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I love my dead gay forebears —
and the living ones too
W
e were listening to Terry Gross’
“Fresh Air” on NPR the other
night when she said, “Coming
up, we listen to an interview with Jane
Rule, the author of a classic work of lesbian
fiction. She recently died at age 76.”
I’ve never read Rule’s groundbreaking
1964 novel Desert of the Heart (Bella
Books, $12.95), but I did have two of her
other books on my shelves. One was This
Is Not For You (out of print), a 1970 book
that epitomizes an unreliable narrator — in
this case, Kate George, who spends the
entire book in love with a possibly straight
friend, never able to figure out how to bring
love and sex together. That was depressing.
So were some of the short stories I read in
Rule’s Inland Passage (out of print), but
near the end of the book, things started
looking up a bit. Whew.
In her interview with Gross (available
on the Dec. 11 podcast at freshair.npr.org),
Rule talks about how in the 1960s, she and
her partner, both professors at the
University of British Columbia, would be
invited to dinner parties with two gay men
“so that it would all look all right. … You
simply dealt in those terms in those days.”
And, as she notes in an online interview,
“We were still, at that time in 1964, illegal.
We could have been jailed for five years for
living together.” She came out anyway and
became a lesbian icon in Canada. Rule died
Nov. 27 of liver cancer. I plan on reading
Desert of the Heart and some other Rule
books over my winter break.
And then I saw a New York Times head-
line: “Allan Bérubé Is Dead at 61; Historian
of Gays in Military.” Bérubé’s Coming Out
Under Fire: The History of Gay Men
and Lesbians in World War II (Free Press,
$19.95) should be required reading, really,
for anyone who wonders about the history
of people in love — or the unexpected ways
WWII brought about a variety of civil
rights movements. The story of how
Bérubé came to write the book is fascinat-
ing: A friend brought him a box of letters
rescued from a Dumpster. They were letters
written among a group of gay soldiers dur-
ing WWII; the men met at an Army base
and kept in touch through the war years.
Bérubé died on Dec. 11 of complications
from stomach ulcers. Coming Out would be
an excellent holiday gift for the historians
on your list.
On the alive side, there’s a new crop of
young adult LGBT books — like grl2grl
by Julie Anne Peters (Little, Brown,
$11.99), a book of short stories about les-
bian and trans teens. The teens in the stories
have tough lives and sometimes make
choices that don’t help them, but the open-
ing story and the closing story contain a bit
more hope. Author Ellen Wittlinger once
told me that she thought it would be pretty
tough to get a book of young adult LGBT-
themed short stories published, so I’m glad
Peters was able to blaze the trail.
Speaking of Wittlinger, her new book is
Parrotfish (Simon & Schuster, $16.99), the
tale of Grady’s first few months living as a
boy after growing
up as Angela.
Parrotfish is a per-
fect book for the
winter holidays,
for it revolves
around Grady’s
Christmas-
obsessed family
and the ways fam-
ily traditions can
change. Not just
family traditions
but also religion can adapt and grow: Alex
Sanchez’s new The God Box (Simon &
Schuster, $16.99) deals head-on with the var-
ious passages in the Bible that some believe
condemn same-sex relationships. I found the
book a bit didactic at first, but by the end I
read through tears of recognition as the main
character learns to choose love over fear. As
we mourn and honor Rule and Bérubé this
season, may our holidays with our families
(birth and chosen) be filled with that hope,
love and joy.
ew
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DECEMBER 20, 2007
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