John Greyson (born March 13, 1960) is a Canadian director, writer, video artist, producer, and political activist, whose work frequently deals with queer characters and themes. He was part of a loosely affiliated group of filmmakers to emerge in the 1980s from Toronto known as the Toronto New Wave.
Greyson has won accolades and achieved critical success with his films—most notably Zero Patience (1993) and Lilies (1996). His outspoken persona, activism, and public image have also attracted international press and controversy.
Greyson is also a professor at York University's film school, where he teaches film and video theory, film production, and editing.
Early life Greyson was born in Nelson, British Columbia, the son of Dorothy F. (née Auterson) and Richard I. Greyson. He was raised in London, Ontario, before moving to Toronto in 1978, where he became a writer for The Body Politic and other local arts and culture magazines, as well as a video and performance artist.
Career He directed several short films, including The Perils of Pedagogy, Kipling Meets the Cowboy, and Moscow Does Not Believe in Queers, before releasing his first feature film, Pissoir, in 1988. Pissoir is a response to the homophobic climate of the period and, particularly, to police entrapment of men in public washrooms (toilets) and parks and police raids on gay bathhouses.
Greyson’s early video work was “social change documentary.” During the 1980s and 1990s, Greyson created many videos as a form of AIDS activism. One of his first videos to address AIDS was Moscow Does Not Believe in Queers (1986).
The ADS Epidemic (1987) also addresses the AIDS epidemic. Greyson created this video as part of the Public Access Collective’s The Lunatic of One Idea project. The project involved a number of artists creating works to be displayed at Square One Mall in Mississauga, Ontario, between the advertisements that were usually played on a 36-screen video grid at the mall. Greyson describes the title as a “dual purpose acronym,” referring both to the titular “Acquired Dread of Sex” (evoking the AIDS epidemic, which the film addresses) and the advertisements typically displayed on the screen where this video was exhibited. The video is a musical spoof of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971). It was filmed in Toronto over one day. Its accompanying song was written by Glenn Schellenberg, with Greyson providing lyrics. The cast included Colin Campbell as Aschenbach, and his son Neil Campbell as a young man on a ferry. Greyson defined his goals for this video as “talking about that culture of fear and hatred that early AIDS discourses in the mainstream media and state policies had produced, demonizing queers, creating a general sense of sex panic, and trying to combat that through humor and music.”
Greyson's next film was The Making of Monsters, a short musical film produced during Greyson's residency at the Canadian Film Centre in 1991. The film deals with the 1985 murder by five adolescent males of Kenneth Zeller, a high school teacher and librarian, when he was allegedly cruising for sexual encounters in Toronto's High Park. The film is a fictional documentary about the making of a movie-of-the-week, entitled Monsters, in which the young murderers are depicted as psychopathic monsters, rather than normal teenage boys. The film features Marxist literary critic Georg Lukács as the producer of Monsters, with Bertolt Brecht (played by a catfish) as director. Greyson's film was pulled from distribution when the estate of Kurt Weill objected to its use of the tune of Mack the Knife. Greyson had originally received copyright permission to use the tune, but it was withdrawn, apparently because Weill's estate objected to the film's homosexual themes. Although copyright is no longer an issue, having lapsed in 2000, fifty years after Weill's death, the film has not yet been re-released by the Canadian Film Development Corporation.
The copyright issues that came out of creating The Making of Monsters inspired documentary segments in his film Un©ut (1997), which explored debates around how copyright law affects artists, outing public figures (with the example of Pierre Trudeau), and circumcision.
He is best known for the feature-length films Zero Patience and Lilies. His other films include Un©ut (1997), The Law of Enclosures (1999), and Proteus (2003). He has also directed for television, including episodes of Queer as Folk, Made in Canada, and Paradise Falls.
In 2003, Greyson and composer David Wall created Fig Trees, a video opera for gallery installation, about the struggles of South African AIDS activist Zackie Achmat.Goddard, Peter (November 22, 2003). "Greyson finds grandeur in video opera". Toronto Star , p. J.07. In 2009, a film version of Fig Trees was released. This film, a feature-length documentary opera, premiered at the Berlinale as part of its Panorama section, where it won the Teddy Award for Best Documentary."John Greyson opera Fig Trees tackles AIDS activism," CBC News, May 21, 2009
In 2007, Greyson was the recipient of the Bell Award in Video Art. The award committee stated: "John Greyson is perhaps best known to a general public as a feature film director. He shoots his 'film' projects on video with trademark video post-production techniques, thus colonizing the space of cinema with the aesthetics of video. An incisive social and political critic, Mr. Greyson is in fact one of the leaders in the AIDS activist video movement, among others. Mr. Greyson has supported the practice in many ways and he influences many emerging artists." In 2013, Greyson released Murder in Passing, a murder mystery series which aired as 30-second episodes on Pattison Outdoor Advertising's video screens in the Toronto Transit Commission subway system and as a web series."TTC offers new platform for mystery". Toronto Star, January 7, 2013.
