From A Queer Love Story: The Letters of Jane Rule and Rick Bébout, edited by Marilyn R. Schuster. Published by UBC Press in 2017. Jane Rule was a writer, teacher and activist. Schuster is the author of Passionate Communities: Reading Lesbian Resistance in Jane Rule’s Fiction. The “Gerald” referred to in these letters is Gerald Hannon, author of “Men Loving Boys Loving Men.”

March 31, 1992

Dear Rick:

The editor of the Mills Quarterly phoned to say they were doing a series of articles on minorities at Mills and wondered if I’d do one on lesbians. I’d just been reading a good article by Adrienne Rich in the Radcliffe Quarterly and wondering why the Mills Quarterly couldn’t manage to be half as interesting. So, contrary to my vow of retirement, I said yes I would. As I remembered what it was like to be a lesbian at Mills in the ’40s, I realized that the offense was being sexual at all, never mind what orientation. I remembered a ridicu­lous lecture given us by an embarrassed woman doctor who wanted us to save our virginity as a great gift to our husbands and the paper we were asked to write afterwards entitled “A Livable Sex Philosophy.” And the jam I got into for being flippant in mine.

You have never talked specifically about how you intend to be looked after when you need it. What options do you have? Are they ones you feel all right about?

Helen is finally scheduled for the removal of one of her cataracts, and she’s having enough trouble now to look forward to the operation.

Louise Hager and her friend Daphne were here last night for dinner. Louise is the one who pushed me around in a wheelchair at the literary festi­val connected with the gay games. She and Daphne are taking a lesbian cruise to Alaska in June, over 900 passengers on a large, luxury ship. I asked if they had to dress for dinner. They confessed they were renting tuxedos. What a funny picture I had of 900 women all dressed like penguins every night for dinner. Sea travel was forever spoiled for me when I went back and forth to Europe in the early fifties on everything from a converted troop ship to the Queens [i.e., Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth] in steerage. The confine­ment in close quarters with hundreds of strangers of whatever sexual orien­tation is my idea of hell.

Do you realize I’ve managed to live 61 years? Helen is giving me a private dinner for ten at the Pink Geranium in May to avoid making it a birthday party.

Helen sends her love with mine. Jane

February 28, 1994

Dear Rick:

David is dead, and I feel peaceful about him, that he could die as quietly and privately as that. It’s Terrell I feel distressed about, and, though you say you’re good at the hospital stuff, I feel distressed for you, too, watching him suffer so many indignities of technology.

I don’t think much about the public these letters may eventually have. Years and years ago I figured out that the only real privacy I had was in my head. That was when Helen found our first landlady in Vancouver going through our wastebaskets and reading anything she could find. Helen was outraged. I found myself feeling sorry for the woman that her life was so narrow she was looking for it in our wastebaskets.

The trip south, on the surface of it, was very successful. Mother is more rested and calm than she’s been in years, busy seeing old friends and making new ones. Helen walked out each day, and I sat with Mother, having good talks.

The family dinner party of Saturday night was more successful than any reunion for years. It’s quite obvious that Dad’s sad silence in the last few years was more daunting than I’d realized. It made Mother talk nervously against it, driving everyone else into a passive torpor. Without his distress, she is con­tent to sit at the head of the table resting her eyes on her happily conversing kin. In a circumstance where, in the recent past, people have kept sneaking looks at their watches and leaving as soon as was decently possible, nobody wanted to break the party up, and everyone said we must do it again soon. We talked a lot about Dad, easily, affectionately, our private sorrows kept private.

I am glad to have worked almost always at something that had meaning in itself, aside from the material rewards (or lack of them!), and I suppose a number of younger people want to talk to me because they see my life as an example of a life lived meaningfully. It would be folly to try to persuade them that a dozen books on the shelf are not meaningful. Of course they are, but it was the making of them, regardless of their value in the world, which mat­tered. Living a life sentence by sentence, learning that every one of them matters, is a fine rehearsal for retirement because you know so deeply that the quality of life is a matter of paying attention.

I’m glad you’ve been nominated for an award, glad to have you know that your community pays more attention than you realize. I’d be glad if you’d be willing to take part in the film. The growth of our friendship and corres­pondence is characteristic of how we both lead our lives, loved work making a community of friends, however far-flung.

