An unconventional love story in letters
For this fascinating book, editor Marilyn R. Schuster waded through 2,700 pages of letters (most from 1981 to 1995) between the vanguard lesbian author and Galiano Island resident Jane Rule and Rick Bébout, an activist and editor with the Toronto-based LGBTQ publication Body Politic. As the letters and conversations evolve, the book becomes part historical document, part manifesto and a fascinating and unconventional, evolving love story.
Q: Was it hard to sit down with other people’s letters and intimate thoughts and decide what should go out into the world?
A: I had the great privilege of knowing both Jane and Rick so I had a sense of what I thought would capture their styles and personalities for readers who didn’t know them. I was very moved by the way they expressed their thoughts and feelings and sought to highlight letters that might evoke a similar response in other readers. I worked over time with students, some of whom weren’t even born in 1995, to help me understand what would interest a younger audience — and what they needed to know to understand references that were clear to contemporaries of Jane and Rick.
How do you describe the relationship between Rule and Bébout?
When they started writing each other in 1981 Jane was an established, much revered lesbian writer and activist whose 1962 novel Desert of the Heart helped change lesbian narratives years before Stonewall. Rick was on the editorial collective of The Body Politic an early incubator of “gay thought” in North America. The paper was also the target of a series of court battles with the Crown about censorship and obscenity. Rick was 19 years younger than Jane and a behind-thescenes person. Jane was an important public voice — she wrote seven novels, several collections of essays and short stories and ultimately wrote over 50 columns and reviews for The Body Politic.
In the beginning their relationship was strictly professional — he edited her regular column, “So’s Your Grandmother,” for The Body Politic — and she discussed the content of the paper with him. As they grew to trust each other he became less deferential and she valued him as someone who could teach her about urban, gay male life. They argued candidly about issues and eventually shared intimate details about their daily lives and personal histories.
The collection is a kind of living history book. Is there an issue or topic you feel the pair really illuminate within their correspondence?
The letters are filled with insights about issues still very much relevant today: censorship, pornography, violence, freedom of expression, sexuality and children, models for domestic life, kinds of love. Rick valued “promiscuous affections,” Jane and Helen Sonthoff lived together for over 40 years but didn’t consider longevity as the mark of a “successful” relationship.
Perhaps what I value most in their exchanges is the style as much as the topics. They relished genuine debate — exploring differing positions on important issues and allowing for growth and change as the conversations evolved. The problems they discussed were often reduced to partisan positions in public, but they could go deeper, to a more nuanced understanding of highly contentious issues.
Some letters go back and forth during the emergence of HIV/AIDS.
In an early letter, in 1982, Rick writes that he is suffering from “an odd flu” that is going around the collective. Even though the paper had started to publish articles about the “gay cancer” or GRID (gay related immune deficiency) no one realized that the “odd flu” was for many of them the first symptoms of HIV infection. Even though we know today what happened, the first hand witness of the disease with all of the confusion and contradictory information that marked the early years gives us an opportunity to experience the effects of HIV/AIDS on Rick and his friends. Rick worried that fear and panic would destroy the very community that made gay lives possible. The letters help us understand that in a visceral way and tell stories of people at their best and at their worst.
The pair were activists at a time when that could be quite risky. What sort of obstacles and threats did they face?
The Body Politic was accused by the government of obscenity because of articles that dealt with intergenerational sexual relations. The protracted court cases required constant fundraising and nearly bankrupted them. They were ultimately vindicated. Rick was involved in those disputes and in demonstrations against police harassment of gay men in bathhouses and other gay male gathering places. He writes in the letters about numerous demonstrations and about the growth of Gay Pride. Sometimes demos were confrontational, sometimes they were relatively benign. Rick talks about police intimidation, occasional street violence as well as efforts to shut down public discussion of controversial issues. Significantly, he considers Jane to have shown much more courage than he had to. Her early writing, especially, sparked negative reactions because of her positive portrayals of lesbian lives. She could have lost her job. She was alone, writing before there was a public movement; he and his friends had each other for support.
What would make them the happiest about today’s queer world?
Rick writes at one point about his amazement when movie listings for the Cineplex-Odeon included multiple films that incorporate gay lives without resorting to stereotype.
Jane, when the documentary about her was released, said “It occurred to me that the making of the film had created its own community, gathering people across borders, miles, years to make together a public space for our views and values.”
Public space for queer views and values would no doubt please them. But they would have been the first to caution against complacency, to urge us to think more deeply, more sensitively about those who continue to be marginalized. They were not happy that “gay marriage” became the driving issue of LGBT politics. They saw it as a normalizing of queer relationships to the exclusion of less acceptable forms of intimacy and domestic arrangements; they saw marriage as an invitation to the state to regulate gay lives.
What makes you the happiest when you think of Jane and Rick?
A: Rick talks about reaching into his bookcase and opening at random the published letters of Virginia Woolf and her lover Vita Sackville-West when he needed intellectual or emotional sustenance, or simply wanted to enjoy their insights and wit. He was never disappointed. I hope this volume will provide that nourishment for readers today.