Channel Surfing in the Sea of Happiness is an iconoclastic romp through the end of the twentieth century. The misfit characters in this funny and poignant collection of stories find themselves adrift in an increasingly absurdist world — a world they must reinvent for themselves in order to find hope. How much of our identity is forged by direct experience, and how much is shaped by our constant exposure to a barrage of images and ideas imposed on us from elsewhere? From a story about a precocious teenage boy coming out in high school in the 1970s, to a series of tales about two queer con artists and their ridiculous get-rich-quick schemes, to a yarn about a famous transgender sex worker’s efforts to rally her community against redneck homophobes, to an account of a lesbian puppeteer’s AIDS activism in the 1980s, to a story about a sister coming to terms with her brother’s death from AIDS, the collection explores how the human heart stays afloat in a society entertaining, informing, and networking itself to death.
Guy Babineau is a writer, freelance journalist, and educator in fashion marketing and communications. His fiction, articles, and reviews have appeared in The Globe and Mail, Descant, The Georgia Straight, Xtra!, Xtra! West, Vancouver Magazine, The Vancouver Sun, and more. He is the recipient of a Vancouver Fashion Week Award for Journalism and a Vancouver LGBTQ+ Community Award for Writer of the Year. He loves photography and working out, is a superfan of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and is passionate about sustainable fashion. He was born in Toronto, Ontario and now lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
We understand the importance of accessibility for all of our customers, including those with disabilities. While our website may not currently meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA, we are actively working towards compliance and constantly seeking ways to improve the user experience for all of our customers.
To that end, we have implemented a variety of accessibility tools provided by third-party app, AppifyCommerce. These tools include features such as keyboard navigation, high contrast mode, font resizing, and alternative text for images read focus, various cursor sizes. We have also incorporated tools to help with visual impairments, such as screen readers and text-to-speech functionality.
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