The naked truth: performance artist and author Tim Miller faces down oppression with anger, intelligence, and nudity. Now he's leaving the country. (books).

I believe somehow as the days get .dark that we are called to become aware of light, to witness it in a deep way," writes performance artist Tim Miller in one of the soulful introductions in his winning new collection, Body Blows (University of Wisconsin Press). The 43-year-old Miller has seen a lot of darkness--the plague years, the aftermath of bashed boyfriends, police brutality, and the U.S. government turning against him--yet he keeps spilling himself onto the stage. As one of the country's queer theatric vanguard, Miller's confessions are his way of making some light.

Body Blows assembles Miller's six major solo shows, from his frisky, earthy coming-of-age story Some Golden States in 1987 to 1999's mournful Glory Box. Read together, they make a lush, rambunctious autobiography to an artist whose notoriety long precedes him.

In 1990, Miller became one of the infamous NEA Four--along with Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, and John Fleck--who sued the federal government when their applications for solo performance grants from the National Endowment for the Arts were denied due to political pressure deeming their work to be indecent. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the artists won their argument that government cannot censor art, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. The court's main decision was that "decency" is a legitimate standard for public funding of art.

Over tea at his cozy bungalow in Los Angeles's Venice neighborhood, Miller calls that time period "as fun as a colonoscopy," which is typical Miller. No doubt, his performances are just this side of raunch--and sometimes just the other side--but they're also deadly serious and comfortably camp. Miller is known for getting bucknaked in almost every show and sitting in laps or coaxing an erection or malting love to a hole in the ground. Audience members get to wash him as well as "tattoo" him with markers. In one of his most outrageous bits, My Queer Body, Miller argues with his "forlorn" penis: "Are you trying to make me look bad?" he asks. "Get hard!"

If you're getting turned on, you're probably missing the point. Nudity, for Miller, is about not titillation but politics. It's one his "many little activisms,' he says. "There is almost no public space in our country where people can be naked--nude beaches and the theater, and that s it. Whenever we re more fucked up than England, it's always a cause for concern."

Miller is currently on tour, performing excerpts from Body Blows across the country at least through fall. On the page, the book reads much tamer than the heat and intimacy of his stage shows. Solo performance demands an uncommon braw ery, which doesn't quite translate to print. But in another way, publication reduces the shock value of his nudity and lets Miller's rich poetry and thoughtfulness emerge.

"Door hanging is a very useful skill because everybody needs doors," he writes in Naked Breath, a hilarious and harrowing 1994 monologue about working as a door-hanger in Brooklyn, N.Y., and falling in love with an HIVpositive man. "We need doors to go from one room to the other, sure. But we also need doors to go from one time of life to another."

These days Miller is planning to exit permanently. He and his Australian partner of almost eight years, Alistair McCartney, are living out their final months in the United States before McCartney's visa runs out and they are forced to emigrate. Because gay binational couples are denied the same immigration rights as heterosexual couples in the United States, the two of them will go into exile in London. (This trauma is the subject of Glory Box.)

In his kitchen--a tangerine tree and redolent jasmine that he planted just outside--Miller seems a little sad, beaten. "I feel like I've been able to persevere in all my other struggles, but in this one the Jesse Helmses of the world win," he says. "We're now in the ticking-clock period. We'll have to leave by Christmas--it'll be our present from the U.S. government."

Just one more body blow.

Bunn also writes for The New York Times Magazine.