I was terrified of him. Whatdidhedo? He used … sarcasm. He knew all the tricks: dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire. He was vicious. “The Piranha Brothers,” MontyPython’sFlyingCircus (1989, 189–90) Many recurrent themes run through John Greyson’s work – queer politics, hiv /aids activism, solidarity political action with marginalized, under- represented and persecuted groups – yet one theme that unites all these issues is Greyson’s profound preoccupation with history, its role in both preserving and eliding the past, and the way in which being cognizant of the historical revitalizes the present. Greyson critically and self-reflexively questions how moving images function in the cultural and political imagescape by reartic- ulating marginalized, repressed, and forgotten histories (through the use of a variety of strategies, including found footage, faux-found footage, quota- tion, collage, détournement, and appropriation) in such a manner as both to throw into relief how the traces of these images and texts are always partial and, at the same time, to foreground the ongoing dialectical connection be- tween past and present within the public sphere. His discursive avatars in this humorous historical reawakening are drawn from the plethora of historical figures – queer, queer-friendly, straight, straightish, or closeted – that popu- late Greyson’s films and videos: Sergei Eisenstein, Virgil Thomson, Langston Hughes, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Georg Lukács, Yukio Mishima, Michel Fou- cault, Sir Richard Burton, Gertrude Stein, Frida Kahlo, Bertolt Brecht, and Kurt Weill (admittedly, the last two are played by fish) all make appearances. These at times contradictory historical figures allow audiences to enter into 10 And Now for Something Completely Dissident: The “Parodic Historical” and “Archival Necrology” of John Greyson Scott MacKenzie