Alberta senator Kristopher Wells is putting on a different hat on Aug. 6, when he makes his personal collection of over 300 queer picture books available to the public for the first time. Wells is partnering with the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) Canada to release the collection, and it is believed to be the largest collection of its kind in the world.
The collection includes books dating back nearly 50 years, which document LGBTQ2S+ life for young readers. IBBY Canada is the Canadian chapter of IBBY International, a non-profit organization that, since 1953, has worked to bring together children and books. Wells will participate in the opening ceremonies for IBBY’s 40th World Congress in Ottawa this week, the first held in Canada. The four-day conference will explore the theme “Listening to Each Other’s Voices,” and Wells’s collection fits in perfectly with this theme, which includes a focus on gender, sex and sexuality.
Wells worked with IBBY Canada to create a full-colour monograph, bringing together all the books in the collection, which will also be available online courtesy of Edmonton Public Library. The physical collection of more than 300 books will also be on display at Carleton University, where the congress is being held.
Wells says the collection, Reading with Pride: Stories for Everyone, “is like taking a walk” through the generations and decades of change for LGBTQ2S+ people.
“It’s beautiful to be able to see that change, books becoming more inclusive and intersectional, reflecting the greater understanding and empathy of our communities in the books being published now,” he says.
Wells didn’t intend to start collecting LGBTQ2S+ picture books, but his work as a classroom teacher in Alberta during the ’90s demonstrated the need for inclusive resources for young people.
Alberta teacher Delwin Vriend was fired from his position in 1991 and unable to file a human rights complaint because sexual orientation was not protected under the Alberta Human Rights Act at the time. He eventually took both the Government of Alberta and the Alberta Human Rights Commission to court, winning in 1998.
B.C. public school teacher James Chamberlain took the Surrey School District to court when, in 1997, they refused to allow him to use three picture books in his classroom that all offered representations of LGBTQ2S+ families: Asha’s Mums, Belinda’s Bouquet and One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads; he won his case in 2002.
“My partner and I would go to Vancouver for gay getaway trips, and we went into Little Sister’s [bookstore] and saw the three books that were part of the Chamberlain case on display and I bought them, thinking how different my life would have been if I’d had these books as a child,” Wells says.
He says the collection continued to grow from there as friends started to contribute books.
“Someone once told me that if you want to know what any culture in the world values the most, the first thing you should do is read their children’s books, because it’s the way that we most directly transmit society’s values and beliefs to the next generation,” he says. “So I kept buying books on my trips to Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver, and friends started giving books to me too!”
After teaching in the public school system for 17 years, Wells’s career shifted gears in 2012 when he became an education professor at the University of Alberta. He felt strongly about making LGBTQ2S+-themed books available to kids and suggested that even if these books weren’t in the school library or part of the government curriculum, teachers could still have them on their classroom bookshelves.
“Just having a child see those books can make a world of difference. You don’t need to say anything, just have them there,” he says.
Just after the Vriend verdict, Wells went to Vancouver to march in the Pride parade. He says he remembers the teachers in the parade getting a loud round of applause. “But I also recall a voice coming out of the crowd, stopped me in my tracks, yelling out, ‘Where were you when I needed you?’
“I still hear that echo 30 years later and it drives the work I do. Sadly, the progress we made in Alberta is under threat with levels of unprecedented discrimination from the [United Conservative Party] government that have chosen to target the 2SLGBTQ+ community as a convenient distraction and scapegoat.”
The UCP has embraced the MAGA playbook, implementing it in Alberta via restricting access to gender-affirming care for children and youth, censoring LGBTQ2S+ materials in schools and libraries and creating a culture of silence and fear through using the Notwithstanding Clause. As a result, Alberta has truly become the Texas of the North—an almost unrecognizable part of Canada.
Last year, Wells began thinking it might be time to get the books out of his home and into the world and contacted IBBY Canada to help find a permanent home for his collection.
Patti McIntosh, president of IBBY Canada, was delighted to connect with him. IBBY Canada has created similar projects including an Indigenous picture-book collection in 2018 in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action.
“Reading with Pride isn’t just a list of book titles: we’ve tried to ensure readers see it as a comprehensive overview of what’s happened since the first LGBTQ2S+ picture books were published in the ’80s, and we’re hoping it will also act as a call to action to grow Kris’s collection with books in many different languages, if possible, making it truly international,” McIntosh says.
“For me, being part of this year’s IBBY Congress is a call to action, a challenge to the world. Growing up without any visible role models, I can only imagine what it would have meant to have discovered a children’s book that actually reflected my identity and community,” Wells says.
Why you can trust Xtra