The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson was published in 2013. The book includes some of his writing as well as scholarly essays about his work from across his career. One essay quotes scholar Wyndham Wise saying that Greyson's work displays a "unique combination of wit and didacticism."
In 2020, he released the short film Prurient as part of the Greetings from Isolation project.Norman Wilner, "Canadian directors are making films in self-isolation". Now, May 12, 2020. In 2021, his experimental short International Dawn Chorus Day had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Teddy Award for best LGBTQ-themed short film.
In 2022, Greyson’s eighth feature, Photo Booth, had its world premiere at the 15th Toronto Palestine Film Festival. The film follows two Palestinian queer activists, who, along with novelist Jean Genet, attempt to sabotage the Eurovision Song Contest, being held in Jericho. The film was billed as “a split-screen documentary opera,” and included interviews from Ghadir Shafie, Judith Butler, and Ali Abunimah, among others. Greyson describes Photo Booth as his “BDS manifesto.”
Greyson’s film Door Prize (2024) had its world premiere at the 2025 Images Festival in Toronto, Ontario. The film is about a trans bike courier, named Mars, who is killed by an SUV, and the true crime spectacle that follows his death.
Notable films
Zero Patience
Zero Patience is a 1993 musical film which challenged AIDS orthodoxy. Zero Patience is a response particularly to Randy Shilts' 1987 book And the Band Played On, which notoriously (and erroneously) traced the arrival of HIV/AIDS in North America to a single person, a Canadian airline attendant named Gaetan Dugas. Based on a single flawed epidemiological cluster study, the conclusions of Shilts' book were very problematic for the narrative of blame they created, suggesting both that particular individuals were at fault (for example, that Dugas willfully spread HIV, although he actually died before the virus was identified and the study in which he participated was one of several that allowed scientists to determine that HIV was sexually transmitted) and that monogamy and the 'normalization' of gay male sexual practices were the proper and adequate response (as opposed to a focus on safer sex practices).
Zero Patience features a gay ghost named Patient Zero who returns to Toronto to hook up with Sir Richard Francis Burton who, through an "unfortunate encounter with the fountain of youth" has lived to become the Chief Taxidermist at the Museum of Natural History. Burton is engaged in creating a "Hall of Contagion." When he loses his central exhibit, the Düsseldorf Plague Rat, he casts around for a replacement, lighting upon Patient Zero. In a comedy of errors, Zero and Burton come together, fall in love and attempt to figure out what to do about Burton's earlier attempts to defame Zero as a "sexual serial killer."
A number of sub-plots centre around specific criticisms of the social response to AIDS by politicians, doctors and pharmaceutical companies. There is a not entirely sympathetic ACT UP group engaged in a protest against the manufacturer of ZP0 (a reference to AZT), a teacher who is losing his sight to CMV and several scenes involving his students, and a number of scenes involving the animal and human inhabitants of the dioramas in the Hall of Contagion. Most of these feature lively and thought-provoking musical numbers, but none have drawn critical attention as much as the "Butthole Duet" in which Burton's and Zero's anuses sing about the social perception of anal sex and its relationship to the discourses circulating around AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s. Widely misunderstood by film reviewers, the song refers to a number of academic responses to the popular perception of AIDS as a "gay disease" and the now discredited belief that the anus was more vulnerable to HIV than the vagina, particularly Leo Bersani's article "Is the Rectum a Grave?" Bersani thoroughly discredits the notion that anal sex is inherently diseased; Greyson takes this one step further to argue that an unreasonable bias against anal sex is linked to patriarchy.
The central scene in Zero Patience, however, is probably the scene in which Zero looks through a microscope at a slide of his own blood. What he sees is the subject of an Esther Williams-like song-and-dance number throughout which Zero converses with Miss HIV (Michael Callen). Both lyrically and in conversation, Miss HIV informs Zero that he was not the first, that he did not bring HIV/AIDS to North America, and that his participation in the infamous cluster study helped to prove that HIV is transmissible by sex and thus place an emphasis on safer sex that saved countless lives.
Lilies
In 1996, Greyson released his most famous film, Lilies, an adaptation of Michel Marc Bouchard's play Les feluettes, ou un drame romantique. The film screened at numerous festivals, including Sundance, and received critical acclaim; it was nominated for 14 awards Genie Awards at the 17th ceremony, winning four, including Best Picture. The film also won a number of other awards, including the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Film.
Following the dual chronology of Bouchard's play, Greyson's film (for which Bouchard wrote the screenplay) moves between two time periods: the film's 'present' in 1952 and the events that took place in the town of Roberval, Quebec in 1912. The film begins with a visit by Bishop Bilodeau (Marcel Sabourin) to a prison chapel where he is supposed to hear the confession of convicted murderer Simon (Aubert Pallascio). Both men were at school together in 1912 when a fire supposedly set by Simon took the life of a third schoolmate, and Simon's lover, Vallier (Danny Gilmore). However, this apparently simple story become quickly more complicated when the prison chaplain (Ian D. Clark) and the prisoners lock Bilodeau into the confessional booth and proceed to stage the true story of Vallier's death before their captive's eyes.
Fig Trees