G. B. Jones’ The Lollipop Generation is a film about runaway queer kids, a gang of lollipop-eating social misfits let loose on the streets of Toronto. They stumble into drugs, danger, and prostitution, and inhabit an underground culture infused with a pervasive yet innocent kind of sleaze. Seasoned with a bottom-up punk aesthetic and a good handful of homemade porn, the film presents an altogether refreshing critique of the stultifying norms of convention.

Lollipop is serious as well as comically lewd, but it is also beautiful and sweet, and can produce in the viewer an almost familial recognition of gestures, attitudes, social strategies, relationships to systems of control and perspectives on desire. The film’s combination of explicitness and mystery, lushness and sparseness, clarity and confusion creates an engaging visual terrain for the subaltern. The lo-fi soundtrack, a mix of music and voice-over, provides a push-pull dimension to the narrative, building a slow and uneven tension beneath the unruly storyline.

It took Jones thirteen years to create The Lollipop Generation. Such sustained resistance is itself a paean to the endurance of Queercore against the unfortunate crawl of the LGBT movement towards normalization and the badge of legitimacy. Lollipop, of course, will have none of that – it is unyielding, funny, gorgeous and exhilarating.

Starring Jena von Brücker, Mark Ewert, Vaginal Davis, Calvin Johnson and an attractive cast of North American punk and zine luminaries.

G. B. Jones is a Canadian filmmaker, artist, and musician, a Queercore legend and a tireless rebel. Her other films include The Troublemakers (1990) and The Yo-Yo Gang (1992); between 1985 and 1994 her band, The Fifth Column, produced three albums: To Sir With Hate, All-Time Queen Of The World, and 36-C; her zines include J.D.s, co-edited with Bruce La Bruce, and Double Bill, co-edited by Carolyne Azar. Jones’ book of Tomgirl drawings, G. B. Jones, was edited by Steve LaFreniere and published in 1996 by Feature Publications.

Curated by Cecilia Dougherty