Tim Miller and Holly Hughes write and perform witty text-based works about being queer in America today. In 1990 they became notorious as two of the so-called NEA 4, performance artists who sued the National Endowment for the Arts for rescinding their grants based on illegal political criteria.

Both arrived in New York in the late seventies. Hughes began working with a group of women at WOW Café and her early plays such as "The Well of Horniness," emerged from these collaborations. A collection of her plays have been published under the title Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler and she is the co-editor, with David Roman, of O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance." Her current piece, Preaching to the Perverted is partly an account of the lawsuit that the "NEA Four" filed against the federal government.

Soon after escaping to New York in the late seventies, Miller-along with Charles Moulton and Charles Dennis-founded Performance Space 122 (PS 122) , one of New York's foremost performance venues. In 1986, Miller returned to Los Angeles and three years later co-founded Highways Performance Space. Since then, he has produced numerous works including My Queer Body (1992), Fruit Cocktail (1996), and Shirts and Skin (1997, based on his autobiographical novel of the same name. His latest work, Glory Box, is about he and his Australian lover's problems with the INS.

Robert Atkins (RA): Refresh readers' memories. What happened at the NEA 4 trial? What were the central issues?

Tim Miller (TM): In 1990, I, a wandering queer performance artist, had been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts' Solo Performer Fellowship, which was promptly overturned under political pressure from the Bush White House because of the lush, wall-to-wall homo themes of my creative work. We so-called "NEA 4" (me, Karen Finley, John Fleck and Holly Hughes) then successfully sued the federal government with the help of the ACLU--if you're not a card-carrying member, become one!--for violation of our First Amendment rights. We won a settlement where the government paid us the amount of the defunded grants and all court costs.

Holly Hughes (HH): For the record my grant was also an individual performer's fellowship. Of course the defunding happened at the height--or perhaps we should say the depth--of a panic about federally funded art. Think Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.

TM: The last little driblet of this case was the "decency" clause, which Congress had added to the NEA appropriation at the cattle prodding of Jesse Helms. Judge Wallace Tashima of the Ninth Federal Circuit Curt had sagely declared this "decency" clause unconstitutional and thrown it out. This might have had a happy ending, except for our supposed friend Bill Clinton, who allowed the Justice Department to appeal this decision to the highest court.

HH: Some friend! As if Jane and John Doe rose up off their couch and demanded this. It was another calculated move by the religious right to raise money and their own profiles. The Christian Coalition was a fringe group before this began. And I think that whoever encouraged the NEA to dump the four of us was either very smart or very lucky. We are four artists whose art aims to be provocative, to be controversial, working in a marginal field that is poorly understood. Few people have seen performance art at all and the phrase is often used as short hand for "bad theater".

RA: Most people assume that litigation ended in the early nineties. But that's not true, of course.

TM: Oh, no. If you read your newspaper in 1998, not so long ago, you'll know that the Supremes decided that it was okay not to fund "indecent art" in their NEA 4 decision. The law "neither inherently interferes with First Amendment rights nor violates constitutional vagueness principles," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in her majority opinion. In a disappointing 8-1 decision the high court hitched up with Helms and his ilk and said the National Endowment for the Arts can consider "decency" in deciding who gets public money for the arts. I was grateful that at least Justice David H. Souter showed that he understood the assault on artists that has been taking place in this country for the past ten years. He was the lone dissenter, saying the law should be struck down as unconstitutional because it was "substantially overbroad and carries with it a significant power to chill artistic production and display."

HH: The decision is typical of the kind of "justice" stigmatized groups receive when they seek redress through the legal system. You think you have proof of some wrong doing, in our case, a paper trail clearly demonstrating that the defunding was based on our sexual identities, rather than our work. Not to mention ten years' of other defundings, other exhibits closed, etc. We're talking documented events. But the Supremes ignored all this. In fact I'd bet that only Souter and Scalia read the briefs. Maybe the dog ate it. They claimed that discrimination against "minority" viewpoints would be wrong, had it ever happened. Hello? Do they read the papers?

RA: Let me give you an opportunity to dispel the notion that this litigation made you rich and famous. What was it really like?

TM: A colonoscopy! I felt my work was trivialized and misrepresented all over the place. Whole swaths of the country that I used to perform and teach in became off-limits for years. I lost a great deal of work. An example of how this goes on and on: Last year, when I was performing in Chattanooga, as the audience arrives at the theater so do the protesters. They set up shop across the street, a motley bunch of seven or eight men who have stashed their wives and children at the corner. As the people began to arrive for the show, they were forced to walk by the protesters across the street who waved their confederate flags. (The black cops we had hired for security didn't seem too thrilled about these characters.) The protesters shouted the usual charming greetings at the audience: "Faggots! God made Adam and Eve, Not Adam and Steve! Sodomites Burn in Hell, etc." The children down the street join in these cries, which seems to demonstrate this particular church's version of family values: "The Family That Mates Together, Hates Together." There is both a rambunctious spirit of a carnival with the barkers as well as a public hanging full of unsated blood lust. The situation is simultaneously absurd and terrifying.

