Jane Rule

There must be a lot of pressure to having the media treat you like “the only lesbian in Canada.” Jane Rule was, I think, part of the bridge between criminalized and hidden and being open and out. That’s partially simply due to living through that era as a public figure. The idea that lesbians even existed was something barely discussed at the start of her career, and by the time she died, she had a highly controversial opinion on gay marriage that we’ll get to. That people were interested in because gay marriage was one of the big issues of the day.

Rule was born in New Jersey and was a military brat. She moved repeatedly, making it hard to keep friends. The fact that she was six feet tall by the time she was twelve didn’t help, nor was the fact that she was a tomboy. At age fifteen, she read The Well of Loneliness. Again it’s worth noting that you’re getting a lot of these articles from a straight-by-rounding error woman, but even I know that The Well of Loneliness is one of those formative texts for an older generation, the kind of thing that made a lot of people realize there was a word for what they were feeling.

It would almost be a joke in some circles that she got an BA from Mills College. She then followed a lover to the UK. She taught at Stanford for a while but quit because she found the atmosphere repressive—and misogynist, it’s barely worth pointing out anymore. While teaching at Concord Academy, a prep school in Massachusetts, she met Helen Sonthoff, whose blue-text link is recursive to Rule’s own page. The pair fell in love, though Sonthoff was married at the time. Out of fear of McCarthyism, she fled to Canada, where she worked at the University of British Columbia.

It was there that she wrote Desert of the Heart. This at a time when the relationship it creates would be criminalized in much of the country. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a Happily Ever After for its characters, but it’s happier than might be expected given the situation. Not all of Rule’s books after that were about lesbian characters, or even gay men, but it was for that book that she would be known, and she got many letters from women telling her how they’d started coming to terms with themselves because of her books.

That controversial opinion mentioned earlier was that she didn’t think gay people should get married. Nor should straight people. Marriage, she thought, should be abolished entirely as a prison. It’s an opinion I’ve heard before, and I think it tells you a lot about the marriages the person with that opinion has seen. Not surprising for a woman from her era, even if she lived with Sonthoff for more than forty years. Maybe they weren’t monogamous; I don’t know. But they had a partnership that from what I do know might as well have been a marriage.