Love, Jane

December 10, 1995

Dear Rick:

I’m very glad I wrote “Teaching Sexuality” when I did and that it can be recycled on the internet now. Though I don’t always agree with Gerald, I think of him as one of the few who can keep us honest, insisting that we look at what really is, to avoid nothing, to think through to some sort of sense. The dishonesty, hypocrisy, and vindictiveness aimed at him now simply enrage me, and he’s so damned vulnerable as a part-time instructor and a freelance writer.

You are absolutely right in saying that we have to take the definitions away from those simply out to rant and smear. What a bad name they give morality.

The only pleasure in it all is for you to be reunited with that fine bunch of people, older now, more experienced, working so well and quickly together. I wish my sideline weren’t so far away so that all of you could hear me cheering. And what an incredible amount of work you’ve got through in so short a time. You must be exhausted.

The book for Little Sister’s is being launched in Vancouver today. That dear bunch didn’t even invite me, knowing that I might feel pressured to get into town for it. Instead they sent me a copy of the book and a bottle of single malt scotch. The royalties go to the Little Sister’s Fund.

… Monday

I’ve now had a chance to reread “The Body Politic and Visions of Community.” I do think it’s a wonderful essay which should have a wide readership. A history of the paper becomes a history of ideas. We see where we’ve been and where we might be going. We see the recurring problems which may always be with us for each generation to grapple with in its own context. We see the great dangers of both exclusion and silence. And through it all our great strength has been language through which we can express our growing understanding of ourselves and each other. That’s why Gerald has been so important for us, his ancient mariner insistence that we stop and listen to where he’s coming from no matter how delayed we may be upon our own business. That’s why it is so important we find the ways to defend him now, not allow the media to distort his position to convince the public that even a discussion of sexuality in children is child abuse. The fear and shame and moral outrage focused on him are the same weapons used on children in the name of protecting them from the evils of sexuality. The choice should not be between selling children into sexual slavery and keeping them in terrified ignorance of their bodies. We have to listen to ourselves long enough to know how to teach them to become sexual adults, knowledgeable and responsible, and the only way we can accomplish that is to keep challenging those who would silence us.

It’s interesting how often inclusion becomes the solution in your history, not always because a conscious decision is made. Sometimes it is an event like the protest against the bath raids which simply demonstrates that we are in it together. I feel a wonderful energy in your voice and a clarity of purpose.

Talking with a friend the other day on the ferry, I said I didn’t really miss writing, only sometimes didn’t know what to do with the habit of specula­tion about human motivation and emotion. Sometimes I think, too, I wrote through some of my own feelings which now I carry around with me as heavy, useless baggage, perhaps not having developed other more ordinary skills at living rather than writing through them. Perhaps sometimes I simply escaped into writing, letting the intensity of that concentration shut out the troubles of the day. I’m certainly less good tempered than I used to be, but I suspect that is part of aging, patience wearing as inevitably thin as the skin does.

I’m sometimes nearly overcome with pity for Helen’s poor frail flesh, the dozen times a day she nearly falls, the moments of confusion and failed memory which make staying with a conversation more and more difficult, her deafness adding to the difficulty. I’m not angry at Helen but angry at age about which I can do nothing. I’ve been angry since my father’s death in ways that embarrass and shame me because I find it so hard to control and so irrational and unacceptable. I’m used to healthier angers I can put to use. How have I come to the age of applying for a pension without such basic skills as accepting with some grace what is inevitable? I’m relatively patient and stoical about my own physical failings. Why hasn’t that taught me the same attitude for Helen? And that’s not something you can muse with me about because Helen looks forward to your letters as much as I do. I sometimes suspect that what I can’t endure is fear and mask it in impatience.

Winter is a harder time for distracting pleasures. No bodies at the pool to give my eye casual pleasure as I look out my study window, only the pool under its weight of winter leaves, and the last killing frost took the late blooms from the garden. There is an abundance and variety of berries, dark purple, bright red, white, to feed the winter birds and soon decorate our houses for the holidays. But the best thing about this time of year is that we are less than two weeks away from the shortest day, and even on Christmas day the hours of light will be lengthening toward spring.

Love, Jane