The next meeting of the Queer STS Reading Group will take place on Thursday 27th February from 5pm-6pm in the Alice Farrands Room on the ground floor of the UCL STS Department (22 Gordon Square, WC1H 0AW).
This time, Queer STS is going to the movies! We’re going to be discussing director John Greyson’s 1993 film Zero Patience.
Zero Patience is a zany, queer, camp, mind-bending musical that you have to see to believe. Set in 1990s Toronto, the film follows the 19th century sexologist and explorer Richard Francis Burton who, after an “unfortunate encounter” with the fountain of youth, is alive and well and working as a taxidermist at the Toronto Museum of Natural History. Burton decides that the crown jewel of his exhibition on contagious disease will be a display about ‘Patient Zero’ of the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis. Across town, in a gay bathhouse, Patient Zero re-emerges as a ghost.
Aside from its stand-alone qualities as a genuinely funny and bananas Brechtian musical, Zero Patience is a moving and intelligent thesis on the imperative of blame that undergirds epidemiology and the sciences of epidemic. The ‘truths’ and meanings of HIV/AIDS are deconstructed and contested again and again within the film as Burton wrestles with the ghost of Zero about how to narrativise his life and death, as well as the Toronto chapter of ACT UP who quickly identify Burton as a political enemy.
The entire 1hr 40min film is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQSzOnDQIkg&
To accompany your viewing, I would like to recommend you read Richard McKay’s (2014) article ““Patient Zero”: The Absence of a Patient’s View of the Early North American AIDS Epidemic”. The text is here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4046389/
Although he is not named within the film, the character of Zero in Zero Patience closely maps the figure of Gaétan Dugas, the gay Canadian flight attendant who was unfairly determined as the so-called “patient zero” of the North American AIDS epidemic. Dugas was maligned for his apparent role in the early transmission of HIV/AIDS and apparent flippancy — a view propagated by the author Randy Shilts in his promotion of one of the best-selling books about the HIV/AIDS crisis, 1987’s And the Band Played On. In this article, McKay seeks to re-narrativise Dugas’ role in HIV/AIDS history and to shatter the moralising logics of blame that have coloured his legacy. Simultaneously, McKay demonstrates how the construction of the figure of a “patient zero” is the moral epicentre of epidemics — determining, with a narrow positivism, what responsible, appropriate action within a crisis looks like. In this sense, McKay’s article is the social historical counterpart to the film Zero Patience (which McKay writes about in some length in his 2017 book Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic).
This should be the makings of a great discussion. I hope to see many of you soon!