VIEWPOINT by Tim Miller
I have always had the ability to regard the lay of the land and I will be sharing some of my kinky perspectives with Chicago at Victory Gardens Theater March 15-21 with my show aptly called Lay of the Land. When I was a very little boy—at a time when my favorite wooden puzzle was called "Ride a Cock Horse"—there was a kids' show I loved called Romper Room. It was on for decades, and if you are over 28 years old you probably had a Romper Room period in your life. Each episode had a segment in which the kindly woman Miss Something or Other would reach out to greet various kiddie viewers in TV Land ( by first name only ) using her magic mirror. She would look directly into the camera and, thus, into our child-souls. She would hold up a mirror to her face, and would look lovingly into it. We would get some TV psychedelic-spiral special effects, and the glass part of the mirror would disappear and there would just be an open circle with a handle—and she would say several names. ( "I see Jimmy and Bobby and Susie and Billy ..." ) There were never many Lakeeshas or Javiers mentioned when I was a kid. It was uncanny if you heard your name read on TV. ( "I see Timmy being stripped naked and pawed by handsome, hirsute coal-miners…." Wow! Miss So-And-So saw me! ) I have always had this ability, too. I can really see the Lay of the Land and know what is happening everywhere in queer America. I just hold that mirror in front of my eyes.
After Proposition 8 passed in California and my home state joined the other 45 H8 states—including Illinois—where gay folks are denied these fundamental rights, I found myself marching with a quarter of a million folks in hundreds of cities in all 50 states protesting the anti-gay laws that passed on Election Day 2008 in California, Florida, Arkansas and Arizona. I was preparing to premiere the very first chunk of a brand-new show here in Chicago at Links Hall ,and I knew I was going to have to access the Romper Room mirror to see WTF is going on in our lunatic asylum of a country. Voila, Lay of the Land—my saucy, sharp-knifed look at the State of the Queer Union during a time of trial! Careening out of that marriage-equality street protest to my sexy misadventures performing in 43 states , to the electoral assaults on gay folks all over the country, to my life as a grade-school flag monitor, to choking on cheap meat caught in my 10-year-old gay boy's throat, Lay of the Land friskily gets at that feeling of gay folks being perpetually on trial, on the ballot and on the menu! Lay of the Land is a "lay" in all kinds of ways: a sex-assignation, a queer-citizenship map and, of course, a narrative ballad with a recurrent refrain ( my favorite way-down-the-list definition for "lay" ) !
I travel a lot—at least 30 states a year. I sometimes feel like a performing "queer Johnny Appleseed, which is a bit redundant since Johnny Appleseed is widely thought to actually have been gay. Johnny Appleseed was a Walt Whitman-y queer fleeing the bourgeois family duties back east for adventures in the world of men in the west! Yeehaw! Plus those apples he was planting weren't baking apples. Nope—they were only good for hard-cider drinking and partying. Johnny Appleseed was a queer Dionysus bringing joy and fermentation to the new nation!
As I do the Lord's work trying to undo homophobia—seriously—I often call on my animal spirit guides. Since I do a ton of university gigs all over the country as I throw my luggage together for my college engagements, I often imagine that all the animal mascots of these institutions of higher learning I work at are gathering to help me. Just as the mice and birds in Cinderella's Disney garret pimp her up for the ball, I visualize the animal mascots of the upper Midwest preparing me. I see Illinois State University's Reggie Redbird getting in on the Disney action and dressing me in my so-out-they-are-in cargo pants that I have had to sleep in on the nasty carpet at O'Hare during many airport snowstorms. I see University of Minnesota's Goldy Gopher, with his scary teeth, pulling my roller bag out of the closet. I see Northwestern University's Willie Wildcat fluffing my naturally curly hair, I see Wisconsin's Bucky Badger—the sexiest of all the mascots because he has been seriously working out and is wearing no pants!—meeting me for a quickie in the airport public restrooms reserved for closeted a Republican senator to help me face the horrors of changing planes in Dallas or Dulles!
I hold up that Romper Room mirror and I can really see the Lay of the Land. I see everything, my gaze flying over the states. I can see French Lick, Ind., and Morehead, Ky. I see Fort Gay, W. Va., and Nellieburg, Miss. These are real places! Is this a queer country or what? I can even see the Statue of Liberty all the way from Chicago's Victory Gardens Theater! Have you ever noticed how butch, how gender-fuck the Statue of Liberty is? Uh oh, I see Liberty is choking. America is choking on that MSG-laced piece of tough homophobia trapped in our national throat. I quickly fly through the mirror to the New York harbor and do the Heimlich maneuver on the Statue of Liberty, which is not easy through all that copper! The Statue coughs up a nasty chunk of homophobic gristle that is choking our nation and also four Supreme Court Justices who stand between us and freedom: Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia, who explodes in a toxic cloud when he hits the water.
The Statue of Liberty whips off that tired copper muumuu and Planet of the Apes tiara, and lifts that suspiciously vibrator-esque lamp and I hear Liberty sing out the new slam poetry written there on that statue.
"Give me your fierce faggots,
your strong dykes.
Your huddled queer masses yearning to love free
Give me your working-class femmes with Lee press-on nails
Your activist queer boys who make out in jails.
…. your cowboy homos in buttless chaps and such
your U-hauling lezzies who move in together too much!
Give me your hope! Your heart. Your queer self possession.
Your families, your future and fierce sex transgression.
I lift my lamp beside this open closet door.
Come out shout out where ever you are.
Welcome.
We're home."
Tim Miller performs Lay of the Land in Chicago at Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln, March 15, 19-21. He will also be leading a weeklong intensive performance workshop March 16-22 that will create a performance to be performed March 22 at Victory Gardens.
For tickets to Lay of the Land or for workshop information, call 773-871-3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org .
