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."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. Rule lived in a remote rural community on Galiano Island, British Columbia, but wrote a column for the Body Politic. Bébout was a resident of and devoted to Toronto’s gay village. As writers, Rule and Bébout hoped to nurture a more precise language to articulate gay and lesbian lives. In her letters, Rule reflects on her life with companion Helen Sonthoff and expectations regarding marriage, monogamy, and long-term relationships. In his letters, Bébout details his more “promiscuous affections," ranging from a knowing glance at a stranger in the subway to obsessional on-again, off-again affairs. Together, they offer sharp-eyed and unsentimental observations on queer communities and politics and, if those politics clashed with their personal beliefs, they were not afraid to express more radical views, most notably opposition to same-sex marriage, a conviction they both shared. A Queer Love Story showcases not only two incisive minds in intimate dialogue but also, more largely, how members of the queer community worked together to build ties of love and friendship amidst intolerance and outright hostility. | A Queer Love Story by Marilyn Schuster, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters