"Music exalts each joy, allays each grief. Expels diseases, softens every pain. Subdues the rage of poison, and the plague." —John Armstrong, quoted in Fig Trees

"For me, personally, it was ... wrong ... to take medicines because other people couldn't buy life ... it was very simple ... it was a question of ... buying life." —Zackie Achmat, Fig Trees

"Why are you—a faggot and a dyke—glorifying celibate saints? Why are you two bright whites ... fetishizing ... your all-black cast?" —Chorus members confronting Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson, Fig Trees

"Pigeons on the gr-ass, alas(s), a(l)l-as(s) ...." —Wayne Koestenbaum, analyzing Four Saints in Three Acts subtext, Fig Trees

Watching John Greyson's Fig Trees—an experimental docu-opera about AIDS protest movements set to a surreal arrangement of Gertrude Stein's and Virgil Thompson's atonal Four Saints in Three Acts—was a transportive experience. Knitting avant-garde opera, pop music, and documentary to form a story of queer social struggle, its agile weaving of desire and the imaginary into its interstices performs crucial work of preserving and distilling queer cultural memory without memorializing or mythologizing away its import. At the same time, the film's playful and transgressive appropriation of religious imagery induces its viewers to rethink and re-appropriate traditional concepts of community, belonging, ritual, and the healing—even political—power of music.

Before MIX NYC's 2009 Experimental Film Festival, I knew little about the film other than reading the short, mysterious blurb in the festival brochure and the emphatic clucking of my friend, the mix director, that, as an activist and singer, it was a film I "shouldn't miss." The blurb reads:

In 1999, South African AIDS activist Zackie Achmat went on a treatment strike, refusing to take his pills until they were widely available to all South Africans. This symbolic act became a cause célèbre, helping build his group, Treatment Action Campaign, into a national movement. Yet with each passing month, Zackie grew sicker .... Fig Trees is a documentary opera about AIDS activists Tim McCaskell in Toronto and Zackie Achmat in Capetown, as narrated by an albino squirrel, an amputee busker, and St. Teresa of Avila. Telling the story of Zackie's treatment strike in song, and the larger story of the fight for pills on two continents and across two decades, Fig Trees performs musical and political inversion on the music and words of Gertrude Stein's 1934 avant-garde classic Four Saints in Three Acts. Using compositional techniques of chance, inversion, and polyphony, Fig Trees finds points of political harmony and musical convergence in operatic and documentary sequences that profile the overlapping stories of various activists: Tim McCaskell, Gugu Dlamini, Stephen Lewis, Simon Nkoli ... and Zackie himself.[1]

The film was powerfully affecting. I was surprised by the wash of memory—and bubbles of trauma—the film loosened as I watched. Playfully held together with surreal panache by the wonderfully bizarre and moving adaptation of Four Saints in Three Acts by David Wall, Fig Trees artfully weaves the global with the local across boundaries of nation, geography, and race in its juxtaposition and intertwining of AIDS protest movements in the developed and developing world. Using archival footage of significant moments in AIDS protest history—protests, conferences, breakthroughs, and documentary-style interviews, Fig Trees "beatifies" two prominent queer activist "saints" and a number of corollaries, building their case for queer "sainthood" by following their travails and activist "miracles" they leave in their wake: long-time activist St. Tim McCaskill of Toronto's AIDS Action Now, a "tireless crusader against corporate pharmaceutical greed "[2]; and most centrally, St. Zackie Achmat, who famously refused to take the AIDS medications available to him (friends were able to pay for the drugs) until everyone in South Africa had access to them as well—sparking a global movement for access to AIDS drugs in South Africa and other nations in the developing world. Zackie was also the founder of South Africa's influential Treatment Action Campaign, which popularized the wearing of bold t-shirts reading "HIV POSITIVE," a political statement that played with the ambiguity of the wearer's HIV status to help de-stigmatize people with HIV.

