Throughout the ’90s and into the new millennium, performer and writer Tim Miller has worked at the intersection of performance, politics and identity, using his personal experiences to create fierce and funny explorations of life as a gay American man. His performances and books have ricocheted from the perils and joys of sex and relationships to the struggles of political disenfranchisement and artistic censorship. In his new book, 1001 Beds (University of Wisconsin Press, edited by Glen Johnson), we have the most complete Miller yet – a raucous collection of his performance scripts, essays, interviews, journal entries and photographs, as well as his recent stage piece Us.

1001 Beds the book, and the performance based on the book that Miller will be touring all over the U.S. and abroad, brings together the personal, communal and national political strands that have fueled his work from its beginnings and ultimately define Miller’s place as a contemporary artist, activist and gay man.

This intimate – sometimes really intimate – autobiographical collage of Miller’s professional and personal life reveals one of the celebrated creators of a crucial contemporary art form and a tireless advocate for the American dream of political equality for all citizens. No stranger to controversy – Miller was one of the notorious “NEA four,” the four performance artists who had their National Endowment for the Arts grants taken away in 1990 for the content of their work, a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court – Tim Miller’s performances have been at the center of the culture wars, the fight against AIDS, the battle for marriage equality and the struggle for lesbian and gay culture throughout the ’90s and into the new century.

The performance 1001 Beds is a raucous and rowdy exploration of Miller’s adventures in a performer’s life fiercely lived in his travels through love, politics and art. From a gay teen’s head-on collision with life in a sleazy hotel across the street from the Hollywood Bowl to an ecstatic queer vision of a sex-positive future on a mattress in a police holding cell, Miller’s 1001 Beds is a fiercely funny, sexy and inspiring story about the transforming power of art and the richness of gay identity lived out loud. I caught up with Tim Miller to talk about the politics, love and dirty laundry that jump out from between the sheets of his new book and performance.

Gay & Lesbian Times: So tell us about 1001 Beds.

Tim Miller: My new book, 1001 Beds, just came out from University of Wisconsin Press. I just got the first copy in the mail today and it’s beautiful! 1001 Beds is a collection of my essays, performances, manifestos, performance touring stories from Tokyo to Chattanooga and my tell-way-too-much journals.

GLT: 1001 Beds – you have been a busy man! It sounds nasty. Does that mean what we think it means?

TM: 1001 Beds is a kinky and funny journey through the beds and hotels and life on the road as a traveling salesman – oops, I mean a performance artist! I was doing the math recently and I figured that if I continue to tour as a performer for another 20 years, I will end up sleeping in at least 1,000 hotel beds in my lifetime on the road. For maximum poetic oomph, let’s say 1,001 beds.

GLT: Do you “do the math” in your life a lot? It’s always dangerous to do that.

TM: Yes, we like imagining the 25,000 or so sunrises you get to greet, but try pondering how many swimming pools of coffee you will drink or room full of hot dogs you will suck down in a lifetime. Swimming pools of coffee! Weenie infinity!

It is [these] dangerous love-of-life-statistics that made me calculate when I was 17 how much semen I was likely to ejaculate over the course of a lifetime. I figured, based on a reasonable per-orgasm average of one tablespoon [and] cumming at least three times each day until I was 35 – somewhat less since then – I was going to fill two large Hefty garbage bags with cum! Not a sexy thought!

GLT: What do all these beds and travels mean to you?

TM: It seems important to think about those beds. To let them wash over me, crush me with their rusty springs – dust mites and polyester comforters that Holiday Inn will never once wash! When I was a kid, I once saw in a Ripley’s Believe it or Not book a monument to a bed. The image was a four-poster bed up on a tall pillar like Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. As you might imagine, the monument was somewhere in the Midwest – maybe somewhere near Peoria – an area I have racked up many of those 1,001 beds. Anyhow, this monument was a tribute to the bed – a place where most of us are born on, most of us die on and most of us spend one third of our lives on. This idea thrilled me as a boy, since I loved being in bed greatly and knew in my life [that the] bed would loom large as an emotional, political and psychic hotspot. I knew my deepest sense of self would be forged in bed, history is made in bed, creativity and life force is generated from between the sheets: all those 1,001 hotel beds I would travel to in the Midwest, just like that one up on the pillar in my Ripley’s Believe it or Not memory.

GLT: Is there one bed that jumps out at you?

TM: Hmm, I think I would have to say the most important bed of my life has been a certain crummy hotel in London, the Adelphia Hotel in South Kensington, where I brought my partner, Alistair, back to the day we met 12 years ago. Who could know that on that bed that hot July night in London underneath that water-stained ceiling my life was about to be changed, challenged, deepened? Our lives, especially as gay people, are really written there in the sweat and heat of a tangle of sheets.

GLT: What do these 1,001 beds add up to?

TM: These 1,001 beds today have become the symbol of my life on the road as an artist and activist. My mission – and I have totally decided to accept it – is to be always ready to run around and perform my lean ’n’ mean homo-drenched performances, cultural agitating, teaching and, [in] general, being a way-out gay moving target. Whenever I need to hop on a tiny plane for Des Moines or Chattanooga and show the rainbow flag, I am ready to do this. This new book explores my journeys and adventures and observations of this mission.

Tim Miller will perform 1001 Beds Thursday, June 1, through Saturday, June 3, at 8:00 p.m. at The Real Theater (at the Get Wireless Store), located at 116 Washington St. in Hillcrest. Call (619) 297-7309 for tickets and additional information.

William J. Mann is the author of All American Boy and Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger.