American-born author Jane Rule died November 27 at age 76 in her adopted home of British Columbia, Canada due to complications from liver cancer. Rule famously took the literary world by storm when she published Desert of the Heart and became an icon of the gay rights movement in the ’70s as one of the few out lesbians in Canada.
On the 40th anniversary of her novel in 2005, Rule spoke with Curve in an intimate interview about her life’s work, both in the literary and political worlds.
We’ll miss you, Jane.

“The most terrifying thing about finishing Desert of the Heart was that I thought, Oh, my God, I think this may be good enough to publish! Now what will I do?” Jane Rule recalls of completing her 1961 groundbreaking lesbian novel, which was later turned into the award-winning 1985 film Desert Hearts. Rule has invited me to lunch at her home on Galiano, one of the Gulf Islands in British Columbia. It is an apt setting for someone who feels passionately about Canada’s natural spaces.
Born in New Jersey in 1931, Rule moved to Vancouver in the mid-1950s, later becoming a Canadian citizen. When Desert was eventually released by an English publishing house in 1964, it was the first literary novel with a lesbian theme in which the protagonists were not somehow punished for their sexuality, thought to be inverts or portrayed as deviants, or whose author, because of the subject matter, felt obliged to publish under a pseudonym. North American reviewers were prudish in their criticism: “Desert of the Heart is extremely frank in its treatment of lesbianism,” wrote one. “Perhaps a little too frank.” Another critic put it more plainly: “But all the time you keep turning to the photograph of the author on the jacket and wondering how such a nice looking woman could ever have chosen so distasteful a subject.”
Rule’s deep, throaty laugh, a recurrent feature in our interview, emanates as she remembers how her novel was received. Despite the moral concerns of critics, Desert has never been out of print, and its author went on to write numerous other novels, short stories and essay collections. Telling the truth about the fears and complexities of the human heart, as Rule sees it, has been at the root of her writing.
“I think of fiction as a way of working out what I see in the world—posing questions about it,” she says. There is no political agenda in her books, she adds, saying she reserves debate for her essays. Some have criticized her nonpartisan stance. But coming out before feminism, before Stonewall, meant that taking refuge within the lesbian feminist ghetto was not an option she had in the beginning, and was one she later did not choose.
“I am a politically involved lesbian, and I am a writer,” Rule once wrote. “I do not see the two as mutually exclusive; neither do I see them as inextricably bound together.”
Rule smokes the occasional cigarette as we speak. She talks with the poise of a good storyteller. Plagued by chronic arthritis, she was told by doctors at the age of 45 that she would be wheelchair-bound within five years. Still not completely wheelchair-dependent, she swims a mile a day to help stretch her diminishing spine. She no longer reaches her previous 6-foot height, but when she sits down and arranges her limbs, their commanding length remains very much in evidence.
Donna Deitch’s film Desert Hearts, based on Rule’s book, took eight years to make and some soul-destroying fund raising, says Rule. At times, the author says, she wished Deitch had never read her book, seeing all she went through: “Suddenly all these rich lesbians who were dyed-in-the-wool conservatives decided they ought to be putting their money where their mouths were, and so Donna was getting money out of people like that, but not nice people, you know, not politically sane.”
Like the book, the movie was a first—the first lesbian-themed feature film written and directed by a woman, giving it similar historic significance in cinematic terms as the book had in literary terms.
Today Rule is far from Hollywood. She’s deeply involved in the community on Galliano Island, where she has lived for 30 years and now runs a small mortgage and loan business. There is no bank on this island of 1,000 inhabitants, and many exist within a cash-only economy.
She is, she says, “often bailing out kids who’re in trouble and finding mortgages for people whom the banks wouldn’t touch. I think a good many of them are growing pot. I said to the cop, ‘Don’t you bust anybody until you check to see whether I have their mortgage or not!’”
Another laugh follows.
“I’m probably laundering money; I don’t know. I turn a blind eye.” Either way, Rule says, the job allows her to indulge her writer’s curiosity; “You learn a lot about people when they need money.”
Rule is also involved in mentoring up-and-coming writers and remains an active figure in the Canadian literary establishment. She has been friends with Margaret Atwood for decades; Rule helped Atwood edit her first collection of verse. In Fiction, Atwood speaks of Rule with great warmth, describing how Rule’s principles were shaped by the McCarthy years, when gays were part of the general witch hunt.
It was Desert that catapulted Rule into the public eye, with two immediate consequences: hate mail, and a nascent gay community seeking her support. Although she saw herself as a writer rather than an activist and was initially reluctant to take on a public role as a lesbian, it did not take Rule long to recognize the importance of her visibility and voice to a community largely characterized by men in drag. Forty years later, her courage remains understated: “For a long time, I was the only visible lesbian in Canada, which is no fun.”
Although she balks at the idea of being seen as a leader, Rule’s role in the gay community over the past 40 years has not gone unrecognized. In her book-lined study, she has numerous awards commending her contributions to both the literary and gay communities. Someone who had a place in both those worlds was Helen Sonthoff, Rule’s life partner, to whom many of her books are dedicated. Their relationship began in 1955 and ended (only physically) when Sonthoff died in 2000. She talks about their common interests (they were both university lecturers, although Rule gave up teaching when she could support herself through her writing), about theater binges in London during their holidays, about traveling together and about the numerous children and young people constantly present in their lives.
When I ask her about the key to her long relationship, Rule is pragmatic on the topic.
“Well, I think amazing good luck is the first part of it,” she says. “But it seems to me that a lot of people aren’t taught that they have to do really hard work in a relationship to make it good. So many people, I think, think of a loving relationship as one where you can really just slack off and be your ugly self and you have to be loved anyway. And my sense is that you have to be the best of who you are if a relationship is going to work, and you also have to be flexible and not be possessive and figure out that somebody has to have their own space, whatever it is, and not be dependent.”
Not surprisingly, Rule has strong feelings on gay marriage and, as ever, is not afraid to swim against the tide of popular opinion.
“I’ve been snarling about gay marriage for the last couple of years, saying this is the stupidest thing you could possibly be campaigning for. Let us into the cage? We should be opening it up and letting our friends out. None of my heterosexual friends are married; they’re much more sensible than that. I’m very much in the minority—an old dinosaur. I was very active in gay politics in the ’70s and it was radical then—there was a real sense of saying, ‘We’ve got new things to say about how to live.’ And now it’s, ‘We’re just like you,’ even more conservative and safe.”

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