HIV Positive: Saints, Sinners, and AIDS protest movements in Fig Trees’ Queer Religion

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.¹ An imaginary “mock-MTV”² 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,³ 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.⁴

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 bodies⁵ 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.⁶ 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.”⁷ 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.⁶ 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.⁸

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.⁹ 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.

1. See Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). [↩]
2. Ben Nelson, “Film Review, Fig Trees,” Variety, 1 July 2009. [↩]
3. See Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975). [↩]
4. 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. [↩]
5. 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). [↩]
6. Henstra. [↩] [↩]
7. “John Greyson Opera Fig Trees Tackles AIDS Activism,” CBS News Arts & Entertainment, 21 May 2009. [↩]
8. Henstra, 72-73. [↩]
9. 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). [↩]