a day ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In Two New Books, the Chef Definitely Recommends Something Gay
WHAT IS QUEER FOOD? How We Served a Revolution, by John Birdsall
DINING OUT: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America's Gay Restaurants, by Erik Piepenburg
What's queer about food? Over the past decade, momentum has gathered around this conversation. By nature, the intersection resists fixed rules and embraces abstraction, but the benefits of asking seem clear: As two new books demonstrate, food can reveal a richness of queer culture, expression, possibility and survival.
Building on a 2021 New York Times article, Erik Piepenburg's 'Dining Out' looks at 150 years of queer American food establishments, from cafeterias to diners to bathhouses. He argues that gay (his chosen modifier, meant to encompass all queer and L.G.B.T.Q. people) restaurants — defined simply as places where gay people eat — have been every bit as essential to connection, activism and queer history as have bars.
Early gay restaurants were often those that attracted artists and other bohemians, who invariably numbered gays and lesbians among their ranks. The storied Pfaff's Saloon opened in Greenwich Village in 1856 and was a known gay meeting place, counting Walt Whitman as a regular. Other restaurants became gay more serendipitously — such as Automat cafeterias, whose rapid turnover, communal seating and atmosphere of anonymity created inconspicuous venues to meet and cruise.
Like bars, gay restaurants were frequent sites of pre-Stonewall uprisings and sit-ins, as well as a backdrop to history. Annie's Paramount Steak House in Washington, D.C., opened in 1948 and served gays and lesbians through the Lavender Scare of the McCarthy era, the gains in sexual liberation of the 1960s and '70s, the devastation and aftermath of AIDS. It continues today.
When restaurants became a target of hysteria at the height of the AIDS epidemic, thanks to the dining public's ignorance and panic about the virus's transmission, gay restaurants were one of the few spaces that provided respite for queer patrons. Florent, which opened in Manhattan's meatpacking district in 1985 and epitomized downtown cool for 23 years, helped to destigmatize AIDS, with its H.I.V.-positive proprietor, Florent Morellet, listing his latest T-cell count prominently on the day's menu board.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
