An Intergenerational Dialogue on HIV/AIDS Activist Video History

An Intergenerational Dialogue on HIV/ AIDS Activist Video History by Ryan Conrad and John Greyson Martine Syms is an artist. Specialties: the color purple, modern comedy and strategic swearing. 113 Little Joe An Intergenerational Dialogue on HIV/AIDS Activist Video History ilmmaker John Greyson and I have been working together with a handful of other artists and academics as part of the Archive/Counter-Archive (A/CA) initiative in Canada. A/CA is an expansive multi-year, multi-institution initiative focused on preserving and reactivating twentieth century Canadian media from marginal communities. Our particular case study on AIDS activist media recovers, preserves, analyses, reactivates, and recirculates AIDS activist video tapes connected to the Toronto artist/activist milieu of the 1980s and early 90s. The following dialogue between us discusses Greyson’s work on the recently recovered tapes from the 1990–91 cable access television series Toronto Living With AIDS as well as Greyson’s classic, recently remastered feature-length AIDS musical Zero Patience from 1993. Poster for Toronto Living With AIDS (1990) F 114 The videos that made up the Toronto Living With AIDS (TLWA) series ranged in form, content and imagined audience, but all the tapes took seriously the medium of public television as having the potential to impart critical information about HIV/AIDS as much as entertaining audiences viewing the series from their living rooms. For example, at one end of the spectrum is Debbie Douglas and Gabrielle Micallef’s anOther Love Story: Women and AIDS, a narrative melodrama about racialized lesbian women, serodiscordant relationships and HIV stigma. At the other end is Marc Bérubé and Steve Walker’s AIDS: A Family Affair a somewhat dour talk show-format video that alternates between the host’s earnest direct address and group-style talking head interviews with HIV-positive gay men and their families. While all the tapes in the series feel unique and can certainly stand alone, they were in fact connected through their production funding and initial distribution on public access cable TV under the TLWA banner. Unlike individual artist responses to the epidemic in Canada, of which there are many, the series was uniquely funded with public money from health 115 Little Joe An Intergenerational Dialogue on HIV/AIDS Activist Video History agencies as opposed to arts councils, making it a unique political, cultural and social phenomenon. Zero Patience, Greyson’s first feature-length commercial film, was made shortly after TLWA concluded in 1991 and tackles the myth of ‘Patient Zero’ popularized by Randy Shilts’ book And the Band Played On. The film follows the ghost of Gaëtan Dugas, a gay Québécois flight attendant, who magically reappears in the present only to learn that he has been falsely vilified as the first person to spread HIV throughout North America. The film goes on to dismantle this myth and restore Dugas’ reputation through a series of comedic song and dance numbers that revolve around the activities of AIDS activists and the British explorer Sir Richard Burton, who is somehow immortal and the only one who can see Dugas’ ghost. From this brief description, Zero Patience is an obvious outlier among feature films made about HIV/AIDS. Greyson utilizes comedy, musical accompaniments and magical realism to tell a story that is to this day is still largely presented through heavy melodrama and committed-documentary conventions. The text that follows was edited from conversations between Greyson and I beginning in February 2020. Still from Toronto Living With AIDS (1990) Conrad Can you describe how the idea for the TLWA series came about between you and video artist Michael Balser? John Greyson I approached Michael and I said, “They’re doing this weekly public access cable series in New York City, Living with AIDS. It comes out of Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Let’s go talk to the AIDS Committee of Toronto (ACT).” So we met with ACT and identified that there’s these new health funding opportunities that seemed to fit our project, and that they could sponsor us. Michael and I wrote the grant applications, identified the artists and community groups, and got it all in place. Michael was the one who really pushed it up the mountain. I’d stepped back to the point where my responsibilities were making The Great AZT Debate (1989) happen, which came out of a hilarious conversation the two of us were having about how much he hated AZT and him ritualistically flushing it down the toilet because he was so disgusted by this medication that was making him so ill. We were brainstorming, “How do we put this on screen?” and that’s what came out of it. My other contribution was The World Is Sick [sic] (1989), which was a short documentary of all the groundbreaking activist mobilizations