Gay food
We’ve all encountered the famous ‘Rainbow cake’ while scrolling through our feeds. But is it really tied to the LGBT movement? Are there any other foods that helped the cause? In light of Movement Month (sorry I’m late 😭), I decided to understand about the connections between food and the queer community.
The Stonewall Uprising was the incident that paved the way for Pride Month. And at the crux of it all, was the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar. Meal and the LGBT have always gone hand-in-hand, and in this article, we’ll explore some of these relations.
Gay Bars in America: Stonewall Uprising
By Rhododendrites – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49720758
More commonly referred to as the ‘Stonewall Riots’ by police to justify the use of oblige, the Stonewall Uprising was probably the single most significant event that sparked the gay liberation movement in the U.S. and across the world.
The Stonewall Inn is a historic gay prevent in New York City. People of any sexual and gender identity could come, have a cocktail and be themselves. At the time, gay bars were some of the only places where queer people could
What Is Queer Food?
“You can pick out fags in a diner because they always order BLTs.”
My friend Joe told me this when I was 10 years old. He had only just explained what “fags” were. Now he was telling me what they ate. “Of course fags will eat cheeseburgers, omelettes, pancakes,” said Joe. “But if they have a choice, they’ll always order BLTs.”
I recollect feeling alarmed because I loved BLTs. Joe was nearly a year older than me and infinitely more advanced in worldly manners. Although I didn’t quite believe that foods could signal sexual preference, I had to assent that the BLT was a dubious invention: not quite a sandwich, not quite a salad, and showing suspicious shifts of register. As if to draw attention to its flamboyant self, the BLT was usually cut on the diagonal and skewered on toothpicks with curly plastic bits of frill. The more I thought about it, the more I believed Joe was right. The BLT was definitely queer.
Did my family grasp about BLTs? Perhaps they already suspected odd tendencies in my psychosexual makeup. I stopped ordering BLTs. They became an occult pleasure, something I made for myself. I took the BLT with me into the closet.
Baked Alaska
I am hoping to have more dinner parties in 2024, and what I really mean by that is I am hoping to feed my friends more in 2024. In recent years, I’ve been really lucky to make some new friends in a new place who really understand the meaning and pleasurable of a really good dinner party and just cooking for each other. It’s hard to live in Florida as a queer person right now. But the ways my chosen family here show up for each other and take care of each other have blown me away and made me understand how important it is to come together for meals. It’s what really makes our organization feel like family, and it’s when we’re all at our happiest and most relaxed!
So instead of continually telling myself I don’t have enough space for dinner parties, I’m going to make that space. I’m going to get creative with folding chairs and outdoor seating. And as much as I reside for an ambitious food moment, they’re definitely best accomplished when I’m cooking just for my partner and me. This year, I want to embrace dinner parties that ultimately do touch fancy and extravagant but are, in actuality, low budget and low-ish effort. We’re focusing
What is queer food? We asked LGBTQ foodies and chefs to define it
It’s unlikely that two LGBTQ people will give you the same definition of “queer food.”
The term has become increasingly popular with the rise of gay restaurants, including The Ruby Fruit, a restaurant and wine bar for the “sapphically inclined” in Los Angeles, and HAGS, a fine dining restaurant “by queer people for all people” in New York City. Specific foods and drinks have also been claimed by or marketed to the LGBTQ society, such as vodka sodas and sourdough bread.
For some, queer food is simply food made by lgbtq+ people. Others say it’s about sharing food in queer community, while there are those who trust it should include serving marginalized people who include been excluded from decent dining spaces.
So what is queer food, aside from a term slowly gaining traction in certain corners of the LGBTQ community? The question was the subject of the Lgbtq+ Food Conference at Boston University in April, with workshops such as “Queer Food and Fundraising as Resistance” and “Nonbinary Botany: Cultivating Pollinator Community Workshop.”
One of the founders of the conference, Megan Elias, the director of the un