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And yet, as a gay man-ish person, I have always found these dinners to be an undeniably queer space, even if I couldn’t offer the exact reason why. Is it the fact that Quenioux is gay? That’s an important starting point, but plenty of events and restaurants run by gay chefs are not necessarily queer. Is it the decadent plates, each served by the chef with a pinch of backstory or a dirty little joke? Or the fact that you know you’re in when Quenioux sits down to sip a glass of wine, and whispers which cheese he smuggled over from Langres, the taste of which reminds him of an old lover? Or is it Quenioux’s expert social engineering? If the guest list is too heavy on newcomers and polite acquaintances, he will invite flamboyant close friends and previous attendees to shake things up.

It’s not any one of these things, but it is all of them, a merging of ambition, sensuality, and social enchantment which is undeniably, ineffably queer.

Queerness has become a useful blanket term for anyone on the LGBTQ spectrum, but it has radical roots as a subversion and redefinition of all aspects of society — including restaurant dining. When Quenioux approaches something as basic as a meal with an eye toward the unspoken bond only outsiders share, it’s a necessary act of unity. Queer people hail from every region, every state, every city; we exist across religion, race, and class; we have lived parallel to the mainstream, passing off dishes as normal when they are, in fact, bewitched. Of course, queer soup and transgender sandwiches don’t exist. No flourish of sauce makes a dish bisexual, nor does flambe make your duck or ice cream “homosexual”: these are terms applied to people, and ones that don’t transfer to food, even if an LGBTQ someone ignited that dish.

Though that may be changing. The restaurant world is full of queer people, and increasingly, they are demanding to be seen. In the New York Times, Jeremy Allen traces the flowering culture of queer restaurants, dinner parties, and pop-ups that suggest an emergence of explicitly queered restaurants and voices, ones left out of the story of American food for too long. Just as the gay bar is only the tip of the queer-nightlife iceberg, the explicitly queer food business is only the most visible aspect of a much larger, often unseen universe of queer food, one that’s been evolving in and shaping American culture for decades.

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Like so much of queer culture, our food is often hiding in plain sight, which offers a frisson of exclusivity while occluding so much of what queer people have done to shape our culinary moment. The emerging queer food movement is necessary because our food is increasingly misunderstood. The one thing queer food isn’t is a rainbow cupcake — just ask the viral (and extremely straight) rainbow bagel. It is less about what is literally eaten, but it’s more than just the presence of queer people at the table. Queer food is the food of a temporary utopia, one where unexpected eating styles and culinary creativity thrive, where things that seem too weird to work actually do.

The vibe, impossible to fake and discovered almost always by chance, can reign in a restaurant for years, alight in a home for a few hours, or spark in the look a bartender serves alongside your drink. I found it when out queer woman Angela Dimayuga ran the kitchen at New York’s Mission Chinese, wait staff along the gender spectrum slipping my boyfriend and me colorful, spicy dishes with a side of flirtation, a playful nod we associated with gay bars a few drinks in, not trendy restaurants.

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Loitering outside a West Los Angeles art gallery, old and new friends crowded a Coolhaus truck, dance music blasting, for aggressively aesthetic ice creams in flavors like french fries with chocolate and foie gras peanut butter and jelly, which felt as comfortable as a big leathery hug from a masc-identifying person: strangely, comfortably good. During sprawling dinners at my own apartment, my clique I call the “gay bros” call me the “Barelegged Contessa,” thanks to my fondness for the Food Network star’s recipes, served at a table bedecked with seasonal decor like dick-o-lanterns while I waltz through the kitchen in short shorts.

These are all moments where the culinary queer manifests as its own type of rainbow: It wasn’t just this or just that which made the meal a bit gay. It was a little of everything, the magic of political lives lived with joy. Queer food is not the ingredients, the cooks, the diners, the labels. It’s in the make.