Fig Trees follows Zackie's teetering T-cells amidst activists' stand-off with the primary AIDS "sinners": a pharmaceutical industry putting "profits before people"; AIDS denialists, South African President Mbeki and his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msiman, who questioned whether HIV caused AIDS, and advocated beetroots, lemon, and garlic instead of anti-retrovirals for South Africans; their inspiration, Dr. Matthias Rath, the opportunistic German vitamin entrepreneur who claimed AIDS drugs were toxic and advocated his vitamins instead; and lastly, inactive and ineffectual South African, Canadian, and United States governments and their leaders, such as Ronald Reagan, who famously never said the word AIDS while President.

While Zackie is better known to Western audiences, through interviews and archival footage, Fig Trees documents other notable, but less known AIDS activists from the South African struggle, which led the struggle for access to drugs for people with HIV/AIDS in developing nations around the world: St. Simon Nkoli, a prominent anti-apartheid and LGBT activist, one of the first South Africans to publicly come out as positive; St. Gugu Dlamini, killed by an angry mob for bringing "shame on her community" two weeks after speaking about living with HIV on the national radio (many of her murderers turned out to be HIV+ and later died of AIDS themselves); St. Nkosi Johnson, the eight-year-old who came out as having AIDS at his school so he could get the special help and care he needed; and Zackie's friend St. Kwiney, who he couldn't bear to visit at the end of her life, dying because she couldn't afford the drugs, spending her last night in the hospital writing 39 postcards to President Mbeki pleading with him to reverse his AIDS denialist policies. The film also includes interviews with St. Stephen Lewis, UN special envoy for AIDS to Africa, recording his bitter and trenchant criticism of the absence of global political leadership on AIDS, and the inadequate and sensationalistic "celebrity leadership" that filled its void.

Playing with a transgressive re-appropriation of religious imagery and hagiography, this central plot line is intercut with apparitions by St. Teresa of Avila and other saints and an ironic abduction of Tim and Zackie by St. Gertrude Stein herself resulting in a tragic opera about their struggles—abandoned, ironically, once the threat of death fades. I say "re-appropriation" of traditional religious imagery rather than simply "appropriation," as there must always already have been queer "single, celibate" priests, monks, martyrs, nuns, and saints throughout the centuries, realized or not. Vignettes of saints, historical and postmodern, criss-cross through the film in ways that weave together the heroism of traditional saint stories and mythology with those of today, all narrated somehow by a young St. Martin of Tours who at times mysteriously morphs into a singing albino squirrel. This subplot is at turns interrupted by vignettes of a wailing, endlessly tuberculosis-stricken Maria Callas; altered and re-imagined clips from famous AIDS movies, such as Philadelphia; critical exegesis by opera-and-queer theorist Wayne Koestenbaum on the predominance of anal erotic imagery ("ass") in Stein's famous "Pigeons on the gr-ass, alas(s), al(l)-as(s)," and the role of sexuality in classical and modern music.[3] An imaginary "mock-MTV"[4] mixed "top 100 AIDS songs of all time" countdown is hosted by seductive, pink-spandexed, bed-ridden AIDS patients singing and querying in high camp to "Dollar Bills" (Gates and Clinton): "when [are we] gonna get [our] ARVs?" and other songs, amidst the occasional imaginary downpour of colorful pills. This phantasmagoric inclusion of desire and the cultural imaginary allows the viewer, particularly queers of a younger generation who grew up associating being gay with getting AIDS, to project their own experiences of fear and desire into the work, allowing it to transcend a simple documentary format about what happened to a certain generation of gay men and South Africans from decades ago. In the dizzying, famously amnesiac culture of North America,[5] Fig Trees preserves important queer historical memory, and provides access to the different aspects of battles fought and won, lives lost, and lessons learned by previous queer social movements.

