Zero Patience: A Queer Film Classic

Contents

Acknowledgments

Synopsis

Credits

Abbreviations

One: Song and Dance

Two: History Lessons

Three: The Cinema We Queer

Four: How Do We Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic?

References

Filmography

Endnotes

Index

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank John Greyson for the brilliant films that have inspired us for years now. Where would we be without The Making of ‘Monsters,’ Urinal, Lilies, Proteus, and so many others? Not only are many of the films drop dead gorgeous, but their wit, intellect, generosity, and deep emplacement within the LGBT community allow us many different forms of engagement within the rubric of queer film. Greyson’s films are something to anticipate; there are never enough of them, nor can we watch them enough.

We would also like to thank Thomas Waugh and Matthew Hays for inviting us to write about Zero Patience, a favorite film for many, many years and one which has also engaged each of us separately in our differing research projects as well as in this collaboration. Tom and Matt have been unfailingly generous as series editors. Susan Safyan has been a joy to work with throughout the editing process and we would like to thank others on the Arsenal Pulp Press staff as well, particularly Brian Lam and Shyla Seller.

Last but not least, we want to thank our tireless and amazingly thorough research assistant, Matt White.

Synopsis

Zero Patience blends the spectacle of Broadway/Hollywood musical with both a near-documentary response to contemporary AIDS discourse and a comedy-romance (not romantic comedy) to raise important questions about the production and circulation of knowledge surrounding HIV/AIDS. Set in 1987, the film takes place only three years after HIV was identified as the source of the immunosuppression that leads to AIDS and just six years after the disease was first identified (both as a syndrome and with gay men). It brings together two historical figures: Sir Richard Francis Burton and Patient Zero. Burton is a Victorian explorer, sexologist, and author of many books, including English translations of The Arabian Nights and The Kama Sutra. He has survived into the twentieth century through an unfortunate accident with the fountain of youth. Patient Zero is an imaginative and entirely fictional stand-in for Gaétan Dugas, a recently deceased Quebecois flight attendant who was identified by journalist Randy Shilts as the source of North American AIDS.

The audience is introduced to Zero’s story as he sings the opening musical number, Just Like Scheherazade, in a gay version of Limbo that includes a swimming pool, synchronized swimmers, and a disco ball. He is completely unaware that he is about to make a reappearance in the world of the living. Realizing that no one can see him—not even his mother—Zero cuts to the chase: How can I get laid if nobody can see me? Zero’s focus on corporeality and sex announces one of the film’s strongest political messages: a refutation of anti-sex hysteria in favor of safer sex practices and education. In the meantime, the audience has also met Burton, who is busy creating a Hall of Contagion exhibit for the fictional Museum of Natural History in Toronto. Magically apprised of the cluster study that purportedly identified Zero as the source of AIDS, Burton sets out to make a music video about Zero, whom he homophobically assumes to have been deliberately and knowingly infecting others. But first he must convince the museum director to finance this enterprise by arguing his case in the solo number, Culture of Certainty. When his interviewees (including Zero’s doctor and mother) don’t say what Burton wants to hear, he edits the tape to make Zero appear to be a gay serial killer. In his pursuit of further footage, he is instructed in bathhouse etiquette by a trio of naked men in the novelty number, Pop-a-Boner; is confronted by the anger and frustration of AIDS activists, including Zero’s friends Mary and George, in Control; and runs into Zero.

Although the two are antagonists, the fact that Burton is the only person who can see Zero leads them to collaborate in finding a way to make him visible/alive again. Their growing sexual attraction—explored initially in the Butthole Duet and consummated in the jungle diorama—as well as interventions by AIDS activists undermine Burton’s certainty about Zero. In the meantime, George’s own certainty in both his AIDS activist work and the medical treatment he is receiving for AIDS is called into question in the song Positive.

Redirected by both the animals’ rejection of blame in the song and dance number Contagious and the reaffirmation of Zero’s innocence by Miss HIV in the water-ballet reprise of Scheherazade (Miss HIV), Burton sets out to clear Zero’s name and introduce a more accurate picture of both Zero and the genesis of AIDS. While he encounters obstacles from institutional authorities, the media, and (for opposite reasons) from Zero himself, Burton is surprised when the ACT UP crew restage his exhibit in the number Zero Patience. The love duet, Six or Seven Things, foreshadows the end of the film when Zero asks for Burton’s help in order to return to Limbo. Burton comes to understand that redeeming him in the public eye would only play into the same discursive trap that allowed the media to make him a monster in the first place.

Credits

Zero Patience, 1993, Canada, English 100 min

Color, Sound, 35mm, 1.85:1

Shot in Mississauga and Toronto

Distributed by Motion Picture Distribution

Production Company: Zero Patience Productions

Director and writer: John Greyson

Executive producer: Alexandra Raffé

Producers: Louise Garfield and Anna Stratton

Original Music: Glenn Schellenberg

Canadian Premiere: September 11, 1993, Toronto, Festival of Festivals.

Prizes: Special Jury Citation as Best Canadian Feature Film, 1993, Festival of Festivals, Toronto; Best Canadian Film and Best Ontario Feature, 1993 Cinéfest Film Festival, Sudbury; Genie Award nomination for Best Original Song in 1993 for the song Zero Patience by Greyson and Schellengerg.