HH: Your question is unanswerable. The belief that there is no such thing as bad publicity is so widespread and so deeply rooted that it's stronger than any evidence of harm I could offer. Ultimately, that was what was most painful for me; even most of my friends were jealous. I felt incredibly isolated.

But here is an answer: Even if it was personally the greatest thing that ever happened, if I'd made piles of money and bought a few tropical islands and the like, it was a terrible thing for this country. It legitimized the religious right, it eviscerated the NEA so that there is no more funding for individual artists, and, most important, it established a precedent for more attacks on free expression in any publicly funded domain.

RA: Did it have a direct affect on your work?

HH: No, I really like working under the threat of a Justice Department investigation of me as a child pornographer! And I can't be the only artist in the country who is actually inspired by bad reviews. Every day the press was going on about what a rotten artist I was, was a day I was able to churn out more operas, more books, and more paintings. I loved it! I just wish every artist could have the advantages I've had!

TM: Actually, the NEA struggles didn't influence my work nearly as much as the reality of HIV-AIDS had in the early nineties or my struggles with the INS these last five years. I do have a major case of NEA fatigue, but I know that it is something important to keep looking at, even if it's something I don't think about much these days.

The culture wars seem all squishy and homey compared to the real-life war the US government continually wages on my relationship with my Australian partner Alistair through its denial of the immigration rights that every straight person is afforded by marriage. This other "culture" war will almost certainly force us from the US next year into exile to a civilized country like Australia or the UK. These battles are connected, of course.

RA: How do you deal with the possibility of self-censorship? Do you actually see it going on in others--that is, in the culture? Or intuit it happening?

TM: There is no question that the "chilling effect" is as real as the polar ice cap! I hear this from artists and my students all over the country. It's so embarrassing that the Supreme Court made this decision that undermined the First Amendment. I will look forward to the time--in the not too distant future, I hope--when a teacher will step before a community college class exploring late twentieth century social movements and say, "Now, students, I know it is shocking to believe this, but there was once a time as recent as the late 1990's when lesbian and gay men were actually denied certain civil rights within our democratic society. The Supreme Court even upheld a series of laws that constitutionally discriminated against them!"

HH: You look at what is happening in theaters and performance spaces it's easy to see--at least to me--that there is not much of an edge. I think there is more edgy subversive stuff happening in other media. Can a presenter make money by presenting controversial work? Undoubtedly. But it's short term gain. The box office bump is not going to cover increased scrutiny by funders. Unfortunately the only way the dominant culture pays attention to art is if there is some scandal.

RA: Tim, you spoke of being picketed by fringe right-wingers. Do people in their twenties know anything about the history of the Culture Wars and censorship struggles?

TM: Certainly people study the thrills and chillls of the (on-going) culture wars in college and universities. I get several emails a day from people writing their theses and dissertations about my penis and such.

HH: I think people know about it in a general way, but many of the young people were just kids in 1990. And the media coverage was--and remains--so problematic and sensationalistic when any controversy arises. You get a few villains, a few victims, no cause and effect, no context or connections. But I think there is interest, definitely.

RA: Many American artists working in hybrid and avant-garde live-art forms have found more support for their work in Europe than the US over the past two decades. Is there an interest in your queer or AIDS work outside the US? In identity-politics-related work generally?

TM: Europe has always been more receptive to formalist, interdisciplinary work. The more politicized, identity-based performance work around sexuality, AIDS and race is seen as a peculiarly American discourse. Some of this is on account of language issues, of course. Much of this work is very text-based and presumes fluency in English.

HH: I agree with Tim that the type of work I do does not translate to Europe as well as more visually abstract, multimedia work. Not only is my work very text-based, but I think that identity-based performance work is a particularly American idiom. There is a long tradition of representing history in the first person here that has been part of social change movements like the civil rights movement, second wave feminism, and post-stonewall gay liberation. But it's also rooted in the tradition of romantic individualism that is so American.

RA: Do you see a difference between homophobia and AIDS-phobia? If so what?

TM: Homophobia is a deep-rooted theme of American life, like racism. AIDS-phobia is a pernicious variation on that theme. I think we can't overstate how poisoned our country is by homophobia in all its variations. Anti-gay bigotry is really the lingua franca, the gold standard, the cream in the coffee of the radical religious right's final gasp at controlling our country. The jury is still out on whether they are going to be succesful in this. As I've mentioned, this toxic bigotry reaches into every corner of my life here and determines whether I will even be able to remain in my country with Alistair or leave.