Born February 3: Gertrude Stein, James Bridges, Marlon Riggs

By the time she was four, Gertrude Stein had lived in Pennsylvania, Vienna, Paris, and Oakland. By the time she was seventeen, both her parents were dead and her eldest brother took over the successful family business. She graduated from Radcliffe in 1897 and spent the summer studying embryology at Woods Hole, then attended Johns Hopkins Medical School, which she left after two years. In 1903 she moved to Paris where she would stay until she died forty-three years later. Unlike writers who withdraw to contemplate, Stein engaged with the world head-on across the arts. She wrote novels, plays, essays, autobiography, and libretti, sometimes in collaboration with close friends. Mocked for her modernist use of repetition ("A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"), Stein could be perfectly succinct, as when naming the Lost Generation, or saying, "Hemingway, remarks are not literature." A bold collector of new art, she and Alice Toklas, partners for almost forty years, hosted legendary weekly salons in which the best of Paris came to see the paintings and stayed for the conversation. Among their regular attendees were Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Derain, Rousseau, Hemingway, Wilder, Anderson, Appolinaire, Thomson, Bowles, Pound, and Bernard Fay, the gay Nazi informer who protected Toklas and Stein, a Jewish lesbian after all, throughout WWII. Although they were great travelers (it was they who tipped Bowles to Tangier), Stein and Toklas perversely stayed in France through the war. Although she wrote her coming out memoir, Q.E.D. before she was thirty, it was not published until 1950, four years after her death at 72. Despite thirty-nine years together, Stein left Toklas very little. Nieces and nephews grabbed the fortune in art. Stein and Toklas are buried side by side in Père Lachaise. Get the essential Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories by Wanda Corn and Tirza True Latimer. 

Two-time Oscar nominee James Bridges wrote and directed The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome, Urban Cowboy, Mike's Murder, and Perfect, among other films. It's not hard to guess a queer subtext in his September 30, 1955 starring Richard Thomas as Jimmy, a college kid who "goes berserk" the day his idol James Dean dies. To say nothing of John Travolta's aerobic thrusts in Perfect. Bridges got his start writing The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. His life partner was television's Jimmy Olsen in the Superman series, Jack Larson. Bridges died at 57 in 1993.

Speaking of Harvard (from which he graduated with honors in 1978, followed by his MA in journalism from Berkeley), and speaking of 80s queer dancing, here's a clip from Marlon Riggs' famous Tongues Untied. The best part is the poem by Essex Hemphill. Riggs' 1989 documentary about black gay culture was funded by an NEA grant and shown on PBS, making it a prime target for right wing attack groups. But its breakthrough honesty (and snap lessons) also made it perfect for Cannes and Berlin, as well as the many American events where it won awards: San Francisco's Frameline, Atlanta's film fest, and New York's documentary festival. His next work, Color Adjustment, examined television's "unflattering" portrayal of black characters from 1948 to 1988. After that he made Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, interviewing HIV+ black men. When he was doing preproduction on his Black Is...Black Ain't (viewable in three parts starting here), he died of aids. He was 37.