It's unlikely that two LGBTQ people will define “queer food” in the same way.
The term has become increasingly popular with the rise of queer restaurants, such as Ruby Fruits, a restaurant and wine bar for people with “gay tendencies” in Los Angeles, and HAGS, an upscale restaurant “by queer people, for all” in New York City. Certain foods and drinks, such as vodka sodas and sourdough bread, are also claimed by or marketed to the LGBTQ community.
For some, queer food is simply food made by queer people, for others it's about sharing food within the queer community, while for others it's about catering to marginalized groups who may be excluded from fine dining restaurants.
So what is queer food, apart from the term slowly gaining traction in some parts of the LGBTQ community? The question was the theme of a Queer Food conference at Boston University in April, which featured workshops such as “Queer Food and Fundraising as Resistance” and “Non-Binary Botany: Cultivating Pollinator Community Workshop.”
Megan Elias, one of the conference's founders and director of the university's gastronomy program, declined to offer a precise definition, saying the term has many different meanings: “Which one is nice?”
For Elias, the words bring back memories of a restaurant he visited in the 1990s called Hot 'n' Crusty in San Francisco's Castro district, one of the first gay neighborhoods in the United States.
“I thought, 'This is gay food,'” Elias recalled. “It was fun and it was delicious and it was messy, but that was because it was served in the Castro. If Hot 'n' Krusty's had been near a baseball park, it would have a different vibe, a different meaning.”
What queer food means to Elias is “contextual and something to be discussed,” she said.
NBC News asked a variety of LGBTQ scholars, chefs, and foodies across the country what queer food means to them, and while definitions of the term vary, they all agreed that queer food in any form must have one non-negotiable element: community.
Vanessa Parrish
Executive Director, Queer Food Foundation
Vanessa Parrish co-founded the Queer Food Foundation in 2020 as a mutual aid fund to support food service workers who were laid off at the start of the pandemic. The organization now also conducts research and hosts events and educational panels.
“We like to say that queer food is about us being in that space,” Parrish said. “If you're queer, your food is queer. That's pretty much it. It's not a rainbow cupcakes and bagels situation. That's fun, but that's not what queer food is.”
Parish added that a rainbow cake is no more inherently queer than a regular cake made by a queer person.
“If the person who puts it together, their craft, their energy, their community building is queer, then it's queer food,” she said.
John Birdsall
Award-winning food and culture writer
John Birdsall began writing about queer food at a time when “nobody I knew or read about was talking about it,” Birdsall says. In 2013, he contributed an article to Lucky Peach magazine called “America, Your Food Is So Gay.” The article was about three gay men — chefs and cookbook authors James Beard and Richard Olney, and restaurant critic Craig Claiborne — who Birdsall argued were the architects of modern American cuisine in the mid-to-late 20th century. The article later won a James Beard Award for writing about food and culture.
“For me, queer food isn't necessarily focused on food or recipes,” said Birdsall, who is based in Tucson, Ariz. “It's focused on the voices and individuals who have changed, for example, cookbooks, changed restaurant spaces, and changed the way queer people are seen in public.”
Birdsall cited James Baldwin as one of the architects of that change. The gay civil rights activist and one of the 20th century's most influential writers, he said, wrote that “shared hospitality is a queer virtue.” Birdsall added that Baldwin's explicitly queer philosophy of “total acceptance” around the table represents “a really important evolution in American cuisine.”
“James Baldwin had this idea that the specific food isn't important. What's important is how you sit at the table, who you invite to your table, and who you consider family around that table,” Birdsall said, adding that Baldwin would host dinner parties at his home in France for a rotating cast of cultural icons, including dancer and singer Josephine Baker and singer-songwriter Nina Simone.
Elizabeth Blake
Assistant Professor of English, Clark University, Massachusetts
Elizabeth Blake, a professor of gender and sexuality studies, food studies and modern world literature, said her book on depictions of queerness in modern literature was inspired in part by “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook,” written by the longtime partner of legendary lesbian novelist Gertrude Stein, who published the cookbook in 1954 to support herself after Stein's death.
“It's a very gossipy memoir, and she knew that most people who would buy it wouldn't buy it to make her recipes, but to hear her dirty stories. [Pablo] According to Blake, Stein had a friend, an artist named Picasso, who painted her portrait.
