Constitutionally Disruptive

Nadine L. McGann“A Kiss is Not a Kiss: An Interview with John Greyson”Afterimage 19, no. 6 (January 1992): 10–13If I’m being honest, it was the cover photo of men in hockey masks and jockstraps that first caught my attention when I was looking through back issues of Afterimage in the Walker Art Center’s library. The image—a production still from John Greyson’s 1991 featurette The Making of “Monsters”—promoted a long-form interview between Greyson and Afterimage Coeditor Nadine L. McGann.1 Their dialogue presents the director as thinker and activist, and its length affords a sustained reflection on his practice and the contexts to which he responds. Not until a few years after this image and interview imprinted on me (and more than a decade after their publication) would I finally see The Making of “Monsters” while in graduate school.The Making of “Monsters” experiments with form, genre, and history. In it, Greyson fuses aesthetic debate, critical theory, political activism, pathos, and critique, yet he does so with a signature playfulness virtually absent from his queer filmmaker contemporaries. As Greyson astutely questions, “Gay desire is constitutionally disruptive to any narrative. So why not pursue that, why not fragment other aspects of the narrative too, both form and content, to foreground our disruptiveness?” (11). The Making of “Monsters” is both about the making of a fictitious television movie titled Monsters and about how a homophobic society produces perpetrators of violence. Greyson’s film dramatizes a “purposely vulgar realization” (11) of the 1938 aesthetic debate between Bertolt Brecht (revived as a TV-movie producer, absurdly played by a cantankerous catfish), who advocated for avant-garde tactics, and Georg Lukács (as a director who is a maudlin hack, played by a human), who advocated for socialist realism. Within the film, Lotte Lenya directs the making-of documentary; she has been cast as a Black lesbian activist who critiques the misogyny and racism of the white gay men who surround her. The film also includes musical numbers, such as “I Hate Straights” (to the tune of Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife”), “Hockey Night in Canada” (the cover image), and “Bash Back, Baby” (Lenya’s militant anthem against hate crimes).2Greyson’s work is distinguished by its camp wit and brazen sexual content. As Greyson remarks in the interview,I tend to pursue subjects that are outside of proper, respectable gay politics.…I think there’s been an opening up on every level—in academia, in critical theory, in cultural representation—of space to talk about our pornographic imaginations and our transgressive habits; the ways we aspire to one thing and do another and the distance between what we desire and what we live. (10)Greyson also maintains an openness toward popular culture, from music videos to problem-of-the-week TV movies that refused the would-be staunchness of the left but that reflected the sensibility of much of queer activist culture. “I don’t think we gain anything, as queers and as people committed to an alternate media practice, by dismissing the dominant media, what has gone before and what has oppressed us,” he says. “Our engagement, our subversion, our tainting, our poisoning of those genres is going to give us much more” (11). Queer people have long understood popular culture as a medium to recognize their cultural marginalization yet also imagine fabulous ways to use the dominant culture against itself.3 An artist who came up via video cooperatives in Toronto, Greyson made a featurette that more closely resembles television than film in its look and running time.The Afterimage interview appeared amid the culture wars of the late 1980s/early 1990s—a battle marked by reactionary political moves that weaponized homophobic anxieties against queer people and defunded socially engaged art contemporaneous with the first decade of the AIDS epidemic. Queer people responded with ingenious new forms of activism, art, and cultural theory. This queer perspective came to academia and cinema from activism, most influentially ACT-UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and its spin-off Queer Nation (which focused on LGBTQAI+ issues specifically). As Michael Warner characterized the moment’s turn from gay to queer: “‘queer’ gets its critical edge by defining itself against the normal…queer politics opposes society itself.”4 As Greyson recognized, coalitional queers also debated among themselves, as leftists do: “We’re always living in political contradiction with each other.