Stein was a gay writer to the extent that James Joyce was a Caucasian writer. She is lauded in the gay community these days, and rightly so: she was out of the closet at a time when such a thing was unheard of, and did not seem to suffer any social ills for it (she was good friends with Picasso, Matisse, and Hemingway, and made herself a central figure in the Parisian expatriate community). But when we look to her fiction, it would perhaps take something away from it to call it "gay fiction". This would put it in the category of polemic, and take it from the tier of universal profundity down to pulpit exhortation. We are so awash with political correctness these days that novels that tells us, "Gays are people too" or "African Americans suffer injustices" seem somewhat like preachy public service announcements, and bumper stickers telling kids to stay away from drugs. This was not true in Stein's day; but still, to call her art prose "gay writing" completely misses the universal significance that is available for all people who read her, straight and gay.

The first work of Stein's I ever read was in a collection of short stories I had bought for a creative writing workshop. Stein's story wasn't assigned (in fact, less than 40 pages of the 1,700-plus page volume was assigned), but after the class was over, and I went back to my "taking a break from college" mode (which I am in again), I read the book cover-to-cover. The single story by Stein in this collection was the rather brief "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene". Once I had finished this, I thought on how we'd read Joyce's short story "Araby" in that creative writing workshop, how I'd not known what the story meant until the professor explained it to the class. I won't go into the explanation of "Araby" here (a lot of things having to do with contrasting "bleak real life" with "the romance of dreams and fairy tales"). But I knew after I'd read "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene" that there was no such verbal explanation that could be given me that would show what the story meant. If ineffable applies to anything, it applies to Stein. When we read the repetition, sense the shape and structure, find ourselves being taken along geometrically unfolding and infolding syntactic forms that develop and blossom, determined and sober, there is no two-sentence interpretation which we will give the professor. Perhaps this is why Stein is not as appreciated and taught in our universities as much as Joyce; while Joyce will write us a little puzzle we must figure out by means of the clues he gives us with each sentence, Stein does no such thing. There is no "interpretation", there is no "answer" to her work. The answer is the work; it could not be said any other way, and no words but hers will do for what she has to communicate. English professors have a very hard time lecturing on things that cannot be said any way other than the way she has said it. Her own ineffable profundity has led to less attention, given that no one can blurt out a few sentences and solve the riddle of one of her stories. The answer is the story, and its message cannot be told in words other than the ones on the page.

(A portrait of Stein by her good friend Pablo Picasso)

Put a polar bear in a zoo, and all its surroundings are false, designed, made for presentation to the world. The polar bear is not a social beast; it will not feel self-conscious, have any conception that it is being seen. It will react to its public circumstances as its instincts direct; there may be some inner disturbance at the people who gaze at it, but it will never feel embarrassed or have any conception of humiliation. But human beings are naturally social; even when we live as recluses away from society we have an image of ourselves abstracted from merely living and being who we are. We constantly look at ourselves from the outside—look to Sartre for the inspiration here—and present ourselves to ourselves always, only partially being who we are, and mostly looking in on this person we are as if he, as if she were being presented to us for show. Socialites such as Gertrude Stein, even more so than the recluse, are in a mode of presentation, have a self-conception that is so wrapped up in being-as-others-see-them, that they forget to be who they are, and spend all their time being the person the others must see. Perhaps Stein compensated by writing her "portraits" to reflect on who everyone really was. Not how they saw themselves, not as they were presented; but what was their fundamental nature, what was universal about them all and yet at the same time particular to each—an inexplicable particular that was so precisely what-it-was, that it could be nothing else, could be described no other way. Perhaps Stein saw others in these moments as finally being, and neither to Stein, nor the crowd, nor to themselves being seen. And so she saw who they were after all.