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A Queer Love Story The Letters of Jane Rule and Rick Bébout Edited by Marilyn R. Schuster Sample Material © UBC Press 2017 © UBC Press 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication A queer love story : the letters of Jane Rule and Rick Bébout / edited by Marilyn R. Schuster. (Sexuality studies series) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7748-3543-5 (hardcover). – ISBN 978-0-7748-3545-9 (PDF). – ISBN 978-0-7748-3546-6 (EPUB). – ISBN 978-0-7748-3547-3 (Kindle) 1. Rule, Jane, 1931-2007 – Correspondence. 2. Bébout, Rick – Correspondence. 3. Authors, Canadian (English) – 20th century – Correspondence. 4. Journalists – Canada – Correspondence. 5. Lesbians – Canada – Correspondence. 6. Gay men – Canada – Correspondence. I. Schuster, Marilyn R., editor II. Series: Sexuality studies series PS8535.U77Z48 2017 C813’.54 C2016-907853-1 C2016-907854-X UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing program of the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund) and the British Columbia Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens Set in The Sans, Garamond, and Sabon by Artegraphica Design Co. Ltd. Copy editor: Sarah Wight Indexer: Margaret de Boer Cover designer: TG Design UBC Press The University of British Columbia 2029 West Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2 www.ubcpress.ca Sample Material © UBC Press 2017 Praise for A Queer Love Story “These letters swept me up like a novel. The evolving friendship between these unlikely correspondents – the older lesbian writer and the younger gay editor and activist – is indeed a love story. But their love is about something much larger than themselves. Jane and Rick’s running analysis of the sea changes occurring in queer life, from the radical ’70s, through the AIDS-devastated ’80s, to the assimilationist ’90s, is incisive, deeply considered and, above all, engaged. In the current era of atrophying attention spans and political atomization, these lush, eloquent letters between people who see themselves first and foremost as part of a movement are exhilarating.” – Alison Bechdel, cartoonist and author of Fun Home “A Queer Love Story is an extraordinary gift. The letters unfurl a heartwarming friendship, a fierce commitment to ideas, and the ordinary iterations of everyday life that enrich the public and political profiles of these two important writers. Marilyn Schuster deserves the highest praise for recognizing the profound value of these letters and turning them into a book that reads like a novel.” – Jim Downs, author of Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation “The passage of time has only burnished this living legacy of intimate exchanges between the greatest lesbian writer of her generation and the peerless gay editor who was her closest confidante. To read this gift to history is to eavesdrop on two profoundly perceptive eyewitnesses to events central to all our lives, in a conversation unsurpassed in its intelligence, richness, insights, and wisdom.” – Katherine Forrest, pioneering lesbian author and editor “The letters in A Queer Love Story aren’t just a look into private lives, which are satisfying and rich in themselves. Here are two powerhouses influencing Canadian history. They helped make our queer history, one word, one gesture, one fight at a time. I felt waves and waves of gratitude, both for the work these two heroes performed and for the chance to see it documented, to be welcomed into that past. A Queer Love Story reminds you how deeply personal are our political struggles.” – Michael V. Smith, author of My Body Is Yours Sample Material © UBC Press 2017 “It is a queer love story indeed, and it is a story that must be told ... This book reminds readers that other, more radical alternatives are available, that conversations about these alternatives were very much part of both feminist and gay liberationist discussions in the 1980s and ’90s, and that Rule and Bébout lived the promise of queer community considerably avant la lettre.” – Catriona Sandilands, co-editor of Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire “These very readable letters written in a braver and less conventional time offer a refreshing view that prizes friendship over coupledom and suggests how we might all – gay, straight, or just plain queer – organize our lives and loves outside of the ready-to-wear straightjacket of family and marriage.” – Ken Popert, former president and executive director of Pink Triangle Press and long-time member of the Body Politic Collective “A Queer Love Story offers fresh insight into two important figures in Canadian LGBT history – their lives, their views, their activism, and