…I’m interested in referencing [these contradictions] and speaking to them but not in trying to solve them” (12).The Making of “Monsters” debuted the same year that witnessed the emergence of an extraordinary wave of queer films and videos on the festival circuit and in release, including Derek Jarman’s Edward II; Christopher Münch’s The Hours and Times; Jean Carlomusto’s L Is for the Way You Look; Cecilia Barriga’s The Meeting of Two Queens; Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho; Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning; Todd Haynes’s Poison; Laurie Lynd’s R.S.V.P.; and Cheryl Dunye’s She Don’t Fade. The debuts of these works at festivals prompted B. Ruby Rich to observe a new “homo pomo” aesthetic and to coin the term New Queer Cinema.5 The Making of “Monsters” was initially feted as part of this wave at the Toronto and Berlin international film festivals (although it did not screen at Sundance). Following its initial public life, however, The Making of “Monsters” was pulled from release due to a copyright infringement claim over its use of Weill’s music in its parody numbers. Although it has returned to authorized distribution, its influence has been diminished by years without circulation.6Like Haynes, Greyson has already done the theoretical work that drives his films, and he may be his own most important commentator. Yet, McGann proved an insightful interlocutor; one can feel from the interview an excitement at the meeting of minds and an immediate bond of recognition. As a form, interviews often articulate an artist’s project more effectively than criticism; they can cut to the chase of what matters and speak more clearly than writers and scholars who tend to overwork their prose. Interviews reveal how an artist’s mind works, as conversational liveness fosters a dynamic immediacy at the near speed of thought. Such exchanges demand precision via follow-up questions or pursue unexpected but productive conservational directions. McGann’s tête-à-tête with Greyson suggests the possibility of mutual understanding. This interview seems, to me, to exemplify a new and savvy queer coalition of the moment: gay men and women inventing new political, social, and aesthetic bonds.The interview between Greyson and McGann occurred following the release of The Making of “Monsters” and as Greyson was raising funds to make 1993’s Zero Patience, which they discuss at length; these two films are perhaps the most similar among Greyson’s filmography. Zero Patience stages a fantastical musical critique of “the culture of blame” surrounding a gay Québécois flight attendant who came to be labeled “Patient Zero” when epidemiologists and journalists hypothesized that he brought HIV/AIDS to North America, as documented in Randy Shilts’s 1987 book And the Band Played On. (Both Zero Patience and the HBO adaptation of And the Band Played On would debut in 1993.) Zero Patience imagines a contemporary encounter and romance between twentieth-century Zero and nineteenth-century British explorer, Orientalist, and sexologist Sir Richard Francis Burton. With Zero Patience, Greyson offers a critique of “the culture of certainty” and its costs in terms of human lives and psychological impact (10). A fully realized feature-length musical, Zero Patience features songs composed by Glenn Schellenberg (who also did the music for The Making of “Monsters”), most notably “The Butthole Duet,” which explicitly references queer theory.7 Zero Patience’s camp sensibility is further demonstrated by rebranding the Big Pharma company Burroughs Wellcome (makers of the controversial early HIV medicine AZT) as Gilbert & Sullivan after the British comic opera composers.8Greyson reflects upon his unique sensibility and strategies:I think all my films make arguments.…that we have to understand the connections between lived, grassroots politics on the street, the representations we make of our culture and our lives, and the representations that others make of us. If there’s a way to sum up the project, pretentious as that might be, it would be about contributing to the argument that gay people’s impact, our emergence as what we call a community, has profound implications for all of society. We represent a different take on community, a different take on culture, a different take on representation, and we have to acknowledge that and struggle with that and realize the stakes we actually represent in terms of the society trying to reorganize itself in a more humane way. (12)Revisiting Zero Patience now, it seems more alive to me than ever before, perhaps because it models such a complex yet generous response to a moment of crisis.I am struck that we are living through another culture war, with repealed protections for reproductive rights and insidious attacks on trans lives. Greyson’s work embraces queer anachronisms, perhaps presciently: recent history demonstrates that political progress is not a straight march forward but a recursive loop of advances and backlashes. We inhabit a present that too often witnesses the undoing of political wins and the disorienting incursion of past wrongs, as if we are back living in the wrong time period. This Greyson-McGann interview stands out to me as an essential document of its queer moment, but also as exemplary of the ways queer artists and thinkers imagine beyond existing paradigms with humor, with lust, with music, and with an embrace of excess. If gay people have been prone to pretentiousness and too-muchness, is it not a valid response to how insufficient, dull, and disappointing the straight world and its available forms and narratives are? The term “queer” has meant many different things to different people during the thirty-plus years since its reclamation, but this interview and its worldview articulate my own formative understanding of what queerness looks like and how it is lived.

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