‘Sometimes men are kissing. Men are sometimes kissing and sometimes drinking. Men are sometimes kissing one another…’
One of the foremost writers of the twentieth century, Gertrude Stein was marked for her ground-breaking experimental prose and extraordinary friendship group alike, and her works stand as a monument in the Modernist era. In more recent years Stein has been held up as a queer icon, as she lived openly with her life partner Alice B. Toklas and wrote of queer relationships at a time when this was strictly taboo.
While some of Stein’s queer works made it into print in her lifetime, including The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, much of her more daring early queer stories only saw the light of day after her death, when Yale set to publishing her complete works. Now that ‘The love that dare not speak its name’ may be bolder, this collection aims to restore Stein’s short, queer works to the canon, and to burnish her status as an early queer icon.
