Toronto lost an intellectual and spiritual force with the death of Rick Bebout last week. [rssbreak]
Gay liberation revolutionary, AIDS activist, fabulous gossip, historian and lover of this city and its queer and not-so-queer histories, Rick never became a household name, but he shaped the way we live in myriad ways.
Rick fled the U.S. during the Vietnam War, landed in Toronto in 1969 at the age of 19 and embraced this city with a passion. By 1977 he was on the Body Politic collective, the news magazine that spearheaded gay and lesbian liberation struggles across Canada and around the world.
I met Rick and TBP collective members in the late 70s when the gang let us do layout for our brand new feminist quarterly, Fireweed, at their offices. They were all extraordinary, but Rick was the historian, the literary thinker and the wise activist.
He was an intellectual without an academic degree, a man whose heart and mind conceived of a gay and lesbian liberation that was not limited to the fight for equal rights. Liberation, he argued, carries within in it the possibility of transforming our cultures and ourselves, whereas fighting for equal rights merely claims the right to fit into what already exists.
Rick became the editor of a column Jane Rule wrote for TBP during the years the Ontario government was using its massive legal powers to shut the paper down and silence gay and lesbian political voices. Neither Jane nor Rick knew it then, but this was to be the beginning of an extraordinary correspondence about love, AIDS, desire, politics and philosophy that would continue until Jane’s death in 2007. (A book of this correspondence is forthcoming.)
In 2000, Rick launched an online memoir that chronicled his “life of promiscuous wonder.” He continued to write his recollections about the people, the bars, the politics, the histories and the desires that beat through the heart of this city. It’s all on his exceptional website that lives on at rbebout.com.
I had a wonderful visit with Rick six weeks ago, when I took him DVD copies of Fiction And Other Truths: A Film About Jane Rule. Rick, Gerald Hannon and I perched on his bed and watched it, talked about his interview, the police raids and criminal charges, and we laughed about our forage through the Lesbian and Gay Archives for posters that would illustrate the TBP office for the film.
I last saw him a few weeks later after the screening of John Greyson’s surrealist opera/AIDS doc Fig Trees at Hot Docs. He was delighted by the film, and we planned to get together to discuss it. As Rick’s health declined, a community of friends assisted him. He suffered a stroke on June 4 and died of HIV-related illnesses June 10.
Typical of his thinking was the way he adopted the concept from a Lewis Hyde short story that “status grows not from how much one owns, but how much one gives away” to realize it’s when “a part of the self is given away that community appears.”
Rick’s spirit shines on in the thousands of out, proud queers who celebrate their lives this week.