at the 1989 International AIDS Conference in Montreal. It satirized formal broadcast news conventions with renowned performance artist David Roche in news anchor drag while giving voice to AIDS activists who were there from all over the world. These two tapes became the pilot episodes for TLWA. R C And can you talk about how the artists were paired with community organizations? J G In my memory there was an open call, but we were also recruiting. Like “Richard Fung, you have to apply—you 116 117 Ryan Little Joe have no choice!” and “Ian Rashid, you have to apply!” Most of the pairings were quite organic and obvious because the relationships already existed. Richard was already working closely with Gay Asians Toronto, Ian partnered with the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention, Glace Lawrence worked with Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention. The applications weren’t coming out of the blue, it was a really good match of people who wanted to do the work on this platform. R C A number of tapes in the series, including the ones you just mentioned, are specific, culturally appropriate, HIV prevention videos that undoubtedly were used as teaching tools due to the sheer absence of culturally relevant prevention materials at the time. These tapes demonstrate how seriously the TLWA series approached the issue of racial and ethnic inclusion. It’s not like vapid state multiculturalism where you simply change the colour of people’s skin in front of the camera but don’t actually include people of colour in the production and making of tapes. So, this is a very different thing than the simple demand for diversity without actually challenging power or thinking about who is making the tapes and that seems rather unique for the time. But one group of people I found absent from the series that I was surprised by was sex workers. Toronto was a hotbed of sex worker HIV/AIDS organizing in the 1980s and 90s. J I think there’s two issues that we should have covered G at the time because they were urgent and remain urgent today. One is sex workers and the other is HIV in prison. It may have been an issue of identifying the artists and activists on the street who would be willing to put in the hard work of doing a half-hour tape on those topics. It’s possible outreach was done to sex worker activists and nothing landed, maybe it didn’t catch their fancy, and so in the end our committee ended up going with who had applied. In retrospect I think it’s one of those things that we should have identified as a priority—we have to make 118 An Intergenerational Dialogue on HIV/AIDS Activist Video History anOther Love Story: Women and AIDS (1990) This heavily scripted melodrama is built around an interracial lesbian couple’s relationship and illustrates the issues facing women, lesbians and racialized women in regard to HIV/AIDS. The storyline revolves around a conflict between the two lovers when one of them withdraws from the relationship after being encouraged to take an HIV test by her doctor. Through a series of candid conversations with friends, the couple overcomes their fear of HIV/AIDS and embrace safer sex. AIDS: A Family Affair (1990) This low-budget talk show features group interviews with families, caregivers and partners of PLWAs, both alive and deceased, as well a few PLWAs themselves. The tape switches between group interviews and short direct address by the host Steve Walker who provides a framework for understanding the interviewees as heroes fiercely fighting stigma, government neglect and medical mistreatment, all while caring for one another. Fighting Chance (1990) A largely straightforward talking-head documentary introduces viewers to gay Asian men in the US and Canada surviving and thriving with the virus. The interviews take place exclusively outside in nature, making them 119 Little Joe intentionally public, vibrant and teeming with life, much like the closing interview with Michael Callen in Stuart Marshall’s Bright Eyes (1984). Punctuating the interviews are short vignettes of ritualistic activities, from making origami shapes out of decorative paper to communal bathing. The Great AZT Debate (1989) This tape begins like a game show, complete with a host, giant spinning wheel and a Vanna White-like character. It quickly transitions into a roundtable talk show format with intertitles about the history and development of AZT. Toronto AIDS activists Wayne Boone, Robert Flack, Colman Jones, and Tim McCaskell discuss the merits and dangers of AZT—the only approved AIDS drug at the time. The World Is Sick [sic] (1989) A deliciously camp documentary focused on the historic activist interventions at the Montreal International AIDS Conference hosted at the Palais des congrès in 1989. Performance artist David Roche in news reporter drag regularly pops up against green-screened footage of activists from AIDS ACTION NOW!, Réaction SIDA and ACT UP New York storming the convention centre. At one point she is taken hostage by AIDS activists for her dismissive coverage of their protests, quickly succumbing to Stockholm Syndrome and becoming an advocate for their cause. 