From Drag Brunch to Cookbooks, Queer Food Is Everywhere

JB: While I'm talking about queer food and trying to define it in this cultural way, I see [in your book] you’re not particularly focused on that. You're interested in queer spaces and in this history about how queer people have moved in public spaces and taken control of them in a certain way to define them. What is it, besides your specific love and nostalgia for the Melrose Ddiner, that has drawn you to write this book?

EP: Diners were always the place where, at least in my Cleveland suburbs, all the weird kids went. I wasn't out, but I remember looking around the room, and thinking to myself, ‘Wow, that boy with the Smith's haircut and the trench coat is really cute.’ I didn’t know it then, but that was a proto-gay feeling. Looking back, that is a way that we queered the space.

In my book, I wasn't interested so much in queer food or queer chefs or queer owners. I was more interested in who's eating there and why, and what does that mean?

JB: ​​The diner was also the dominant gayborhood restaurant, and I'm not exactly sure why that is. Queer fine dining is very recent. I think the community felt that ‘all we deserve,’ or that, ‘all we could hope for,’ is something that's more like a diner or a bar. A place that's more egalitarian, more democratic, where everybody could walk in and it didn't have this class structure about it.

EP: There’s a throughline from the automats of the ’30s, where anyone was welcome as long as you had a nickel to put in the slot. You’d take out your food, and sit there, and you could be in a room and cruise under the radar of straight people. But, there was a sense that this was a place for everyone, and because of that, queer people made it their own. Even though maybe the straight people didn't realize what was happening, there was a lot of gayness happening in that dining room.

JB: I'm very interested in taking that idea to mainstream cookbooks that were published in the 20th century that could also queer the space. They could be subversive in ways that the authors intended, or perhaps that they didn't intend. Certainly there are books and recipes that were published at a time when any editor or publisher would not have allowed queer expression at all.

EP: When did it go from coded queerness to, ‘no, I'm gay, and I have a cookbook, and here are some recipes?’ When did that switch?

JB: It switched in the 1970s. Certainly in the later 1970s with the rise of the gayborhood, when there were shops in specific gay zones where you could buy something like The Gay of Cooking by The Kitchen Fairy, a 1982 cookbook, anonymously written, that had all kinds of cringe double entendres in the recipe names. They were self-consciously trying to be shocking and very gay in this transgressive way. When suddenly there was a market for things like that,

EP: Where do you think queer food is headed? What's still to come when you think about what queer food can look like?

JB: We've seen this incredible flowering of interest in queer food—in taking the identity of food and restaurants, and exploring, celebrating, and interrogating what is queer about those places, and experiences. I think much of what we talk about is pretty narrow, white, mostly, I think male experience of what queer experience was like, certainly in the 20th century. So, looking to the future, I would like to see this incredible diversification of this conversation of queer food. As much as I celebrate being a gay man, I really celebrate us: this idea of us moving beyond queerness, where these exclusionary walls of sexual identities can come down, and queerness can have a broader meaning.