This project explores Gertrude Stein's friendships with prominent male figures of the American avant-garde---Emest Hemingway, Virgil Thomson, and Carl Van Vechten---to investigate three of modernism's most productive cross-gender collaborations. The dissertation considers Stein's personal and artistic development by focusing on how her lesbian and aesthetic styles influenced, and were influenced by, her male friends. In theorizing Stein's performance and embodiment of "masculinity" as a queer style, this study describes her modernist cross-gender friendships as sites that enabled gender and sexual experimentation alongside collaborative, avant-garde cultural productions. In an historical moment marked by new categories of identity (including the "homosexual"), friendship, masculinity, and collaboration operated as important navigational tools for these moderns who defied convention in their arts and sexualities.
Stein is a modernist celebrity remembered for her style, whether found in her repetitive, experimental writing, her famous Parisian salon, or her "discovery" of Cubism and Pablo Picasso. In contrast, little has been said about her relationship to men and masculinity, though, in her day, she was notorious for her charismatic masculinity and her preference for male friends. In theorizing how Stein and her men are gendered through friendship, this project links Stein's "male identification" to queer self-discovery rather than to a "natural" lesbian mannishness. A source of inspiration for post-modern queers, Stein encourages queer cross-identification through her innovative female masculinity.
To these ends, this study investigates the friendships that produced such collaborative cultural texts as Stein's The Making of Americans (typed and edited by Hemingway), the Stein-Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts , and Van Vechten's promotion of her 1934-1935 American lecture tour. These key avant-garde events are linked to masculinities cultivated in the individual friendships that produced these texts---an authorial butchness with Hemingway, a sissy sophistication with Thomson, and a supportive "gay family" with Van Vechten. The dissertation highlights the ways that Stein's literary and gender styles drew men toward her and shows, finally, how Stein's gender evolved through these friendships, how her masculinity was mustered in the service of her queer authorial ethics, and why Stein remains a muse and ally for gay men today.
