A NOVEL-IN-STORIES BY ALEX TURNER AND LUCIAN CHILDS
Coming Fall 2026 from Arsenal Pulp Press
Flight to Light, Alex Turner, 2012
In 1956, fifteen-year-old Teddy is overwhelmed by his feelings upon meeting the bad boy Wade. After high school, the friends fall out over Teddy’s sexuality and the story shifts from the Upper Fraser Valley to early ’60s Vancouver. There, Teddy struggles to shape a life as a gay man, while ultimately facing his unrequited love for the mercurial Wade.
While this story of star-crossed lovers entertains with humour, twists and cliffhangers, it contributes to our understanding of a seldomly-described period in the Canadian queer experience, the foundational years just prior to the 1969 Stonewall riots and the birth of the modern gay rights movement. As elsewhere during this period of enormous change, in Vancouver and the small Upper Fraser Valley towns, the conformist ’50s were morphing into the politically divisive and freewheeling ’60s.
As described in the novel’s second part, in Vancouver the move toward acceptance of gay love and sexuality was sidelined in the broader push for sexual liberation. And the city’s queer community—far from benefitting from the era’s drive for civil rights—continued to suffer discrimination and police harassment.
Even so, Vancouver was a mecca for a new generation of queer people, whose social networks and gathering places—albeit largely out of sight—became the foundation for the thriving LGTBQ+ culture that blossomed post-Stonewall.
The small towns of Harrison Hot Springs and Agassiz, though largely at the periphery of this cultural moment, were powerfully affected by it, nonetheless. Brought largely by its returning sons and daughters—Alex among them—the new artistic influences and social practices, the books and generation-defining music of the day, all made their way to these Upper Fraser Valley towns.
Toward Another Shore is a collaboration between the late Canadian visual artist, author and educator, Alex Turner, and his husband and Toronto writer, Lucian Childs. For more about the co-authorial process, please click HERE.
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