Frameline Film Festival: The Lollipop Generation 

The Lollipop Generation is the first feature film by Canadian director G.B. Jones. The script tries to provide the audience with a pseudo true-to-life, but humorous, take on the life of a band of misfit queer kids. The film opens with a belligerent diatribe every queer person with homophobic parents has heard before. It is especially brilliant, ending with the camera focusing on a small jar on the kitchen table that says Lollipops for Good Kids. I particularly enjoyed this small joke and felt the filmmaker's message was highlighting the notion that queer kids can't be good kids—they look weird, act weird, all in all just not normal. The film, shot with grainy Super 8 making it seems strangely home-moviesque, brings together a collection of footage that was shot over a decade-and-a-half.

The audience follows this lollipop licking gang as they navigate the seedy, urban spaces and try to make some semblance of a family and home in an abandoned playground. Their "home" is set up to seem like a place "out of time" with reality, almost casting it like a Neverland setting; unchanging, and ultimately (until the end) a safe place for the teens to retreat.

The filmmaker tackles many hard hitting issues dealing with homophobia, prostitution, and addiction, yet keeps the tone playful throughout. Even the scene where a young Catholic schoolboy is abducted, drugged, and forced to participate in a porno is handled to be more hilarious than horrible. This is due to the role that famous cult drag queen, Vaginal Davis, plays in the film, as a clumsy and clueless "villain." All the while exclaiming directly to camera, "I've got a little white boy, look at my little white boy!" as her wig continues to precariously slip off the back of her head. For those that are unfamiliar with Vaginal Davis, she sports a daunting figure of over six feet tall with muscular post-Title IV arms, yet in her long page boy blonde wig and campy demeanor, her physique is unimportant. What I did find intriguing, if not slightly problematic, was that Davis was the only person of color throughout the entire film.

The filmmaker unrealistically portrays life on the street as glamorous, yet still seedy, which somehow ironically makes it seem more glamorous, purposefully keeping the audience from really examining some of the hard truths of this homeless population. On the streets, sex is the currency and your body is the only commodity you have. This becomes even more obvious as we drive around with our villains, listening to the (light-hearted) criticism about the various hustlers. Only at one point during the film does the director make the audience uncomfortable by bringing us a little too close to reality. We watch a painfully awkward scene (referencing the old snuff films of the '70s), with implied dialogue and long pauses, but are spared of anything truly horrific, only to find out later that the interaction we witnessed ultimately led to one of the young hustlers' death.

Overall, during The Lollipop Generations' run time, we became saturated with the grittiness, the lo-fi vibe and mono, (and at times) overly loud soundtrack, but finally get pulled from gutter with a triumphant video-message quote by two of our lolli-welding heroes, "We'll make our own movies now."

NSRC reviewed films from the 33rd annual Frameline Frameline's San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival through a partnership agreement with Frameline Films. For more information on this or other Frameline films, please contact Frameline Distribution.

Marik Xavier-Brier is a Masters candidate in the Sexuality Studies Department at San Francisco State University where he researches identity and sexuality in virtual worlds. His current research interests include the construction of gay identities, sexual interaction, and sexual citizenship within virtual environments. He is an avid online gamer and has been a resident of Second Life since 2006.