Description
A Queer Love Story presents the first fifteen years of letters between Jane Rule – novelist and the first widely recognized “public lesbian” in North America – and Rick Bébout, journalist and editor with the Toronto-based Body Politic, an important incubator of LGBT thought and activism. Rule lived in a remote rural community on Galiano Island in British Columbia but wrote a column for the magazine. Bébout resided in and was devoted to Toronto’s gay village. At turns poignant, scintillating, and incisive, their exchanges include ruminations on queer life and the writing life even as they document some of the most pressing LGBT issues of the ’80s and ’90s, including HIV/AIDs, censorship, and state policing of desire.
Contributor Notes
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.
Editorial Reviews
Both Rule and Bebout are fiercely intelligent, thoughtful, opinionated and perceptive writers ... This voluminous and essential collection offers delights on every page: beautifully crafted sentences and astute opinions on racism, health care, same-sex marriage, violence and publishing.
— Shelf Awareness
It’s one of history’s all-time great queer love stories.
— Toronto Star
It’s one of history’s all-time great queer love stories.
— Toronto Star
It is a pleasure and a privilege to “watch” their friendship grow. I highly recommend A Queer Love Story.
— Lesbrary.com
A Queer Love Story … encompasses a quintessential period for the queer community in Canada … What emerges is not merely an engaging portrait of two provocative thinkers, but a snapshot of a period in Canadian history that saw a seismic change in the lives and attitudes and ideas of the nation’s queer community.
— Quill and Quire - Editor’s Choice, Starred Review
... a fin-de-siècle dialogue of bicoastal and pan-Canadian sensibilities, A Queer Love Story is a tribute to exemplary citizenship and the ethics of personal responsibility in times of crisis.
— The Georgia Straight
A Queer Love Story … encompasses a quintessential period for the queer community in Canada … What emerges is not merely an engaging portrait of two provocative thinkers, but a snapshot of a period in Canadian history that saw a seismic change in the lives and attitudes and ideas of the nation’s queer community.
— Editor’s Choice, Starred Review, Quill and Quire
It is a pleasure and a privilege to “watch” their friendship grow. I highly recommend A Queer Love Story.
— Lesbrary.com
It is a joy reading this correspondence that allows us to truly get to know these two powerhouses of contemporary LGBT history, and to see how they grew as people due to the exchange of ideas and experiences that they shared with each other.
— Lambda Literary Review
It is a joy reading this correspondence that allows us to truly get to know these two powerhouses of contemporary LGBT history, and to see how they grew as people due to the exchange of ideas and experiences that they shared with each other.
— Lambda Literary Review