120 An Intergenerational Dialogue on HIV/AIDS Activist Video History it happen. Rather than passively waiting for somebody to apply, we have to go out there the way we did with the others and make it happen. R C It would have been interesting to see what a group like Prisoners with HIV/AIDS Support Action Network, who are still around today, could have made back then. Michael Smith, a British expat living in Toronto who helped found the group contributed the tape Person Livid with AIDS to TLWA and that does include some content around prisoners and HIV, but also I don’t think his tape was ever finalized for the series. I got my hands on the two-hour performance documentation of Michael’s play, but I don’t think the footage ever got edited into a segment for TLWA before he died? J I don’t think it was ever edited. I think we accepted G the proposal and were excited to work with him. I can’t remember the timeline of when he died, but it was soon. We also commissioned Lloyd Wong to make a TLWA tape and that one was never completed either. He died around the same time. And I wish we’d done more with Indigenous artists. Working with someone like René Highway would’ve been the most amazing thing, but he died in 1990 as well. R C You weren’t just struggling to find funding, working administratively, finding artists, connecting with community organizations, but people—friends—were also dying. R There was, at least in a sort of idealistic or utopian C way, the idea that this was just the first season. But then Michael Balser got burned out and ill. I got tied up with my own stuff and ended up putting all my energies into Zero Patience. It was one of those questions, ‘How far do you spread yourself, and is there someone else who can pick up the ball?’ So when the Rogers cable company station manager Ed Nasello censored the series because of some light thigh- stroking the series was effectively cancelled. I feel like ACT could have done more, but they had their plates full. So it’s one of those, you know, ‘if there’s 121 Little Joe An Intergenerational Dialogue on HIV/AIDS Activist Video History a will…’ If there’s an institutional that will to run with something, often it lands in one person’s lap, and they’ve got to be the one to push it up the mountain. Lacking that person, things don’t move. Michael went on to make a number of other important tapes, Voices of Positive Women (1992) with Darien Taylor, Positive Men (1995) and Treatments – Adventures in AIDS & Media (1996), but sadly Michael passed away in 2002. R C Can you tell me more about the shift from doing short, community-based, activist/art tapes with friends on a shoestring budget like TLWA to making Zero Patience, a feature-length film with producers, professional actors, a substantial budget, and a theatrical release? It seems like a big leap, but the subject matter remains the same. J Between my short 80s AIDS tapes and making the G 'leap' to Zero Patience, there were two crucial in-between steps. The first was Urinal (1988), my hybrid docudrama feature about the policing of public sex in the province of Ontario, working with an ensemble of union and non-union actors and a skeleton crew, and shooting half on 16mm and half on video (the budget was $35,000). Urinal was the first time I attempted something truly longform, and a sustained attempt at embedding theory— specifically Foucault’s analysis of state surveillance (as explained on-screen by queer historical figures like Sergei Eisenstein, Langston Hughes and Frida Kahlo), and the policing of public and private acts—within representations of grassroots community activism. The second was The Making of Monsters (1991), my thirty-five-minute queer Brechtian musical addressing the representation of anti-gay violence on screen, while restaging the Bertolt Brecht–Georg Lukacs debates about the efficacy of realism, with Brecht played by a catfish. I was at the Canadian Film Centre, and of course broke my number one rule for film students that I have rigorously tried to enforce in all my classes at York University: ‘no films about filmmaking, please!’ Monsters uses explicit Brechtian alienation techniques and rewrites of Brecht/Kurt Weill songs (“Mac the Promotional still for The Making of Monsters (1991) 122 123 Little Joe An Intergenerational Dialogue on HIV/AIDS Activist Video History Knife” becomes “I Hate Straights”) to represent the new militancy within queer communities, fighting back against the rise in gay-bashing. R CThis certainly puts your own filmmaking evolution in context, but I’d still like to know more about why you went in the direction of making an AIDS musical comedy for theatrical release. Zero Patience is an anomaly among other AIDS films. 