at-risk youth. Literature Most contemporary analysis of LGBT literature in Canada begins with three poets, Émile Nelligan, Frank Oliver Call and Elsa Gidlow. Although neither Nelligan nor Call can be definitively determined to have been gay, due to the lack of a clear biographical record of their sexual or romantic relationships, both have been extensively analyzed for the presence of homoerotic themes in some of their writing, while Gidlow wrote what is believed to be the first volume of openly lesbian love poetry ever published by a North American writer. Nelligan suffered a psychotic breakdown at the age of 19 in 1899 and was institutionalized for the remainder of his life, and nearly all of his work was published only after his confinement. While the cause of his mental illness has been extensively debated, in recent years a number of critics and biographers have postulated that Nelligan was gay and suffered from inner conflict between his sexuality and his religious upbringing. Nelligan's poetry includes several allusions to public sex in parks, a practice much more strongly associated with the history of homosexuality than that of heterosexuality; Montreal's Mount Royal Park, the apparent inspiration for much of his outdoor poetry, was indeed known as a gay cruising spot even in Nelligan's lifetime. Nelligan was also profoundly inspired by writers, such as Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire, who openly wrote about LGBT themes. Despite the sexual and romantic nature of Nelligan's writing, no records exist to confirm that he ever had a sexual or romantic relationship with anyone male or female; however, later biographers have published some evidence that he may have been the lover of poet Arthur de Bussières. Analysis of gay subtext in Call's writing rests especially on his 1944 poetry collection Sonnets for Youth, which contains explicit homoerotic themes and is inspired by Greek mythology including the myth of Hyacinth, although his earlier collections In a Belgian Garden and Acanthus and Wild Grape also contain numerous references to male beauty. In addition, all of Call's most explicitly sexual poetry is written in the second person, a common technique of gay writers who wish to disguise the gender of the person they're writing about. However, limited biographical information is known about Call outside of his writing itself, so his sexuality cannot be confirmed. Despite the uncertainty surrounding their sexual orientations, both Nelligan and Call are included in John