WHAT IS QUEER FOOD?

Exploring how food has helped define the act of queer survival across decades of sexual prohibition.

Sectioned into four chronological parts, Birdsall, a celebrated culture and food writer, explores how the art of gastronomy became integrated into queer culture despite the prevalence of a closeted 20th-century “homosexual underground.” His narrative first probes the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when same-gender desire was considered a pathology and restaurants like San Francisco’s Paper Doll provided a safer haven for gender-challenging individuals. This was also true at the marble tables of Café Nicholson in Manhattan, which emerged as one of several queer-friendly “spaces with a dynamic mix of art and performance…where people’s masks could slip.” As the book meanders into the “audacious tang” of mid-1980s queer liberation, Birdsall expansively cites influential queer pioneers and disruptors like Harry Baker, inventor of the chiffon cake in 1927; Café Nicholson’s renowned chef Edna Lewis; James Baldwin; and Truman Capote, among others. Birdsall emphasizes relevant volumes like The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, scouring it for cloaked queer meaning, as well as 1940s food editor Genevieve Callahan’s lesbian-coded The California Cook Book, since, at the time, the publishing industry imperative was to “scrub manifestly queer voices from cookbooks.” Through an enthusiastic narrative, Birdsall names names and cites legacies of those responsible for ushering forward the evolution of queer food despite “a system determined to deny, prosecute, marginalize queer existence.” Naturally, Birdsall’s toothsome, astute four-course queer culinary history lesson begins and ends with cake.

An informative and expert analysis of the culture of food fueling a queer revolution.