their deeply engaged friendship.” – Ivan Coyote, writer and storyteller “These letters document a love affair with ideas and moral meaning, as two writers separated by age, gender, and geography give each other space to think about the pressing queer social and political issues of the ’80s and ’90s. Their respectful exchanges offer an insightful running commentary throughout a tumultuous fifteen-year period of Canadian LGBT history.” – Ed Jackson, long-time member of the Body Politic Editorial Collective “The intelligence of both writers, the means by which they directly confront the issues affecting the queer community and identity politics, and their desire to explore love, power, the erotic, and the nature of sexuality – these are some of the most engaging facets of these letters.” – Linda Morra, editor of Jane Rule’s memoir, Taking My Life Sample Material © UBC Press 2017 Contents Foreword ix Margaret Atwood Introduction xiii 1981 “Any question of such censorship” 3 1982 “An odd flu” 20 1983 “It’s Raining Men” 67 1984 “Moved by a stranger” 116 1985 “Why is ‘a star’ a word for the exceptional?” 147 1986 “What is it we want when we want sex?” 177 Sample Material © UBC Press 2017 Contents | viii 1987 “Life and its sheer wonder” 204 1988 “Loving is a way of being” 236 1989 “Xenophilia” 279 1990 “The dying of the light” 315 1991 “There is no fault” 363 1992 “A lesbian in the ’40s” 403 1993 “It’s all right (even useful) to write drunk, as long as one edits sober” 435 1994 “I accept this degree” 487 1995 “A public space for our views and values” 530 The Last Chapter “I will do my best to live up to you” 576 Dramatis Personae 581 Acknowledgments 595 Index 597 Sample Material © UBC Press 2017 Introduction I expect our letters to be some day public property, and, though I write with little self-consciousness about being overheard at some future date, talking intermittently to you and to myself, it seems to me what has concerned us is richly human and significantly focused on the concerns of our time and our tribe. – Jane Rule to Rick Bébout, August 2, 1989 In January 1995 I sat nervously in a darkened theatre in Toronto waiting for the curtain to rise for the premiere of Fiction and Other Truths: A Film about Jane Rule,1 which includes an interview I had done for the documentary. Rick Bébout, whom I had just met, was seated to my right. Early in the film Rick sits at a typewriter in the (reconstructed) offices of The Body Politic, typing a letter to Jane and reading it aloud as he types. She answers, in turn, typing on an electric typewriter. This dramatization was my first glimpse of the correspondence. After the screening I asked Rick about the letters, and he invited me to visit him the following summer to see them – all of them to date, Jane’s originals and copies of his – impeccably arranged in chronological order in a filing cabinet at his home. That June I sat mesmerized at his desk for many hours, captivated by the stories I discovered in the letters and especially by the story of their relationship, a queer love story of emotional intimacy between a man and a woman joined not by family or by conventional love but by shared intellectual and political passions. The letters also reflect their sometimes tough love for the queer commun- ities they belonged to. The correspondence is an incomparable chronicle of an era by two gifted writers; they narrate personal and social change in the making with all the immediacy of the moment, the future still unknowable. Rick could not have known that a recurring flu-like illness was the begin- ning of HIV/AIDS. Jane could not have known that her father would die during one of her parents’ visits to Galiano. Rick uses the letters as a journal Sample Material © UBC Press 2017 xiii Introduction | xiv during difficult moments of loss and confusion. The letters become a writer’s diary for Jane as she shares ideas about her work in progress. As the letters progress, Jane and Rick reflect on events and relationships described in their letters from years before. The epigraph above shows that they realized eight years into the correspondence that the letters might eventually be of interest to readers beyond themselves. When Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman de- cided to frame Fiction and Other Truths with their letters, Jane and Rick started to think more deeply – and cautiously – about future public uses of their private exchange. In June 1995 I was in the throes of researching a book on Jane Rule’s fiction,2 but I was so moved by the letters Rick had shown me that I rather boldly asked both of them if I could edit their letters for publication as my next major project.

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