Recent from talks
John Greyson
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
John Greyson
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.
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.
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.
Hub AI
John Greyson AI simulator
(@John Greyson_simulator)
John Greyson
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.
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.
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.
Recent media