Let’s start Pride Month 2025 with a book about the big gay that Alberta doesn’t want kids to read. (Maybe, if the people agree, or a minimum age, unclear).
Cover art is indicative of the art style, black and white with red to highlight certain scenes.
First let’s talk about the graphic novel, because it’s good. It even deals with a few things I have some familiarity with; being a teenage boy, being at scout camp, and being gay.
The novel follows 14 year old Aiden at scout summer camp, right before he moves from middle school to high school in the mid 1990s. He doesn’t fit the masculine ideal; short, fat, and not good at sports. Boys will 100% pick up on that as a vector for bullying. But he starts off having a history of liking scouts and camp since the boys there are nicer to him than at school, even if he can’t completely escape bullies.
It’s what I would call “a coming out to yourself” story. Because if society only tells you bad things about being gay you probably won’t be thrilled to find that out about yourself initially. I sure didn’t have fun with that step and it was later than 14 that I was willing to examine it. As a result it deals with themes of depression and self-harm, but it ends on a hopeful note. Expect a lot of F-slurs, thankfully in my time and space growing up in school this wasn’t the case, it had been toned down to boys calling each other gay* all the time.
*Pejorative
I would highly recommend for gay teens since its the kind of character and story I wish I had when I was younger. Maybe even for teens that don’t fit the ideal societal image of what they should be, or really anyone, god knows we could use a dose of empathy. Someone more aware of the teens would know if this works for a general audience, at the back of my mind I always worry that pitching a book with a gay character to someone will be viewed as an insult.
Why I’m Even Talking About It
This book came out in 2020, but in 2025 the government of Alberta put it on it’s not age appropriate for schools list. The silver lining is that release made me aware of Flamer, which I had not happened across despite the overlaps with my life.
The provincial government flagged four books, all graphic novels: Gender Queer (I was already aware conservatives have gone after this one a lot), Fun Home, Blankets, and Flamer. If you were to put a gun to my head I would guess they all skew to high school level, so yes, maybe they don’t need to be in elementary schools but the school boards would have likely moved them if notified. That’s taking the government’s word that they were physically found in certain schools.
The personal connection and uncertainty about what exactly the problem with Flamer’s content made me pick it up. The reference material at the provincial government link above didn’t do a great a job of selling what was so controversial about it, especially compared to the other ones that do depict nudity and sex which the government happily provided examples of for concerned parents.
So what gives.
Maybe they had never talked to a teenage boy before, or the horror of watching them interact with each other?
Is the topic of sex and masturbation an issue? The amount of jerking it required by the average teenage boy suggests that avoiding it is somewhere between impossible and likely not good for anyone.
Do we say we can’t talk about homophobia? That’s not a good sign for certain peoples rights.
Do we say we can’t talk about teen suicide? Probably not good for preventing teen suicide.
This is very easily going to end up a witch hunt in which the people who show up to these discussions will want anything gay out of schools. See this CBC article for more on northern migration of the library wars.
Why I’m Talking About It Outside Alberta
This strategy will be tried elsewhere if it keeps working. They don’t even need to be the majority to have a profound impact. Alberta politicians are doing a good job of giving the social conservatives and conspiracy theorists what they want while telling the public they are doing it for reasonable reasons.
It’s the just asking questions of policy.
If they keep being allowed to ask those questions we have to keep fighting a culture war while everything else gets worse.
NS Politics 
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