Imagine for a moment that you lived in a country where your boyfriend or girlfriend, life partner could be deported at any moment, there would be a knock at the door and your lover would be pulled from your bed and taken away. Imagine having to separate because of the laws of that country won't allow you to stay together. Imagine that you and your lover would both have to quit your jobs, sell the house and leave that nation to make a life together in a more civilized country. What country is this? Russia? Iran? Nope, sorry, you don't make it to the final round of Jeopardy! That country is the United States of America and that is the situation that all bi-national lesbian and gay couples face in America. Unlike most western countries ( Canada, Australia, Holland, England, France, Sweden and many others ) that have begun to honor gay relationships with immigration rights, in the U.S., where lesbian and gay partnerships are given none of the same special privileges that all heterosexual marriages are afforded, when an American citizen falls in love with someone from another country they will quickly realize what a homophobic American pickle they've gotten themselves into.
Solo performer Tim Miller dives into this charged personal-is-way-political material in his new show Glory Box, which will be performed at Bailiwick April 13-14. In a work that is disarmingly funny, pissed off, sexy and challenging Miller explores in Glory Box his six-year relationship with his Australian boyfriend Alistair McCartney. Glory Box charts their struggles to make a life together in the United States, a country that does have any kind of immigration rights for committed long-term gay relationships. No stranger to controversy ( Miller was one of the notorious NEA 4, the four performance artists who had their grants taken away in 1990 for the content of their work ) , Miller's performances have been at the center of the culture wars, the fights against AIDS and the struggle for lesbian and gay culture for all of the '90s. But all that pales by comparison to what Miller says will be "the fight of my life" as he tries to claim his equal rights as an American citizen in the most intimate of places, his committed love relationship.
So what's a Glory Box? It sounds nasty!
Well, it's not what you think it is! A glory box is what people in Australia call a hope chest. Glory Box is a funny, sexy and charged exploration of my journeys through the challenge of love, gay marriage, and the struggle for immigration rights for gay people and their partners. I looked at my life and pulled out some of the funny and sexy narratives of how my sense of relationships was shaped ( i.e. fucked up ) by the culture I grew up in. The piece dives into all kinds of juicy stuff from a wild story about asking another boy to marry me in 3rd grade ( he beat me up and jammed a Twinkie down my throat ) to the harrowing travails of being in a bi-national relationship with my Australian partner Alistair ( the U.S. government beats me up and jams its homophobic laws denying gay partners immigration rights ) . I think I preferred the Twinkie! I hope that Glory Box leads the audience on an intense and humorous journey into the complexity of the queer human heart that knows no boundary.
Why Glory Box now?
Well, the clock is ticking on Alistair's student visa and we don't know what to do next. I have been so freaked out and challenged in the last couple of years by our struggle to keep Alistair in the U.S., that I decided to fight back and make a kick-ass piece that I really hope will let the audience know how completely without civil rights lesbian and gay relationships are. I feel like people really don't understand how completely gay people's relationships are in a second-class position to those of straight people. It is the way I've felt my rights be most challenged as a U.S. citizen, the fact that I may be forced to leave my own country to be with the man I love. A bill has been introduced in U.S. Congress ( Permanent Partners Immigration Reform Bill H.R 690 ) that would give couples like Alistair and I immigration rights. It's being sponsored by dozens of Democratic congresspeople, but could never pass in the current congress. So far not a single Republican has sponsored it.
How are you feeling about the Vermont Supreme Court decision and the Civil Union Legislation?
The positive decision from the Vermont Supreme Court on lesbian and gay relationships and the resulting Civil Union legislation was very good news, though not the grandslam I had hoped for. It is HUGE that the Vermont Supreme Court has decided that lesbian and gay couples should have all the same rights that heterosexual married couples have under state law in Vermont, whether through gay marriage or a domestic-partnership legislation. The Vermont legislature opted to create a new structure of civil unions. It is the best law of any state for gay relationships, but still carrying only some of the hundreds of state special rights afforded marriage and NONE of the 1049 federal rights including, of course, immigration. The Vermont legislation won't help Alistair and I or any of the thousands of bi-national couples one bit, sad to say.
Tell me about the piece. How do you get at this very hot material about bi-national couple's situation, which is probably news for lots of people?
This piece is at the same time the most intimately personal piece I have made as well as the most pissed off political. I know that many gay people really don't realize that if you fall in love with someone from another country you have no ability to include that person in your life under U.S. law. Any heterosexual person can fall in love with someone of the opposite sex, marry him or her and make them a citizen. Unless their partner blew up a bridge in Bolivia or something, all heterosexual marriages are given immigration rights. On the other hand, NO gay person may have the same special right that straight people take for granted. I think it's a very tangible way that we can see how unfairly U.S. culture treats our committed relationships.
Why save this heterosexual institution?
I always felt that way in the past, I would say to myself "I don't want to support a corrupt bourgeois institution, etc." Well, I understand that point of view, but it really rings hollow when you are facing your lover being deported, or can't get into the hospital to see your partner, or the immediate family takes away the house you left your partner because your will was not acknowledged. The General Accounting Office in D.C. just released a list of 1049 special rights and privileges that straight people get when they get married. I don't want anybody to get feel like they have to get married, on the other hand I want every dyke and fag who wants to marry their partner to be able to and have the same equal right of relationship that straight people have. Otherwise, we are just letting them fuck us over. The radical right has decided to fight us on this. Californians voted to pass the Knight Initiative in the March 2000 election which said that only marriages between one man and one woman will be acknowledged in the State of California. Unless we just want to throw in the towel and let psychos like Pete Knight walk all over us, we have to fight back. What some people would like to forget is that marriage has been very fluid in our history. I try to remind people that 140 years ago during slavery, African-Americans were not allowed to marry. Thanks to the women's movement we no longer see marriage as a man's ownership over a woman&emdash;we view it as a partnership. That wasn't the case a hundred years ago and it is a huge change. Until 1967, it was illegal in many states for men and women of different races to marry! Changes in how we define marriage have been one of the ways that America marks its slow progress towards more civil rights.
You are notorious for getting naked in your shows. What role does nudity play in performance?
In my own work I am more interested in exploring the most vulnerable and fucked up parts of myself in a naked performance section. In Glory Box I get naked in a sweet section about how I used to take off all my clothes when I was a little kid, climb in my mom's wooden hope chest and snuggle into the fake chinchilla jacket to breathe in that cedar-drenched world. My adult naked body in the performance becomes sweetly redolent of childhood longing and memories and invites all the metaphors that we can cram in that hope chest with me naked! Now, I've written this naked-in-the-hope chest stuff as a short story for the page, but there is something about my naked body in real time in the theater crammed into that hope chest on the stage that totally changes, deepens the text. It gets the words sweaty! As long as I don't get splinters in my butt, that's what I want to do! Get those words to become FLESH!"
What will you and Alistair do to stay together?
Right now, couples like Alistair and I are offered three scenarios: your partner is deported, you break up, or you both leave the country and make a life in a more civilized nation than America. Not very pleasant options. Fortunately Alistair has passports from two countries ( Australia and the U.K. ) that give gay people and their partners immigration rights. I have this completely romantic thought that art can change the world and that something is going to change. The unfairness of this situation is so outrageous, even President Clinton came out recently in a speech in favor of immigration rights for lesbian and gay couples. Meanwhile, I'm going to work my little performance art booty off to raise awareness, money and trouble with Glory Box. I want the piece to conjure for the audience a new glory box, a new kind of hope chest, that can be an alternative site for the placing of memories, hopes and dreams of gay people's extraordinary potential for love.
