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

    Marilyn Schuster (Edited by)

    9780774835442

    Paperback / softback, published 1 April 2019

    648 pages
    22.9 x 15.2 x 5 cm, 0.94 kg

    These smart, deeply felt missives constitute a more than 600-page archival record and reference tool. Enhanced by an excellent index, A Queer Love Story will be invaluable to those interested in the history of the queer movement in Canada as viewed by two of its most thoughtful, lifelong participants.

    - Steven Maynard, historian of sexuality at Queen's University Kingston (BC Studies)

    It's one of history's all-time great queer love stories.

    - Christine Sismondo (Toronto Star)

    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.

    - Steven W. Beattie (Quill and Quire - Editor's Choice, Starred 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.

    - Rachel Wexelbaum (Lambda Literary Review) A Queer Love Story is a wonderful book full of daily life's details, notes on the writing process, and commentary on gay and lesbian issues. It will introduce younger readers to two exemplary members of the gay community ... I felt privileged to be in the presence of these two gifted, courageous writers, both of whom left the U.S. for Canada when they were young. Imagine a book of 600 pages that seems to end too soon. Will we ever again, in this age of texting, have such a lively, spirited, and revealing correspondence? - Margaret Cruikshank (The Gay & Lesbian Review)

    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.

    - Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant (Shelf Awareness) In an era when tweets, texts, and e-mails have surpassed the art and practice of letter-writing, this volume will delight historians of the LGBTQ movement and everyday readers. - Evelyn C. White (Herizons)

    It is a pleasure and a privilege to "watch" their friendship grow. I highly recommend A Queer Love Story.

    - Julie Thompson (The Lesbrary)

    ... 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.

    - Daniel Gawthrop (The Georgia Straight)

    Reading a collection of letters can be something of a guilty pleasure. Marilyn Schuster's edition of the letters of Jane Rule and Rick Bébout, by contrast, is a moving experience, deftly mingling genres of memoir, diary, and essay. Though reduced by three-quarters from the carefully chronologized 2700-page collection both correspondents agreed to present to the editor, covering fifteen eventful years of their correspondence (1981-1995), A Queer Love Story offers a deeply personal view of academic and publishing life from two of Canada's leading gay authors.

    - Patricia Demers (The Ormsby Review)

    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.

    Foreword / Margaret Atwood

    Introduction

    1981 "Any question of such censorship"

    1982 "An odd flu"

    1983 "It's raining men"

    1984 "Moved by a stranger"

    1985 "Why is a star a word for the exceptional?"

    1986 "What is it we want when we want sex?"

    1987 "Life and its sheer wonder"

    1988 "Loving is a way of being"

    1989 "Xenophilia"

    1990 "The dying of the light"

    1991 "There is no fault"

    1992 "A lesbian in the '40s"

    1993 "It's all right (even useful) to write drunk, as long as one edits sober"

    1994 "I accept this degree"

    1995 "A public space for our views and values"

    The Last Chapter "I will do my best to live up to you"

    Dramatis Personae

    Notes
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