This illustrated biography of Canadian LGBTQ activist Jim Egan won the inaugural Sharon Fitzhenry Award for Canadian Children’s Nonfiction at the 2025 Canadian Children’s Book Centre Awards. It opens as a grown Egan and partner Jack Nesbit are waiting for the results of their court battle to allow Nesbit to receive Egan’s old age security payments, like any married spouse.
It then takes us back to Egan’s birth in 1921, and his “ordinary childhood.” As Egan grew up, he began to realize as he grew up that he “liked boys, not girls.” This sometimes made him feel alone, but overall, “He felt good about himself.”
After leaving school at age 16, Egan held a variety of jobs, and it was during a stint in the merchant marines during World War II that he discovered there were other people like himself—and a word, “gay,” to describe them. The book explains that being gay was illegal in Canada at the time, and that many LGBTQ2S+ people hid who they were. Not Egan. He began writing about gay people and the discrimination they faced, and in 1951 had a letter published in a Toronto newspaper, making him “the first person in Canada to write publicly from a LGBTQ2S+ point of view.”
He continued to write and speak out, eventually moving to Vancouver Island with Nesbit and working on environmental issues as well. In 1981, he was elected a regional director, “the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in Canada.” Egan also began his best-known fight, for inheritance rights, a battle that would lead to protections for the LGBTQ2S+ community under the country’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Egan and Nesbit both died in 2000, after more than 50 years together. They never saw full marriage equality, which started in some provinces in 2003 and nationwide in 2005, but their story, and Egan’s work, helped open the door to that right.
With lively text and comic-style images, this is a highly recommended title for young readers anywhere who want to learn more about a pivotal figure in the history of LGBTQ rights.