1993 also saw the wide release of American films like Philadelphia and the made-for-TV adaptation of Shilts’ And the Band Played On, as well as Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman’s devastating diary film Silverlake Life: The View from Here, all of which utterly terrorized me as a young proto-gay trying to imagine my own life not ending with a painful and humiliating death that was my own fault. Zero Patience on the other hand is this wacky celebration of resistance and community organizing through song and dance, including singing puppet buttholes no less, that I never got to see until two decades after it was made. J G During this late-80s/early-90s period, I was involved in a number of collective grassroots AIDS creation, curation and distribution projects. We were trying to provide collective support for this global groundswell of amazing work by AIDS artists and activists, especially those living with HIV/AIDS. The projects included: TLWA; Video Against AIDS (1989), a six-hour compilation of global indie AIDS tapes co-curated with Bill Horrigan (distributed by Vtape and Video Data Bank); and Angry Initiatives, Defiant Strategies (1989), a compilation of clips and excerpts from various global AIDS tapes created for the Deep Dish TV/Paper Tiger TV model of public access cable distribution. The work was energizing, exciting and urgent, but also frustrating because the audiences we reached were tiny. We were essentially locked out of the mainstream. Therefore, the overriding goal of doing Zero Patience was the tactic of Trojan-horsing our AIDS activism into the multiplexes, small-town theatres and late-night TV channels—places that groups like ACT UP couldn’t necessarily reach. To a certain degree we succeeded because the film travelled further than anyone thought it would. It had theatrical and broadcast rights sold to thirteen countries and I still to this day get postcards from kids in small towns, saying they saw it on late-night cable! I mentioned my Monsters film earlier because that narrative was really the trial balloon, test-driving the tactics, tone and style of doing a no/low-budget musical about queer activism. Monsters’ success meant that we could raise our financing from industry funders, so $1.2 million in total. When we were shooting Zero Patience in 1992, there were almost no feature-length AIDS films—just the made-for-TV movie An Early Frost (1985) and the widely released Longtime Companion (1989). Philadelphia actually arrived in theatres the same week as Zero Patience during its US release. This proved to be a gift on a silver platter because critics—and audiences—were handed two radically different AIDS films: a four-hanky neoliberal American melodrama versus a queer po-mo activist musical from Canada that featured assholes singing Leo Bersani lyrics about the psychosexual politics of buttfucking. Whether you’re using Brechtian or neorealist tactics, putting activism on screen is always challenging, and it was no different for Zero Patience. At the time it was not necessarily embraced or celebrated by ACT UP activists or the New Queer Cinema movement. Within queer communities, the response to Zero Patience was definitely divided, by no means unanimously positive, even though the film was centrally depicting AIDS activism on screen. These critical responses turn on inevitable questions of style, of the film not being sharp or hip enough for some, of Zero Patience sitting somewhere on the fence between the great experimental po-mo hybrid AIDS films of that era like Derek Jarman’s The Garden (1990), Todd Haynes’ Poison (1991) or Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied (1989), and the more realist/ melodramatic narrative AIDS films like Gregg Araki’s The 124 125 Little Joe 126 Stills from Zero Patience (1993) Living End (1992), Laurie Lynd’s RSVP (1991) and Stewart Main and Peter Wells’ A Death in the Family (1986). Arguably, it really took three more decades, until French filmmaker Robin Campillo’s BPM in 2017, for the world to finally get the neorealist drama about AIDS activism that we’d all been yearning for so long. I think Zero Patience’s aesthetic and narrative ambitions were certainly honest, heartfelt and ambitious, somewhat naively aspiring to the sort of artistry that Jarman’s Edward II (1991) or Wittgenstein (1993) achieved so beautifully—but instead, because of budget and inexperience, I feel we landed more on the low-budget and somewhat clunky Rocky Horror side of the tracks. One of Zero Patience’s t-shirts proclaims, ‘hindsight is 20/20’ and it’s true that I would do almost everything differently given the chance. There’s so much about Zero Patience that I’d love to ‘fix,’ but that’s of course not possible. I’m honoured that the film made an intervention and was part of the activist conversations of the time, and I’ve made my peace with the place it