The Rule of engagement

Is it unethical to recommend that you all buy a book without having read it myself?

I say no, because reading is good on principle. Even reading the bad stuff.

Now that I'm off the hook, I confess that I'm now 50 pages from the end of Jane Rule's 1977 tome, "The Young in One Another's Arms." It's very much a period piece, a story that examines how different generations of gay men and lesbians cope with society's rules and their own desires. It's sometimes a bit self-consciously smart, but that also makes for some interesting language and characterization.

While it's set a few generations ago, many of the games we play with each other remain the same. We live joyously confused lives as young adults, later become haunted by tragedy, and as we get older, hope to choose acceptance instead of regret.

I only wish the author's essays aged as well. Rule blew me away when I was in my teens, arriving periodically in a plain brown envelope as one of The Body Politic magazine's featured columnists. She wasn't trying as damned painfully hard as some of the younger, hipper chicks to be oh-so-cool-and-out-there-just-like-the-gay-guys. I remember her as saying quite radical things with carefully argued logical steps. Perfect for a confused young'un.

Those issues of The Body Politic, by the way, were found in my closet, hidden in the bottom of a large box, by my snooping mother. I must have been 17. My father dutifully calmed his hysterical wife, put the box in the trunk of the car, and drove it to school, where he tracked me down and said, quietly and without fanfare, to store the stuff elsewhere.

The intellectual and emotional contents of that magazine were essential to my early life, such that when the staff announced its collapse, I wrote in dreadful anger to demand a refund of my outstanding $3.28 in subscription fees.

Many of Rule's collected essays are reprinted from The Body Politic. To a now much older reader, those works, while still incorporating fascinating ideas, also drip with an arrogance that make Rule a much less convivial companion. I think I'll stick to the fiction from here on in.