By Greg Hudson
This looks like it could be bible camp. Young people, mostly in their late teens, are making the cheerful, tinkling sounds of breakfast. Even the groggy kids are smiling, talking about the hows and whys of their grogginess.
In a room beside the dining area, the sun shines through a stained glass Jesus and someone plays a piano in the way people at parties absentmindedly strum guitars – half to stumble on a potential hook, half to get attention. The event, what with all the bright religious paraphernalia on the walls, sounds like a hymn written by Rufus Wainwright. Maybe. Only this isn’t Bible Camp. It’s Gay Camp. At least, that’s what one of the founders calls it.
Photograph by Curtis Comeau
Kristopher Wells stands in the middle of the morning hubbub. Breakfast is over for the most part, and the campers are starting to look busy, entering the lobby, exiting, returning, grouping up. Wells talks to the campers who come up to him, like the big, copper-haired kid in a neon blue Obama shirt. But mostly, Wells, who is well built, head shaved, and wears the eternally unfashionable uniform of a camp counselor – khaki shorts, socks rising out of outdoorsy shoes – is playing host to a group of media. He selects a few articulate, camera-friendly kids to tell their stories to a local news reporter. After he ushers the interviewer and interviewee outside to talk in the morning sun and then sits off to the side watching the younger generation spread the good news of Camp Fyrefly. He looks proud. This, just as much as what will go on at the camp itself, is what the camp is about.
Wells started Camp Fyrefly as a place for Canada’s “lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-identified, two-spirited, intersexed, queer, questioning, and allied youth,” (or LGBTTQ&A) in 2004. That broad definition is how Fyrefly is described on the website, and it’s a big tent. (The “y” in Fyrefly is not a typo – it stands for youth.) Embedded in that misspelled jumble is the goal to foster leadership in teens. The camp doesn’t exactly have sessions on how to give, say, Obama-style, hope-infused speeches or to create the next generation of LGBT CEOs; the leadership training is more internalized. Which makes sense, considering that a lot of the problems LGBT youth face are internalized, too.
Before he started Camp Fyrefly, Wells was a teacher in St. Albert, a suburb of Edmonton. After a student from the school killed himself, Wells felt responsible. “That was a significant turning point in my own life,” he says. “We had never been able to talk about our identities in the school environment. I saw how the school dealt with it, with complete denial and silence, and decided that I couldn’t be in that kind of environment as a gay teacher who had to be closeted to work.”
He left teaching and joined a youth group called Youth Understanding Youth, which became Camp Fyrefly. Now Wells runs workshops in four provinces and has worked with more than 150 teens (the average age of attendees is 18, who can attend for a subsidized cost of $25). This is possible because the camp is more about community than bricks and mortar. It can go anywhere, even to this church in St. Albert.
As kids mill around, the local media are talking with one such kid who just ran for city council in Surrey, B.C. He is confident and eloquent, a born leader. “Our unofficial motto is ‘take what you need and give to others,’” Wells explains. “Someone has created the opportunity for you to be here, and it is investing in you as a leader. How are you going to repay that investment? We let the young people define the kind of leadership role they are going to take, and recognize for many of them, they need to spend the time being leaders to themselves first.”
After the campers have their time on camera, Wells is up. He speaks effortlessly and manages to make his sound bite material sound sincere. He’s like the cool teacher who had that remarkable, yet elusive ability to connect with students. Watching him, you can see just where the campers who had their moment on camera might be in a few years. U
Category: Leadership, Profiles, The Academy, Work, Working for Nothing
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You go, Kris!