A Queer Love Story chronicles the poignant, incisive exchanges and intimate friendship that developed between Jane Rule, lesbian novelist and essayist, and Rick Bébout, gay journalist and activist, as they reflected on and participated in the key issues and events that shaped LGBT communities in the ’80s and ’90s.
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.
Reviews
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
It’s one of history’s all-time great queer love stories.
- Christine Sismondo
It is a pleasure and a privilege to “watch” their friendship grow. I highly recommend A Queer Love Story.
- Julie Thompson
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
... 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
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
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
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
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
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