A Queer Love Story: The Letters of Jane Rule and Rick Bébout

Marilyn Schuster

ਮਈ 2017 · UBC Press

ਇਸ ਈ-ਕਿਤਾਬ ਬਾਰੇ

In August 1989, Jane Rule – novelist, essayist, and the first widely recognized “public lesbian” in North America – summed up the first eight years of her correspondence with Rick Bébout, journalist and editor with the Toronto-based Body Politic: “It seems to me that what has concerned us is richly human and significantly focused on the concerns of our time and our tribe.”

Rule lived in a remote rural community on Galiano Island in British Columbia but wrote a column for the magazine. Bébout was a resident of and devoted to Toronto’s gay village. A Queer Love Story presents the first fifteen years of their correspondence. At turns poignant, scintillating, and incisive, their exchanges include ruminations on queer life and the writing life as they document some of the most pressing LGBT issues and events of the 1980s and ’90s, including HIV/AIDS, censorship, youth sexuality, public sex and S/M, Toronto’s infamous bath raids, and state regulation of identity and desire.

ਲੇਖਕ ਬਾਰੇ

Marilyn R. Schuster was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Smith College and has been professor and provost emerita since 2015. Her research and writing focuses on contemporary writers such as Jane Rule, Marguerite Duras, and Monique Wittig, and she is the author of Marguerite Duras Revisited and Passionate Communities: Reading Lesbian Resistance in Jane Rule’s Fiction. She lives in Oakland, California.

Rick Bébout was the editor of the hugely influential Body Politic, “the magazine of record for the activities and development of the gay liberation movement across the country.” He was born in Ayer, Massachusetts, and came to Canada at age nineteen in 1969. He died in Toronto in 2009.

Jane Rule was born in Plainfield, New Jersey and moved to Canada in 1956. She died at her home on Galiano Island in 2007 at the age of seventy-six. She was inducted into the Order of British Columbia in 1998, and into the Order of Canada in 2007. She wrote fourteen books, including Desert of the Heart (1964), which was turned into the movie Desert Hearts.