[Source: Kyle Fitzpatrick, Eater, June 2018]

Famous LGBTQ Foodies

James Beard - Author, Chef, TV Personality, Culinary Icon

Susan Feniger - Chef, Owner of Border Grill

Ted Allen - Author, TV Personality, Host of Chopped

J Chong - Chef, Asheville, NC

Kristen Kish - Author, Chef at Menton Boston
Cat Cora - Author, Restauranteur, TV Personality

Jennifer E. Crawford - Master Chef Canada Winner

Iliana Regan - Chef, Owner of Elizabeth

Alex Ketchum - Co-founder, Queer Food Conference
Antoni Porowski - Food and Wine Expert on Queer Eye

Jenny Nguyen - Chef, Owner of The Sports Bra, Portland, Oregon

Martha Manner and Shelley Brothers - Owners of Wildrose
DeVonn Francis - Chef, Owner of Yardy

Adam Jacoby and Kris Swift - Owners of Jacoby's

Angela Dimayuga - Food and Culture Creative Director, Culinary Curator

Deborah VanTrece - Chef, Owner of VanTrece Catering Company

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Chad Palmatier and Anthony Sobotik - Owners of Lick Honest Ice Creams

Liz Alpern - Author, Founder of Queer Soup Night, Co-Owner of The Gefilteris

Abraham Salum - Chef, Owner of Salum

Preeti Mistry - Chef at Juhu Beach Club

Vanessa Parish - Executive director, Queer Food Foundation
Josie Smith-Malave - Chef, Owner of Bubbles+Pearls

Paula DaSila - Executive Chef at Artisan Beach House
Brian Hart Hoffman - Editot-in-Chief of Bake From Scratch Magazine

Emanuel Salinas and John Broady - Owners of Komali
Kristopher Edelen - Chef, Owner of Hot Pan NYC

Erika Nakamura - Chef, Co-Owner of White Gold Butchers
David Lebovitz - Author, Blogger, Pastry Chef

John Birdsall - Award-winning food and culture writer
Jason Gehring and Ross Perkins - Executive Chef of Mason Dixon Biscuit Company
Frances Tariga-Weshnak - Executive Chef of Eden Local

Stephen Pyles - Chef, Owner of Flora Street Cafe

Chris Bautista - Owner, The Beignet Truck

Dante Sookie - Entrepreneur, Business Mentor, Fine-Dining Chef

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Dani’s Queer Bar Opens in Boston: Beantown Gets its First Lesbian Bar in Decades

New venue branded itself a space for Sapphic, trans and non-binary community members

Dani’s Queer Bar opened its doors to Boston’s LGBTQ community in Sept 2024, giving the city its first lesbian bar in decades. The venue joins a yearslong “lesbian bar renaissance” that has seen more than a dozen bars for queer women open across the country since the height of the Covid pandemic.

Dani’s, which has branded itself as a “space for Sapphic, trans and non-binary community members,” was more than two years in the making. Prior to opening the bar, founder Thais Rocha hosted parties for queer women throughout the city, and then in March 2022, she announced a fundraising campaign to open a brick-and-mortar venue.

“It’s all about creating the space that you don’t see out there for yourself and for other people. And that’s what we’re trying to do a little by little,” Rocha said back in 2022. “I want everybody to see that it is possible, and it doesn’t have to be something so scarce and hard to attain.”

In May of last year, Rocha was one of 24 small-business owners awarded a SPACE grant by Mayor Michelle Wu’s Office of Economic Opportunity and Inclusion, which helped bring the bar to fruition. After delays caused by permitting issues, Dani’s Queer Bar — reportedly named after Rocha’s American Eskimo pup — finally opened Sept 2024.

Stevie Dickie attended the grand opening with her girlfriend, Jace Williams. Dickie said she was thrilled to finally have a space in Boston that caters specifically to queer women and trans and nonbinary people.

“I felt so good to be surrounded by people like me. It was so invigorating. My heart was so full,” Dickie said. “Any space we have for community is important, especially since we have so many really male-centric spaces. As long as I’ve lived here, there really was no place for us to go and meet people and be with our specific community. People were really missing that. There was kind of like a hole, so I think Dani’s is really filling a need here in our city.”

Several lesbians living in Boston and multiple local news reports said that before Dani’s, there hadn’t been a dedicated lesbian bar in the city for at least two decades.

In the spring of 2020, around the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, an analysis found there were only about 16 lesbian bars left in the US, down from a high of around 200 in the 1980s, and several of these remaining venues were in danger of closing because of the pandemic.

Erica Rose, co-founder of The Lesbian Bar Project, which has documented and fundraised for the United States’ remaining lesbian bars, said there are a few factors behind this decadeslong trend, including gentrification, misogyny in small-business loans and the gender pay gap.

While the number of lesbian or lesbian-ish bars is nowhere near its ’80s peak, an analysis last year found there has been somewhat of a resurgence, with more than a dozen new Sapphic spaces opening up since 2020.

