Although she passed away six decades ago, famed lesbian writer Gertrude Stein is enjoying a resurgence in Chicago this year that is on par with some of our current celebrities.
She is the subject of Loving Repeating, a musical based on Stein’s works that the About Face Theater will present at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Feb. 14 through March 12. However, on Jan. 31 she was also the main focus of the first 2006 Out at CHS (Chicago Historical Society) event, co-sponsored by Center on Halsted, ‘Gertrude Stein’s Lesbian Paris,’ held at the MCA.
Mary Lou Roberts, an author and French historian at the University of Wisconsin, focused on the cultural and geographical worlds that Stein (and her lover, Alice B. Toklas) lived in before World War II. She embarked on a presentation that covered everything from the lesbian sartorial and tonsorial styles of postwar Paris to the actual meaning of the word ‘gay’ as Stein used in her work, ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene.’
Roberts stressed several points during her talk. One of the most salient was that ‘these women were passionately engaged in the effort to imagine, artistically, the love shared by two women. This project was critical and constructive because it entailed creating a set of ambiguous cultural codes that confused or challenged gender roles nationalized as heterosexual.’
She broke the ice, however, with a hilarious tale about how she accidentally relieved herself on Stein’s grave. ‘Stein had figured out, in her own way, to lead [Roberts and her then-partner] to her grave,’ Roberts deadpanned.
Frank Galati, the director of Loving Repeating, then talked briefly about his musical. He praised composer Stephen Flaherty by saying that ‘he channeled Gertrude Stein’s soul through his own musical persona’ to make her material accessible.
The audience was also treated to a sneak preview of Loving Repeating.