Author Archives: Kevin Allen

Join the Beltline Walk: Poetry and Queer History

Posted on September 25, 2025 | Leave a comment

October is queer history month! Join the Calgary Gay History Project’s Kevin Allen and poet Skylar Kay on a history walk through the Beltline. We will highlight significant political and social events that affected the 2SLGBTQ+ community—with poetry! The walk on Thursday, October 2, at 5 PM, begins and ends at the Memorial Park Library (1221 2nd St. SW).

Registration is free through the Calgary Public Library: here (spaces limited).

Kevin Allen is a fourth-generation Calgarian who has been documenting and profiling queer people and events for 30+ years. Kevin started the Calgary Gay History Project in 2012 to uncover and preserve stories from Calgary’s 2SLGBTQ+ past. The Project has achieved national recognition and led to the award-winning documentary film Gross Indecency: The Everett Klippert Story and the best-selling book Our Past Matters: Stories of Gay Calgary.

Skylar Kay is an Albertan poet and grad school dropout. Her debut collection, Transcribing Moonlight (Frontenac House 2022), earned a shortlist nod for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for Poetry and won the BPAA’s Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry. Her second collection of poetry will come out in fall 2025. She received a 2024 Lieutenant Governor Emerging Artist Award. These days, she likes baking muffins, tolerating her cat, and reading as much poetry as possible.

Kevin and Skylar thank the Calgary Public Library for hosting this event! Please join us.

{KA}

Fun Home: Book Review

Posted on September 18, 2025 | 4 comments

At Calgary Pride a few weeks ago, I attended the Calgary Institute for the Humanities’ 7th Annual LGBTQ2S+ Lecture, presented by Dr. Kenneth Kidd, about government book bans. Shelf Life Books was on-site, selling the four graphic novels that are currently in the crosshairs of the Government of Alberta. So, I bought one.

Sit down—this is one of the best books I have ever read—and the best graphic novel to date! Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical story about discovering her lesbianism as well as her father’s closeted homosexuality blew me away. The novel’s title is the nickname for the family’s multi-generational funeral home business in the claustrophobic small town of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania.

I can’t overstate how much I loved this smart, smart book. But I was late to the party…

Fun Home came out in 2006 to rave reviews in many places. Time Magazine called it a masterpiece and the #1 book of that year. The New York Times Book Review stated: “Fun Home must be the most ingeniously compact, hyperverbose, example of autobiography to have been produced..A pioneering work.”

In the ensuing years, Fun Home became a target of U.S. social conservatives, who determined that it was pornographic and offensive. However, some critics admitted that their main critique was that it “promoted a gay and lesbian lifestyle.”

Now I have a quibble. The lesbian sex that is present in the comic is very tame, not arousing. The skin shown in Bechdel’s drawing is much less than what one sees on mainstream television. In my memory, high school locker room graffiti typically features more explicit, hand-drawn content. So, from my perspective, the movement to ban Fun Home is homophobic at its core, hiding behind a fig leaf of pornography.

However, I am grateful for the controversy, because Fun Home wasn’t on my radar before this. Read it! Fun Home is a literary, courageous, and profound work—highly recommended by Kevin Allen and the Calgary Gay History Project.

Note: Fun Home has become a bestseller again, and there is a long wait for it at the Calgary Public Library…

{KA}

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Posted in Gay history

Tagged Alison Bechdel, bisexual, calgary public library, CIH, Fun Home, gay, Government of Alberta, Kenneth Kidd, lesbian, queer, Shelf Life, transgender

Our Past Matters Surprise: Happy YYCPride!

Posted on August 28, 2025 | Leave a comment

In celebration of Calgary Pride 2025, we are giving away a copy of Our Past Matters (now a tradition)! Find the book in one of the inner city Little Free Libraries. {Maybe leave a book for someone else, while you are there!}

*Look for Our Past Matters this weekend!*

Thanks to everyone who came out to this week’s Gay History Walks (at capacity) and to last week’s lecture at The Confluence. It’s gratifying to learn so many people care about our City’s queer history—and hot dogs and hot takes!