Research Catalog

Title

Shirts & skin / Tim Miller.

Author

Miller, Tim, 1958-

Publication

Los Angeles : Alyson Publications, 1997.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xiv, 296 : illustrations; 22 cm

Summary

When his high school gym teacher divided the class into two teams, Shirts and Skins, for a game of touch football, Tim Miller knew "I was always going to be on the team where the boys took their clothes off and got close to each other." In this revealing, humorous, frequently sexy memoir, Miller, on of the famed NEA Four, looks at some of the major events that have shaped his life: the growth of his first pubic hair, becoming the love slave of a John Travolta look-alike, shopping for a god, deciding whether to take the HIV antibody test, and searching for the perfect soul mate.

Alternative Title

Shirts and skin

Subjects

• Performance artists
• Gay men
• Biography
• United States
• Miller, Tim, 1958-
• Performance artists > United States > Biography
• Gay men > United States > Biography

Genre/Form

Biography.

Contents

I am born (in which the queer sperm and the dyke ovum have tea with Gertrude Stein and Nijinsky and young Tim arrives in the world) -- Fräulein Rodriguez (in which we learn about Whittier, California where a Chicana lesbian teaches the young boy German, including the irregular forms of the verb 'to be') -- Tar pit heart (in which the boy meets boy, the heart opens, the car is wrecked, and Tim comes close to getting some) -- How to grow fruit (in which Handel's Messiah turns Tim into a faggot, brings to men together, and finally gets our narrator laid) -- I walk down Hollywood Boulevard (in which Tim is butt-raped under a John Travolta post and then wanders along the Walk of Fame) -- Spilt milk (in which the overidealistic Tim seeks a better world and instead discovers a misty abyss of deceit and subterfuge) -- Good with wood (in which Tim moves to New York, builds his beds, and sleeps in them too as the blood begins to flow) -- The maw of death (in which the increasingly skeptical Tim tries to find an apartment in New York City and sees death on Avenue B) -- A buddy system (in which Tim and Doug learn some secrets of love and biscoastal life from a large black dog) -- Stretch mark (in which Tim is part of the ACT UP tribe in East L.A. as they try to levitate County Hospital and turn fear into action) -- Breathing naked (in which Tim flips the bird to fear as the positive and the negative make electricity on the Lower East Side) -- Shirts & skin (in which the Jewish cabala helps clean the dirty laundry of a number of men and it all comes out in the wash).

ISBN

• 1555834256
• 9781555834258

LCCN

97026917

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library