Art Metropole

#15541

You Can Be Anything You Want As Long As You're Queer

Date

2023

Publisher

Nat Pyper

Format

Editions

Genre

Prints & Posters, Queer Art & Artists, Punk

G. B. Jones is an artist, filmmaker, and musician with a bone to pick. In the early 80s Jones co-founded the post-punk proto-riot grrrl band Fifth Column and in 1985 started publishing the queer punk zine J.D.s with co-conspirator Bruce LaBruce out of their rundown apartment in downtown Toronto. The zine’s inaugural issue featured the debut of her legendary TOM GIRLS series. Her drawings continue to be exhibited worldwide. Jones’ “no-budget” films often depict the hijinks of bad-mannered girl gangs, homo hustlers, and anarchist mischief-makers.

The font featured on this poster is based on the title sequence of her 2008 film The Lollipop Generation. Jones’ matter-of-fact use of a Lite Brite in the film’s titles evokes her use of stencils in J.D.s: a do-it-yourself approach that says you can do it too. Gaps in the alphabet were filled by emulating existing forms as needed. It is the third typeface in a Queer Year of Love Letters, a series of fonts that remembers the lives and work of countercultural queers of the past several decades. Nat Pyper, 2018.