Damon Young, a doctoral candidate in Film and Media Studies at UC Berkeley, is a Fellow at the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities. He is coeditor of Queer Bonds, a special double issue of GLQ, and has written for Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, and Continuum.

“A postmodern pastiche of palindromes, queer history, music history, and Catholic theology.”-Seattle International Film Festival

Canadian videomaker and activist John Greyson's latest feature is a genre-bending, jaw-dropping “doc-op” centered on two AIDS activists, South African Zackie Achmat, who went on a treatment strike, and Canadian Tim McCaskell, a founder of AIDS Action Now! Riffing on Four Saints in Three Acts, Gertrude Stein's 1934 queer avant-garde classic, Fig Trees advocates for opera to be socially conscious. Wildly imaginative, the film yanks the fig leaves off government and pharmaceutical companies to expose their failure to provide affordable access to AIDS treatment. John Greyson will also present a lecture as part of the Berkeley Film and Media Seminar on Thursday, November 15; go to fm.berkeley.edu for more information.