Festivals: Toronto Festival of Festivals, 1993; New Directors/New Films, New York, 1994.

Cast

Sir Richard Burton: John Robinson

Zero: Normand Fauteux

Mary: Dianne Heatherington

George: Richardo Keens-Douglas

Dr Placebo: Bernard Behrens

Maman: Charlotte Boisjoli

Dr Cheng: Brenda Kamino

Miss HIV: Michael Callen

African Green Monkey: Marla Lukofsky

Ray: Von Flores

Michael: Scott Hurst

Ross: Duncan McIntosh

Shower Guy: Charles Azulay

Shower Guy: David Gale

Shower Guy: Howard Rosenstein

School Kid: Jeffrey Akomah

Crew

Cinematography: Miroslaw Baszak

Film Editing: Miume Jan

Production Design: Sandra Kybartas

Set Decoration: Armando Sgrignuoli

Costume Design: Joyce Schure

Choreographer: Susan McKenzie

Abbreviations

ACT: AIDS Committee of Toronto

ACT UP: AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power

AIDS: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome

AAN: AIDS Action Now

ARV: Antiretroviral Therapy

AZT: Azidothymidine

CD4: Cluster of differentiation 4 (a glycoprotein)

CDC: Center for Disease Control

CLGRO: Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights of Ontario

CMV: Cytomegalovirus

DDI: Didanosine

EGALE: Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere

HAART: Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy

HIV: Human Immunodeficiency Virus

HIV+: HIV Positive

IAC: International AIDS Conference

KS: Kaposi’s Sarcoma

LGBT: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender/Transsexual (usually appears as GLBT in the US)

MMWR: Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report

MSM: Men who have Sex with Men

NFB: National Film Board of Canada

PCP: Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia (more commonly known today as Pneumocystis Pneumonia)

PWA: Person With AIDS

PLWA: Person Living With AIDS

PLWA/H: Person Living With AIDS/HIV

ROC: Rest of Canada (a phrase which designates Canada outside of Quebec and which tends to imply a notion of separate identities)

RTPC: Right to Privacy Committee

UNAIDS: Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS

USFDA: United States Food and Drug Administration

WHO: World Health Organization

Chapter One: Song and Dance

Every time a shell explodes, you look around and you discover that you’ve lost more of your friends, but nobody else notices. It isn’t happening to them. They’re walking the streets as though we weren’t living through some sort of nightmare. And only you can hear the screams of the people who are dying and their cries for help. No one else seems to be noticing …

—Vito Russo, Why We Fight (speech, Albany, NY, May 9, 1988)

Zero Patience (John Greyson, 1993) is a film about AIDS. More specifically, it is a film about how the 1980s AIDS crisis played out in Toronto, in Canada and, more generally, in North America. Generically, the film is a riff on the visually and aurally spectacular Broadway/Hollywood-style musical, with elements of ghost story, melodrama, and documentary scattered throughout. Thomas Waugh refers to this film as a rambunctiously hybrid agitprop … comedy-romance (2006, 280), while others have placed it within the genres of horror (Gittings 2002) and science fiction (Pearson 2008). These suggestions are evidence of a multilayered, polysemic, postmodernist approach to filmmaking that is deeply engaged with the community from which it emerges, the history and current technologies of film and video, and the academic work—especially queer theory—which helps to make sense of the complex politics of AIDS. As both Roger Hallas and Waugh have indicated, by drawing on different cinematic genres while still highlighting the movie musical, Greyson’s film foregrounds questions of representation, history, politics, and knowledge in and through generic layering.

That Greyson would choose—perhaps dare might be a better word—to make a musical about AIDS in 1993 was something that baffled many reviewers. Even the film’s publicity played on its irony: the tagline on the film poster was A John Greyson Movie Musical About AIDS.

Figure 1. The film poster emphasizes actor Norman Fauteux’s healthy, sexy body. DVD still.

Greyson says:

Up until that point, all the fictive representations of AIDS (not just films but plays and novels) to date had been melodramatic—from the deeply dreadful formulaic made-for-TV [An] Early Frost and the more nuanced semi-indie Longtime Companion and [A] Death in the Family, to activist-driven [The] Normal Heart to Artie Bressan’s Buddies. I wanted to make something which captured the wit and spirit and anger and radicalism of the AIDS activist movement—and adopt the most inappropriate genre possible (the fluffy musical) to address this deeply urgent crisis. (email correspondence, June 5, 2011)

Reviewers frequently found the choice of genre every bit as inappropriate as Greyson may have wished, but were also stymied by his choice of protagonists: the 174-year-old historical figure of Sir Richard Francis Burton (John Robinson)—using historical and/or fictional figures is very much a Greysonian trademark—alongside the ghost of Patient Zero (Normand Fauteux), the man who supposedly brought AIDS to North America. Many reviewers indeed got the film and appreciated Greyson’s generic, aesthetic, narrative, and intellectual choices (see, for example, Fillion 1993 and Griffin 1994). However, influential American freelance film reviewer James Berardinelli’s 1994 online review of the film is typical of those who did not appreciate this approach to making a film about AIDS and who chose often to target its genre as a primary issue: "What’s more, Zero Patience is a musical (a what???) …" However, as Berardinelli is quick to mention, although the idea of