Mr Blake added that the recipes are also “totally radical”, including a famous recipe for hash brownies and a recipe for fish with three sauces that mimics Toklas's Cubist take on Picasso. Mr Blake described the text as “totally radical” and a bizarre take on a cookbook.
Alex Ketchum
Co-Founder, Queer Food Conference
Alex Ketchum, a professor at McGill University's Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Institute and co-founder of the Queer Food Conference, said she asks three questions when determining whether to classify something as queer food: Who is making it? Is it community-centered? Does it have roots in queer history?
Queer Food Conference held at Boston University in April. Queer Food Conference
Ketchum gives the example of Mary Rathbun's brownies, a medical marijuana rights activist who became known in the 1980s as “Brownie Mary” for a cannabis brownie recipe she created for AIDS patients who suffered from loss of appetite and severe weight loss.
Ketchum is also the author of “Ingredients for Revolution: A History of Feminist Restaurants, Cafés, and Coffee Houses in America,” the first to document the history of more than 230 feminist and lesbian feminist restaurants and coffee houses in the United States from 1972 to the present. She said queer community spaces that serve and serve food create unique spaces for both pleasure and political organizing.
“I think food gives us a way to confront challenges and difficulties, but it can also reaffirm our own community and create spaces that energize us and literally nourish us,” she said.
Liz Alpern
Founder of Queer Soup Night
Chef and cookbook author Liz Alpern founded Queer Soup Night in Brooklyn, New York after the 2016 election. At the first Queer Soup Night, Alpern cooked the soup. Now, Queer Soup Night invites local LGBTQ chefs to cook soup and help raise their profile.
The organization has 13 chapters across the U.S. and bases its activities on the importance of connecting with local queer communities and the collective power of the community, such as holding Queer Soup Nights to raise money for local nonprofits, Alpern said.
“To me, queer food is food that's eaten and enjoyed and made in the queer community,” she said. “To me, queerness is all about community. It's about identity within a community. When I think about being queer, I think about being queer with other people. So when I think about queer food, it's about eating with other people.”
Lou Weaver
Founder of the T Party: Texas Barbecues and Potlucks
Lou Weaver, 54, a queer trans man living in Houston, recently started T-Party, a trans and nonbinary barbecue and potluck inspired by a popular monthly social event held at a local transgender center that closed about a decade ago. Weaver says 12 people showed up to his first barbecue at Frosttown Brewing in April, but by May, that number had grown to 30.
Weaver said Queer Food is “about the company.”
“Building a community with people who accept you for who you are,” he said, “like breaking bread together and feeling at peace with being vulnerable.”
Ludwig Hurtado
PLAY Co-editor
Ludwig Furtado, a Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker who began working on his queer cookbook zine in October, says that when he first told people about the zine, they asked him if it had anything to do with gay sex.
“The first place everyone goes is so sexualized, and that was a little upsetting to me,” said Furtado, the former NBC News producer. “I thought queerness was so much more than that.”
Proceeds from PLAY, a new queer cookbook magazine, will go to two LGBTQ nonprofits: Madison Lane
Hurtado and co-editors Colleen Hamilton and Gabriella Ruiz are curating a new magazine called PLAY, which will be released this month and feature recipes and artwork from LGBTQ chefs and artists. The magazine will be donated to two nonprofits: Intransitive, one of the few transgender advocacy groups in Arkansas, and The Okra Project, a mutual aid group that supports Black trans people.
One project that inspired him, he said, was “Get Fat, Don't Die,” a cooking column aimed at people with HIV/AIDS that ran from 1990 to 1999 in Diseased Pariah News, an AIDS humor magazine.
“The title of the column itself pretty much sums up what we're trying to communicate: eat, have fun, play with food,” Furtado said.
PLAY features handpicked recipes from LGBTQ chefs. Olivia Ricciulgi
For Hurtado, queer food needs to be more than food made by LGBTQ people: it needs to be “radically made or radically presented.”
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“It's either challenging paradigms or feeding people who don't have access to normal food,” he says. “To me, queer food is anti-normative, anti-power nutrition.”
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