As a postmodern, avant-garde figure in the so-called "new queer cinema," Greyson's controversial and political films have mostly been met with critical, but not popular, success. 1988's Pissoir, a response to the homophobic climate of the time, exposed police entrapment of gay cruising in parks, toilets and the crackdown on bathhouses. Zero Patience challenged AIDS orthodoxy's erroneous notion (popularized by Randy Shilt's And the Band Played On) that HIV/AIDS was introduced to North America by a single person (a gay flight attendant). Lilies, his most well-known film, through a clever plot twist thrusts a bishop back into confrontation with his childhood homosexual encounters. Greyson is infamous for his heady and kaleidoscopic counter-positioning of different mediums, realism with magical realism, and in Fig Trees' case, social movement documentary with avant-garde opera. No stranger to controversy, John Greyson made headlines in his protest of the 2009 Toronto International Film's highlighting of Tel Aviv and lack of support for the international economic boycott of Israel.[6]

Why hasn't anyone made an opera about the eminently operatic, global tragedy of AIDS? Greyson asks. In comparison, how many divas tragically (and glamorously) died of tuberculosis (consumption) in early heroin-chic on stage at the end of various 19th century operas? (Just ask St. Callas.) So Greyson proceeds to do it himself, though in an ironic, self-critical fashion, playing with his own appropriation of the two activist saints and the potential fetishization of their suffering queer AIDS bodies[7] through the parodic subplot of Stein and Thompson's time transport to the 20th century to appropriate their stories, replete with scenes of composers and producers angling to market and exploit them. Greyson probes Stein's politically transgressive, avant-garde use of Harlem singers as saints in the original 1934 Four Saints in Three Acts, while at the same time querying the exploitative dimensions of casting and staging black bodies.[8] By applying the healing power of music to the historical and political tragedy of AIDS, Greyson seeks to access the socially-conscious roots of opera: "taking on opera as this conservative, elitist monolith, but on the other hand, trying to tease out a tendency that's sometimes forgotten, a tendency of resistance, a tendency of social activism buried within [all] those sir titles and grand divas parking and barking on centre stage."[9] Unlike more trite and simplistic AIDS films like Philadelphia—which Fig Trees uses to repackage famous clips with imaginary and transgressive dialogue between Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington—Fig Trees draws on the more radical roots of opera through its combination of the ironic, the tragic, and the political. As activist Tim McCaskell deadpans in response to the interviewer's question as to his favorite AIDS songs: "I don't have any."

Fig Trees' beauty and tribute is in its ability to preserve, distill, and recuperate queer historical memory through art, music, and re-configured religious imagery for a phantasmagoric appreciation of the early "saints" of global AIDS movements and their/our loss, without "memorializing" and mythologizing away their subjectivity to a timeless, and ultimately irrelevant, martyrdom.[10] In one of the most affecting scenes in the film, four activists whose deaths were influential in inspiring the creation of Treatment Action Campaign are commemorated. As Sarah Henstra describes, the scene "begins with close-up frames, first of a needle being set to a record-player turntable on which a candle is burning, and then of tiny musical notes being drawn in pen on an actor's neck. The actor's head slowly rotates as he sings, so that it becomes clear he is singing the line now encircling his throat like a garrote." The split screen juxtaposes each disembodied singer with news and other media footage that fill in the events of each activist's history, ending with the turntable's candle being snuffed. As Henstra argues:

Despite the introduction of each character as a saint ... the words they sing explicitly refuse the status of martyr. [...] But the eerie blend of unfamiliar and familiar tropes in the scene—the haunting harmonies, the sameness of the actor's unfocused gazes and collared necks, the rising candle-smoke—summon such an affective force that the viewing experience is somewhat akin to kneeling at an altar. The saints' repeated refusals to become objects of pity or reverence in fact intensify the scene's mournfulness rather than dissipating it: instead of being allowed to refer their deaths to a familiar scheme of sacrifice-to-a-cause or to sublimate them through elegiac models of continuance, we are forced into a prolonged confrontation with a loss whose hermeneutics opens only onto the still-yawning gulf of political injustice.[11]

Fig Trees plays with the way in which the drama of AIDS protest movements sparked and created memory, belonging, and community in ways not unlike traditional religious structures.[12] For instance, its playful mixture and imagery of religious "brothers" and "sisters" in the film invokes one of the remarkable, if not always acknowledged, aspects of AIDS protest movements—the role of queer sisters as advocates for their queer brothers. The pairing of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson in their surreal vignettes throughout the film, the blurring of their identity with the two main activists at times (as well as various singing saints), invokes this bonding across sex and gender. To the extent that much of the substance of religion and religious affiliation can be linked to the desire for belonging, community, and preservation of a "chain of memory," it is a tribute to the queer community, and queer women in particular, that community needs transcended the boundaries of identity in the struggles over AIDS.

