Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was an American writer and thinker who spent most of her life in France, well known for her writing, her premier art collection of twentieth century painters like Matisse, Cezanne, and Picasso, Gauguin, Renoir, and Toulouse-Lautrec, and the many famous people, artists and writers both, like Hemingway and Wilder, who visited her Paris salon. Her life-long partner, Alice B. Toklas, came to be famous in her own right. Stein’s affirming essay, Miss Furr and Miss Skeene, is one of the first homosexual revelation stories to be published. It contains the word “gay”: over one hundred times, perhaps the first published use of the word “gay” in reference to same-sex relationships. SF Bay Times Article
Find her plaque on Castro St between 18th and 19th Streets