Who was Jane Rule?
Though best known for her novel Desert of
the Heart, lesbian author Jane Rule is also widely admired as a longtime
advocate for gay rights and civil liberties.
Rule was born on March 28, 1931, in
Plainfield, N.J. Her family moved frequently around the country,
eventually settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. A tall and awkward
tomboy, Rule became aware of her same-sex attractions at an early age. She
read Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness at age 15, and the next
year had her first sexual relationship, with an older woman.
Having decided as a teenager that she
wanted to be writer, Rule studied English at Mills College in Oakland.
After earning her bachelor’s degree, she followed a girlfriend to
London, but returned to the Bay Area a year later to attend Stanford
University, which she soon left due to its sexist and competitive
atmosphere. She then took a teaching job at Concord Academy, a private
girls’ school in Massachusetts, where she met Helen Sonthoff, a fellow
teacher 15 years her senior who was married to a German political
dissident.
Feeling stifled by the conservative climate
of the McCarthy era, Rule emigrated to Canada in 1956. Sonthoff soon
divorced her husband and joined Rule in Vancouver; a few years later both
women became Canadian citizens. Rule held a variety of jobs, including
working as a script reader, teaching English and creative writing, and
serving as assistant director of International House at the University of
British Columbia. In the mid-1970s, Rule and Sonthoff moved offshore to a
small community on Galiano Island, where they lived comfortably on the
earnings from Rule’s modest but wisely invested inheritance.
In 1964—after more than 20
rejections—Rule published her first novel, Desert of the Heart, about
the relationship between a free-spirited young woman and an older female
professor seeking a divorce in Nevada. Though well regarded within lesbian
circles, the work did not become widely known to the general public until
1985, when Donna Deitch adapted it into the film Desert Hearts.
Rule penned several other novels during her
career, including The Young in One Another’s Arms (1977) and Memory
Board (1987), along with the nonfiction Lesbian Images (1975), which
looked at how lesbian writers over the years had portrayed women-loving
women. She also wrote short stories and essays for mainstream and GLBT
publications, including the pioneering lesbian magazine The Ladder and the
Canadian gay liberation journal The Body Politic.
Rule became known as one of the first women
of her era willing to speak out as an open lesbian. “I became, for the
media, the only lesbian in Canada,” she once wrote. But she resisted
being ghettoized as a specifically lesbian author. “A literature written
with the needs of only one group of people in mind is for me a narrow
statement,” she told an interviewer.
Rule supported The Body Politic in 1977
when it was raided by police for publishing an article about man-boy love.
Her “So’s Your Grandmother” column, which ran in the magazine from
1979 through 1985, featured some of her most provocative writing. Though
Rule’s fiction was not overtly political, her essays tackled
controversial issues of the day such as pornography, sadomasochism,
monogamy, and intergenerational relationships. “I am convinced that
censoring serious discussion of unconventional sexual relationships does
nothing to protect those who might be exploited,” she wrote. “For
every child traumatized by overt and brutal sexual treatment, there are
many, many more suffering the damage of ignorance and repression which
makes masochistic women and sadistic men the norms of our society.”
Rule’s novel Contract with the World
(1980) was among the many books and magazines with queer or sexually
explicit content seized by Canada Customs en route to gay bookstores in
the late 1980s and early 1990s. Rule was one of the most prominent
witnesses to testify in support of Vancouver’s Little Sister’s Book
and Art Emporium during its long legal battle to stop the censorship, an
effort that finally ended with a partially favorable Supreme Court of
Canada ruling in 2000.
By the late 1980s, Rule could no longer
write much due to severe arthritis and the side effects of pain
medication, and she was devastated by Sonthoff’s death following a hip
fracture in 2000. Yet Rule stayed engaged in politics, including the
debate surrounding Canada’s decision to allow same-sex marriage. “We
should be helping our heterosexual brothers and sisters out of their
state-defined prisons,” she declared, “not volunteering to join them
there.”
Having refused aggressive treatment, Rule
died of complications from liver cancer on November 27, 2007. She is
remembered for her integrity and tenacious activism over more than half a
century, although her views were increasingly out of step with those of
the mainstream GLBT movement. “Policing ourselves to be less offensive
to the majority,” she wrote, “is to be part of our own oppression.”
Liz Highleyman is a freelance writer and
editor who has written widely on health, sexuality, and politics. She can
be reached in care of Letters from CAMP Rehoboth or at PastOut@qsyndicate.com.
For further information:
Fuller, Janine, and Stuart Blackley
(foreword by Jane Rule). 1995. Restricted Entry: Censorship on Trial
(Press Gang Publishers).
Rule, Jane. 1985. A Hot-Eyed Moderate
(Naiad Press).
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