Similarly, haunting sequences from Fig Trees invoke ways in which the challenge and needs of those affected by HIV/AIDS spurred attempts at appropriating, recreating, and playing with the spaces and functions that traditional religious structures have often provided, such as the rather "queer" legal function a church or sacred space can take as a "sanctuary" to protect threatened members of a community, like undocumented immigrants. Images of churchlike sanctuaries and the soothing power of sacred music in the film indirectly invoke places such as radical faerie "sanctuaries"[13]—places to which persons living with HIV/AIDS have often retreated to seek protection and refuge from an uncaring or indifferent world. The film disrupts typical associations of liberal/secular and religious/conservative to open up, rethink, and reimagine notions of community, ritual, and healing often associated with primarily traditional notions of religion.

Fig Trees preserves and passes along queer historical memory also through the careful sharing and documentation of stories and vignettes of some of the early AIDS activists—a more solemn counterpart to its playful queering and (re)appropriation of religious imagery. For instance, it follows Tim McCaskill as he passes a candle over the AIDS memorial in Toronto, communicating and commemorating the hidden histories of the names listed—their personalities, personal stories, and political awakenings experienced in their activist careers, long or short.

Watching the film was powerfully affecting on a personal level, and seems designed to invoke personal and collective reflection among its viewers, encouraging them to weave in their own intermixed experiences of fear, loss,[14] trauma, shame and desire—as well as a call to social action, struggle, and purpose—that HIV/AIDS has inevitably created as a shared cultural heritage, if not baggage, across generational and geographical boundaries. In my case, it brought back vivid memories of a protest I attended in Philadelphia in 1999, organized by the newly formed Treatment Action Campaign-inspired Health Gap Coalition against then Vice President (and Presidential candidate) Al Gore. At the time, Health Gap was protesting his role in putting South Africa on the United States' punitive Global Trade Watch List (which he as Vice President symbolically oversaw) for its interest in buying generic versions of HIV/AIDS drugs for its millions of sick and dying citizens; it was one of the first (significant) protests I had ever participated in. Watching Fig Trees provided a rare and complex cultural backgrounding of the experiences and struggles in South Africa that touched and influenced me across the Atlantic Ocean, in ways I didn't understand until watching the film.

Watching Fig Trees evoked memories of the moral indignation stirred at those Health Gap Coalition protests, (inspired by the Treatment Action Coalition, a fact which I was only vaguely aware of at the time) at the seemingly "evil" attempts of the pharmaceutical lobby (Pharma) and the U.S. government to prevent tens of millions of people in developing countries around the world from getting life-saving drugs—all to preserve pharmaceutical industry profits. Even more unbelievably, to protect profits at home, not abroad! Given that there were no real markets for AIDS drugs at the time in these countries, production of life-saving generic drugs cost the pharmaceutical industry nothing. The logic of the pharmaceutical industry in opposing the production and use of generics abroad was to prevent the questioning of the price of AIDS drugs at home in the West, and ostensibly, the erosion of respect for "intellectual property" rights globally, enshrined in the Agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights,[15] (later to become a central issue in the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle)—Antichrist, anyone?

A recent college grad, I had just obtained a job in the Intake Department at Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) on the front lines meeting and greeting dozens of freshly seroconverted, HIV+ people each week—a job that could very well have been highly depressing, if not morbid; somehow it was not. Two long-term members of the Intake/Client Registration Department would regale the rest of us with macabre memories of the "bad old days" of AIDS advocacy work, when community, ritual, and remembrance were often created on the fly, if not the "DL." With so many people dying so quickly, so little time to account for them and often no knowledge whether some—estranged from family and friends—would ever receive a proper funeral, they donned makeshift, priest-camp garments and miters each week, held a solemn, ritual "moment of remembrance" for each of the newly deceased, made the sign of the cross over their file, retired them and moved to the next. In retrospect, the relatively upbeat atmosphere in those group intake meetings (budget cuts had recently eliminated one-on-one counseling) was clearly due to the recently debuted, anti-retroviral AIDS drug "cocktail" that drastically reduced AIDS deaths. Watching Fig Trees helps weave and fill in—with visual and imaginary splendor—the often truncated view or penumbra that former AIDS struggles often have for those of younger generations.

