michael Feingold wrote: “The subject--immigration rights for same-sex partners--is a thorny one, and arcane to most Americans, but Miller has a gift for letting one topic open surprising doors onto a multitude of others; his works are as canny and complex as they are charming.”

Successful as it has been since its October premiere, however, “Glory Box” is also part and parcel of Miller’s political engagement. “Luckily for us, separating his art and his activism seems to be an impossible task for Tim Miller,” says his longtime colleague, actor-writer Michael Kearns. “His life and the metamorphosis of who he is continues to dominate his work: a series of self-portraits, if you will. However, where Miller succeeds brilliantly is his ability to contextualize the private within a larger political picture.”

Miller is touring “Glory Box” in part to participate in the ongoing debate about gay marriage just as measures, such as Proposition 22, are coming up for a vote. The so-called Knight initiative, named for sponsor state Sen. William “Pete” Knight (R-Palmdale), calls for a ban on same-sex marriages and will appear on the March ballot in California.

“My private life has been overlapping with my public life for so long, I just almost take it for granted,” says Miller, as he sits at a dining room table laden with newspaper clippings and literature from the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force and the “No on Knight” campaign. “But at a certain point, it definitely occurred to some part of my artist and activist self that, you know, this is a job for Tim Miller.”

“What people don’t realize is that performing his show in front of 150 or so people a night is not all that Miller does when he visits cities across America and abroad,” explains Kearns, who has engaged in similar activism with his own acclaimed solos about people affected by HIV/AIDS. “He is consistently interviewed in newspapers, which are read by thousands of people. He often teaches classes or lectures to large groups. His messages are delivered in many ways.”

Indeed, Miller has his work cut out for him. Although no nation officially recognizes gay or lesbian marriages, some countries, such as Canada, provide for domestic partner immigration rights. “Almost every Western country has better laws than America in terms of immigration and also domestic partnership,” says the artist. And while there is a bill being introduced in Congress this month to change these immigration laws, it is seen as highly unlikely to be passed by a Republican Congress.

The Vermont Supreme Court ruled in December that same-sex couples should be granted privileges equivalent to those of marriage. That “separate but equal” decision was a positive step in the view of Miller and many in the gay community. Yet it left Miller conflicted. “This whole experience has deepened me a lot into a stronger sense of just how complicated and chaotic American culture is, and these mixtures of good impulses and real, embarrassing, shameful bigotry and racism and homophobia,” he says. “It’s given me a kind of rage and anger with my country that I’ve never had before.”

Still, he also sees the current battle as part of the way marriage has long functioned as a symbol of what the culture at large will allow. “Most people have this idea that marriage has been this fixed institution, which of course it hasn’t been,” says Miller. “Anyone who thinks they’d want to go back to what marriage was like 70 years ago is insane: Women were owned by men, heterosexuals of different races couldn’t marry, there’s almost no divorce. Marriage has been a huge barometer to see where our culture is at, and this is obviously the next battle.”

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The prospect of exile can be very problematic for an artist, particularly for one whose work is so much about the time and place in which he lives. “My work is completely about being American, being a Californian,” he says. “I certainly don’t want to leave the United States. It’s my country, I belong here.”

Miller is a third-generation Californian, the youngest of four children born to a traveling salesman and a department store worker.

He began writing and staging solo performances in high school and was drawn to New York at age 19 by the then-burgeoning downtown art scene of the late ‘70s. In 1980, he, Charles Moulton and Charles Dennis launched PS 122, which is still New York’s premier venue for alternative performance.

By the mid-1980s, the AIDS toll was beginning to take shape as the epidemic spread. Miller responded by making his works even more overtly personal-political. In 1985, he made “Buddy Systems,” an autobiographical piece created in collaboration with his then-partner Douglas Sadownick. The following year, the two men moved to L.A. And three years later, in 1989, Miller and writer Linda Burnham founded Highways.

Beginning in 1990, Miller and fellow performance artists Fleck, Finley and Hughes were forced to devote a great deal of energy to their ongoing battle with conservative foes of the NEA. At the same time, Miller continued to run Highways and tour his performances nationally and internationally.

He met McCartney while performing in London in 1994, and McCartney began visiting Miller in the U.S. the following year. “I kind of knew for a period of time as we were doing our transatlantic relationship that I was getting myself into a complex situation, one that carries with it huge challenges,” Miller says.

A temporary solution was found, or so they thought, when McCartney decided to pursue an MFA at Antioch University in Los Angeles. But when McCartney went to Australia to get his student visa, the U.S. Consulate refused his application. An American Embassy may, and often does, turn down student visa applications if they suspect, for example, that a petitioner will be likely to remain in the U.S. illegally once his studies are completed.

“During that time when my life partner was being literally and tangibly kept from me by my government, it was really upsetting,” recalls Miller. Six months later, McCartney tried again, and the visa was granted.

That experience proved the genesis of “Glory Box.” “I was so worried that when we eventually got him a student visa that they would not respect it when he flew into LAX,” Miller says, referring to the ability of the U.S. Customs Service to turn back potential entrants for any number of reasons, including errors in the visa’s issuance. “I was so haunted by this, so I just wrote my nightmare down.

“I’ve always been telling stories about my life, but usually they’ve been stories of what has happened, or some performance-y version of that. But suddenly I was feeling like I was having to tell the story of what might happen. And that became one of the strong through-lines of the show.”

Miller first performed “Glory Box” in Iowa in October, and has since brought the show to San Francisco, New York, San Diego and Orange County, with upcoming dates in various California cities and elsewhere. The heavy travel schedule, combined with his related activism, prompted his decision to step down from his post at Highways as of this month. Performer-teacher Danielle Brazell, who has served as co-artistic director with Miller for the past year, will take over the job.

“This chore I’m taking on right now with this show feels like it’s going to take all of my energy,” says Miller. “So it’s a good moment to let other people’s energies come forward.”

The situation that he and McCartney face, after all, has taken on a sense of urgency. There is only one year left on McCartney’s three-year student visa, so the men must soon decide what they’ll do. “If we didn’t do anything, we’d just know that in a year we’d have to get landed immigrant status in Canada. Or we could go to England, because Alistair has a British passport too and England has very good laws for immigration for gay couples.

“If things don’t get better, it won’t be a choice,” Miller says. “I won’t end my relationship to stay in the United States. I won’t let the U.S. government break up my family and home, as it’s done to literally thousands and thousands of lesbian and gay couples.”

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“Glory Box,” Highways, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica. Fridays-Saturdays, 8:30 p.m. Ends Feb. 12. $15. (310) 315-1459.