Zero Patience

Canadian New Queer Cinema luminary John Greyson’s audacious, toe-tapping 1993 musical about the AIDS pandemic imagines an encounter between Victorian-era explorer and sexologist Sir Richard Burton (John Robinson) and the hot ghost of “Patient Zero” (Normand Fauteux), in order to debunk a widely propagated myth that a French Canadian flight attendant wilfully introduced the virus’s contagion to North America.

Greyson queers all norms of tone and genre, fusing experimental cinema montage, documentary sequences involving ACT UP activists relating their lived experiences of AIDS, and high-camp musical numbers, inclusive of a little Busby Berkeley-esque synchronised swimming. Glenn Schellenberg’s songs are wonderful, whether delivered in a soaring falsetto by performer and AIDS activist Michael Callen (who also appeared in Philadelphia, and died, that same year) as Miss HIV, or when delivered, ostensibly, by singing anuses. In Zero Patience, the ridiculous and the sublime, the hilarious and the deadly serious, all coexist in perfect harmony!