Leaving my native Seattle to attend college in a small town in the Midwest, by the time I got to New York City in the late 90s, I had (thankfully) missed most of the haunting images of people slowly dying from AIDS in the "big cities." Although not completely—I am still haunted by the image of one beautiful young man, a Columbia University student, I believe, about my age, who came in to register at GMHC. He kept his left hand curled up and away from him, as the tips of two of his fingers had blackened. He was tired and seemed to be giving up; he felt he had become a burden to his friends and was ready to die, and the experience shocked me. I remember acutely the pre-anti-retroviral fear—laying up at night in my college bunk bed, shivering with panic at the recognition of the force of my own sexuality, still in my teens, worrying how I would ever survive my seemingly excessive desire—with many years of sexual encounter and risk ahead of me. Hence the relief when the new drugs rolled out my sophomore year—even if I did get HIV, I needn't ever die from AIDS ....

The more fantastical and imaginary elements of Fig Trees includes and makes space for this adolescent fear and trauma of younger generations often left out in AIDS narratives, but who were and have been affected by HIV/AIDS in their own respective ways. In my case, by the time I got to New York, the glory days of ACT UP were well over. While I spent countless hours with friends a decade or so older listening to their depictions, memories, and mythologizing of the exciting time when gay men—radicalized—actually gave a damn (catching up with dykes who benefited from the historical purpose and affiliation with the feminist movement); New York City gay life, in contrast seemed dominated by quite another mentality. Having attained a certain level of success and survival, they desired, it seemed, a (largely imagined) return to "normality": Wall Street job, gym/circuit party life; an apolitical, "leave me alone" attitude seemed to dominate. Understandable after the trauma of the AIDS scare, perhaps, but not very inspiring for budding queer radicals.[16] In this sense, a film like Fig Trees provides important historical connection for younger activists, disconnected by time and place from important struggles and experiences missed. In retrospect, the global AIDS struggles of the Health Gap/TAC protests, with their critique of Intellectual Property Rights, hurled many of a younger generation of queer activists directly into the budding anti-globalization/global justice movement in Seattle and beyond.[16] In creating a film to which multiple generations and different types of people affected by HIV/AIDS can relate, through its attention to the imaginary, Greyson succeeds in tightening social and communal bonds across age, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and geography, without losing a distinctively queer perspective.

Moreover, in presenting these activists as postmodern-day saints whose struggles changed the world, rather than simply memorializing them, Fig Trees queers religion and its imagery in a very political way, helping reconfigure what it means to be a saint and sinner in the context of today's struggles. For instance, while the current "It Gets Better" campaign admirably seeks to give hope to queer youth in the context of widespread bullying[18] and homophobia, in relative contrast, Fig Trees highlights the necessity of engaging in active social struggle. In this sense, Greyson's timely docu-opera sounds the call for renewed attention to contemporary struggles—struggles far from over given that HIV/AIDS drugs are far from universally available across the globe. Even in the United States—the supposed center of the developed world—the prevailing mood of Tea Party-imposed austerity augurs federal, state and local cutbacks to healthcare and increasing denial of services to those living with HIV/AIDS, a stark reversal from the optimism and hope for universal healthcare at the dawn of the Obama Administration only a short time ago. For instance, over 9,000 people in need of meds are currently on AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP) waitlists in 13 states in the U.S. alone.[19] While 34 million people around the globe are estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS, half of them do not know it. An estimated nine million of them are not getting the drugs they need, and 1.8 million people still die of AIDS each year alone.[20] While real strides have been made in many ways, which Fig Trees celebrates, AIDS is still an epidemic troublingly far from over, as increasing numbers of people, particularly men and women of color and young gay men—and especially young gay men of color and men who have sex with men [MSM]—seroconvert at an alarming rate.[21] Meanwhile, sex education and HIV/AIDS prevention funding is slashed, and the idea prevails that the threat of HIV/AIDS is largely over. It seems clear that the looming threat of austerity—"planned" or "managed" scarcity—as a solution to economic problems will likely be a central battleground for years to come.

