American-born Canadian writer Jane Rule was BOTD in 1931. Born in New Jersey to a military family, she grew up in Illinois, Missouri and California. A tomboy, six feet tall and dyslexic, she described herself as an outsider, realising she was a lesbian after reading Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness. She studied at Mills College in California and University College London, where she began writing fiction. She taught briefly at Stanford University, then at Concord Academy in Massachusetts, where she met her life partner Helen Sonthoff. Concerned by the rise of conservatism in McCarthyist America, she moved to Canada in 1956, teaching at the University of British Columbia. She published her first novel Desert of the Heart in 1964, a romance about two women who fall in love with a controversially happy ending. The book was critically savaged but developed cult status in Canada’s gay community, prompting thousands of lesbians to write Rule fan letters. She published 11 further books, including Lesbian Images, a memoir in which she compared herself to lesbian writers including Hall, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, and Vita Sackville-West. An advocate for gay rights and free speech, she served on the executive of the Writers’ Union of Canada, wrote for lesbian magazines The Body Politic and The Ladder, and campaigned against the censorship of LGBTQ books. Later in life, she surprised many in the gay community by opposing gay marriage, arguing “To be forced back into the heterosexual cage of coupledom is not a step forward but a step back into state-imposed definitions of relationship. With all that we have learned, we should be helping our heterosexual brothers and sisters out of their state-defined prisons, not volunteering to join them there.” One of Canada’s most respected writers, she was awarded the Order of Canada, dying in 2007, aged 76.