occupies in the culture today—an interesting and even intriguing one in terms of discussions of HIV/AIDS media and culture. R C I love Zero Patience for its quirky weirdness! It’s a little sad to hear you say you’d make it differently given the chance to do it again, but I also get that as artists it’s a rarity to be completely satisfied with any work one makes. One thing I hope wouldn’t change is Michael Callen’s cameo. He perfectly plays Miss HIV in Zero Patience, but also makes an appearance in Colman Jones’ contribution to TLWA, The Cause of AIDS: Fact and Speculation, as well as appearing alongside his a cappella group mates The Flirtations in Philadelphia. Can you talk a little bit about working with him since he was quite sick at the time of the shoot and passed away shortly after Zero Patience premiered? R C Exactly! I think we’re like most artists, who are by definition dissatisfied with their work, we want to always do it over, and thus I’m also a firm believer in the school An Intergenerational Dialogue on HIV/AIDS Activist Video History 127 Little Joe John Greyson with Michael Callen behind the scenes of Zero Patience (1993) Michael Callen as Miss HIV in Zero Patience (1993) convert colours 128 An Intergenerational Dialogue on HIV/AIDS Activist Video History of thought that says once the work is released, it’s no longer ours per se—we’ve got to let go. It becomes the property of its audiences to make of it what they will. As for Callen, he was a friend from ACT UP New York and I wrote the part of Miss HIV specifically for him. We built our shooting schedule around his own touring dates. If memory serves, The Flirtations were on a national tour at the time. In agreeing to be in the film, he had three conditions: he wanted to wear Barbra Streisand’s dress from Funny Lady (1975), her wig from On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) and he wanted to hold a note longer on screen than Barbra ever had. But then he came down with pneumocystis and was hospitalized, and really only had half a lung left. Of course we said, ‹No worries, we’ll reschedule. We’ll do a pickup shoot in a month or two when you’re better.’ But he said,’“No, you don’t understand, this is probably our only chance, and I really want to do this.’ And so he arrived in Toronto from the hospital with his half a lung. He went right to the recording studio and did his prerecorded vocals. It was truly remarkable. Then the next day we were shooting his scenes in the swimming pool and he was flirting outrageously with all the grips, and though quite weak, he was clearly having the time of his life. And he was right because though he lasted for eighteen more months, passing away in the last days of 1993, Zero Patience was one of the last times he was able to sing. We got him a copy of the film to watch before he died, and, yes, he got his dress, his wig and his longer-than-Barbra note! R C In closing, are there any other cast or crew members that have passed since filming that you would like to talk about in addition to Michael Callen? J So many! Many of the background performers who G were AIDS activists and grassroots organizers were of course lost to AIDS. They’re seen in activist demo scenes and in the “butthole calisthenics” scene. Bunny Behrens (Dr. Placebo), Dorothy Gardner (casting) and Dianne Heatherington (Typhoid Mary), all passed away from cancer. Glenn Brown, an extraordinary activist who was 129 Little Joe Porno also in the background activist scenes, passed away quite recently, in 2017. I’m working on a new film about him as part of our Archive/Counter Archive AIDS activist case study and our new Viral Interventions project where we will be commissioning new short tapes about HIV/AIDS today from a new generation of artists and activists. It’s very much inspired by the TLWA model from thirty years ago. One of the most satisfying things about this new work, and our archival restoration of so many ‘lost’ videos, is reconstructing a collective picture of a community of artists and activists working together to combat the plague. We didn’t have enough time, money or experience, but we shared an urgent, collective conviction that media could be instrumental in combatting AIDS. That spirit shines through each and every tape and film. John Greyson and Ryan Conrad, along with their case study partners at Vtape and Trinity Square Video, are planning future screenings, intergenerational dialogues, exhibitions, and the commissioning of new HIV/AIDS activist tapes over the next five years. To learn more about this work, visit: counterarchive.ca John Greyson is a Toronto video/film artist, whose titles include Fig Trees, International Dawn Chorus Day, Covered, 14.3 Seconds, Lilies, Proteus, Uncut, Zero Patience, The Making of Monsters, and Urinal. Ryan Conrad is a queer artist, activist, and teacher living in the Ottawa Valley. You can follow his work at faggtoz.org 130 131