All the more important then is the value that a critical and impassioned film like Fig Trees contributes to queer culture and the larger society, preserving the memory of previous struggles, while highlighting the lesson that it is struggle, often painful struggle, rather than the simple passage of time or "march of progress" that has changed the world. Like collage, Fig Trees cuts, combines, and preserves the trauma and traces of important queer historical memory and purpose, jettisoning any stale documentary-style recounting of the facts to get to the heart of the political and historical encounter the various AIDS protest movements embody. Utilizing parody, pastiche, and the healing power of music, Fig Trees intimates a refiguring of religion, body, memory, and struggle for all those affected by HIV/AIDS—a reconfiguring of saints and sinners for the "true religion" of queer historical memory.

Endnotes

1. See Mix 22: 2009 NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival Online Catalog. For a longer synopsis, see "Fig Trees: A Documentary Opera about Pills, Gertrude Stein & AIDS Activism," Fig Trees Press Kit (PDF). [Return to text]

2. Steven Jenkins, Frameline33, 2009 San Francisco International LGBT film festival catalog. [Return to text]

3. See Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). [Return to text]

4. Ben Nelson, "Film Review, Fig Trees," Variety, 1 July 2009. [Return to text]

5. See Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975). [Return to text]

6. The Making of "Monsters,", a fictionalized film about Kenneth Heller, the gay teacher killed in a homophobic hate crime by five adolescents in Toronto's Hyde Park, was never distributed due to copyright complaints by, of all places, the Kurt Weill estate. For more information on Greyson's films and political activism consult his extensive entry in Wikipedia. [Return to text]

7. For reflection on the fetishization of the suffering queer AIDS body, see Sarah Henstra's excellent analysis on the memorial politics of Fig Trees: "Confronting Genre: Opera, Memorial and John Greyson's Fig Trees," English Language Notes 48:1 (2010): 67-77; as well as Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Boston: MIT Press, 2004); and Gregg Bordowitz, The AIDS Scare is Ridiculous and Other Writings (Boston: MIT Press, 2004). [Return to text]

8. Henstra. [Return to text]

9. "John Greyson Opera Fig Trees Tackles AIDS Activism," CBS News Arts & Entertainment, 21 May 2009. [Return to text]

10. Henstra. [Return to text]

11. Henstra, 72-73. [Return to text]

12. Courtney Bender, Heaven's Kitchen: Living Religion at God's Love We Deliver (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Hervieu-Leger, Religion As a Chain of Memory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). [Return to text]

13. Harry Hay and Will Roscoe, eds., Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997). [Return to text]

14. David Eng, David Kazanjian, and Judith Butler, Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). [Return to text]

15. See "Frontline: The Age of AIDS: Timeline—25 Years of AIDS," PBS; and the Health Gap (Global Access Project). [Return to text]

16. See Matilda Sycamore Bernstein, ed., That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2004). [Return to text]

17. See Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk, From ACT UP to WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization (London: Verso, 2002). [Return to text]

18. The Huffington Post, "Anoka-Hennepin, Minnesota School District, Faces Another Lawsuit Over Alleged Gay Bullying,", 8 August 11, 2011. [Return to text]

19. D. Gregory Smith, "ADAP Waitlist Passes 9,000," The Bilerico Project, 16 August 2011. [Return to text]

20. News From Africa, "Africa: Leaders Call for More AIDS funds at UN Summit", 9 June 2011; UNAIDS Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic 2010. [Return to text]

21. Rod McCullom, "AIDS 2010: Concerns for Black Gay and Bisexual Men Raised to National and Global Platforms," The Body 21 July 2010. [Return to text]