OutWrite Festival: Panel - Gay Today: Reflecting on Modern Gay Life in Literature - Dundurn

OutWrite Festival: Panel - Gay Today: Reflecting on Modern Gay Life in Literature

We are now living in an era of marriage equality and corporate-sponsored pride parades, enjoying a degree of mainstream acceptance in North America that previous generations have had to fight for. This panel, brought to you by OutWrite Festival,  brings together gay authors from different backgrounds and genres — Nicolas DiDomizio, Christopher DiRaddo, Brontez Purnell, Zak Salih, and Dundurn Press author Eddy Boudel Tan (After Elias and The Rebellious Tide) — to uncover how our stories are evolving to reflect these times in which the rights of LGBTQ2+ folks are at once taken for granted and under constant threat. In this panel, they will interrogate topics such as apathy, bandwagon optimism, marriage, sex and hook-up culture, family, heteronormative conformity, and aspiration.


About the book:

Sebastien’s search for his father leads him to a ship harbouring a dangerous secret.

Sebastien has heard only stories about his father, a mysterious sailor who abandoned his pregnant mother thirty years ago. But when his mother dies after a lifetime of struggle, he becomes obsessed with finding an explanation — perhaps even revenge.

The father he’s never met is Kostas, the commanding officer of a luxury liner sailing the Mediterranean. Posing as a member of the ship’s crew, Sebastien stalks his unwitting father in search of answers as to why he disappeared so many years ago.

After a public assault triggers outrage among the ship’s crew, Sebastien finds himself entangled in a revolt against the oppressive ruling class of officers. As the clash escalates between the powerful and the powerless, Sebastien uncovers something his father has hidden deep within the belly of the ship — a disturbing secret that will force him to confront everything he’s always wondered and feared about his own identity.