He’s been described as the “patron saint of the gay performance world” by the Los Angeles Times, but that moniker proved insufficiently saintly on Sunday night when a weeklong workshop at Pennsylvania’s Villanova University by the L.A.-based performance artist Tim Miller was abruptly canceled. Miller has been invited to lead the April 16-21 workshop months ago by Heidi Rose, an assistant professor of communications at the Catholic university’s campus, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. But on Sunday night Rose called Miller to inform him that university president reverend Peter M. Donahue had canceled the workshop.

Though there were no reasons given for the cancellation, Miller — who’s given his workshops at many other Catholic universities, including the nation’s largest, DePaul in Chicago — hypothesized that it was a result of fears whipped up by Catholic blogs. They propagated “this bizarre lie that I’m anti-Catholic,” Miller told the Inquirer. “People tell these lies and it gets people who read these blogs worked up.”

Rose was forbidden from commenting on the cancelation, but in a February 14 article titled “Radical gay activist to appear at Villanova“ she told CatholicCulture.org that Miller’s workshop would “take you through an intimate process of self-discovery and exploration, focusing on identity and culture, questions of diversity and difference, knowledge of self and others, etc.”

This proved too risqué for the Catholic school, which issued an official statement regarding the cancelation on Monday afternoon. “Villanova University embraces intellectual freedom and academic discourse,” the statement said. “With regard to the forthcoming residency and performance workshops by Tim Miller, we had concerns that his performances were not in keeping with our Catholic and Augustinian values and mission. Therefore, Villanova has decided not to host Mr. Miller on our campus. Villanova University is an open and inclusive community and in no way does this singular decision change that.”

Noting that Villanova had once hosted a production of Tony Kushner’s controversial, Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, Miller — who in 1990 was one of four artists whose National Endowment for the Arts grants touched off the so-called “NEA Four” scandal — concluded that this decision did in fact reflect a significant change in academic discourse. “Times have changed,” he said. “We’re in a much more coercive, censorious time.”

- Benjamin Sutton

Tags: Censorship, Tim Miller, Villanova University