We are trying to take sexually explicit content out of elementary schools that is inappropriate for me to show on the television news at night, and so it is inappropriate for seven-year-olds to see.
- Danielle Smith, August 29, 2025
A friend in my hometown of Edmonton was recently alarmed to discover that her daughter had watched Heated Rivalry behind her back. Gay romance was not the problem; my friend had devoured the six episodes herself. But the girl was in junior high, barely a teenager, surely too young for all those barely veiled blow jobs. What’s more, her daughter confessed that she hadn’t simply been curious about the hype. At thirteen, she was a full‑on connoisseur of “boys’ love,” an East Asian genre that centres on romance between young men. She’d secretly streamed dozens of Thai and South Korean television series, keeping a colour-coded list to indicate whether they...
Amanda Perry teaches literature at Champlain College Saint-Lambert and Concordia University.
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