[Source: Ellie Rudy, NBC News, Oct 2024]

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First Women's Sports Bar

Giving folks a place to celebrate women’s sports together with food and drink

Jenny Nguyen is a chef and the owner of The Sports Bra in Portland, Oregon. She has succeeded in creating the world's first women's sports bar. Nguyen says, "Our mission is simple." And she is more than willing to spell it out for those who are curious:

Investment and representation for women’s sports has been severely lacking for decades. The Sports Bra seeks to tackle both issues through a familiar, yet groundbreaking venture—the traditional sports bar.

We believe that inequities in sports is a huge problem, the effects of which ripple out and negatively impact our communities. As with any large problem, the solutions seem complicated and seemingly infinite.

The idea behind The Sports Bra is that the smallest, simplest changes can have the most dramatic impact. That’s how we came up with the name, we just took your regular sports bar, switched around the two letters and got The Sports Bra!

We will change the channel. Our goal is to play as much women’s sports as there is to offer and when there are no games to air, we will try to fill that space with women’s sports content like podcasts, interviews, documentaries and more.

Our mission is to support, empower and promote women and girls in the community through sports. By giving folks a place to celebrate women’s sports together with food and drink, we want to build a movement, a culture around women’s sports spectatorship and fandom that hasn’t been done before.

The Sports Bra is not a sports bar for women, but a bar for women’s sports!

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Defining Queer Food

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 "queer food" can have many different meanings depending on who's cooking, eating, or serving it. Some say it's food made by queer people, while others say it's about sharing food in queer communities. Some believe it should also include serving marginalized people who have been excluded from fine dining spaces. Others say it's about challenging the structures of "normalcy" that have come to define cuisine and the food system by offering queer people a seat at the table.

The term has become increasingly popular with the rise of queer 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 community, such as vodka sodas and sourdough bread.

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For some, queer food is simply food made by queer people. Others say it’s about sharing food in queer community, while there are those who believe it should include serving marginalized people who have been excluded from fine dining spaces.

So what is queer food, aside from a term slowly gaining traction in certain corners of the LGBTQ community? We posed this question to a variety of LGBTQ academics, chefs and foodies across the country. Though the definition of the term can vary widely, they all agreed that queer food in any form requires one nonnegotiable ingredient: community.

“We like to say queer food is us existing in spaces. If you’re queer, your food is queer; that’s pretty much it. It’s not a rainbow cupcake or bagel type of situation. That’s fun, but that’s not what queer food is. A rainbow cake isn’t inherently more queer than a regular cake created by a queer person. If the person that curated it, their hands and their energy and their community building, is queer, then it’s queer food."

-Vanessa Parish, Executive director, Queer Food Foundation

"Queer food is all about the company. Being in community with people who accept you for who you are. Like being vulnerable and at peace while breaking bread together.”
-Lou Weaver, Founder of T Party: BBQ and potluck social in Texas

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“For me, queer food isn’t necessarily focused on dishes or recipes. It’s focused on those voices and those individuals who transformed cookbooks, for instance, transformed restaurant spaces, transformed how queer people could be visible in public spaces. James Baldwin, a gay civil rights activist and one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, wrote that shared hospitality is a queer virtue. His distinctly queer philosophy of complete acceptance around a table marked a really significant evolution in American food. Baldwin had this sense of the specific food not mattering — it’s how you come to the table, who’s invited to the table, who’s considered family around the table."

-John Birdsall, Award-winning food and culture writer

“In my heart, for me, queer food is food eaten and enjoyed and produced in queer community. Everything about queerness to me is about community. It’s about identity within community. When I think about being queer, I think about being queer with others. So if I think about queer food, it’s about eating with others.”
-Liz Alpern, Founder, Queer Soup Night

[Source: Jo Yurcaba, NBC News, July 2024]

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Culinary Icon: James Beard

James Andrews Beard (1903-1985) was a gay American chef, cookbook author, teacher and television personality. As a culinary icon, he pioneered television cooking shows, taught at The James Beard Cooking School in New York City and Seaside, Oregon, and lectured widely. He emphasized American cooking, prepared with fresh, wholesome, American ingredients, to a country just becoming aware of its own culinary heritage. Beard taught and mentored generations of professional chefs and food enthusiasts. He published more than 20 books, and his memory is honored by his foundation's annual James Beard awards.

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He was born in Portland, Oregon to Elizabeth and John Beard. The family vacationed on the Pacific coast in Gearhart, Oregon, where Beard was exposed to Pacific Northwest cuisine. According to Beard he was raised by Jue-Let, the family's Chinese cook, who instilled in him a passion for Chinese culture. Beard reportedly attributes much of his upbringing to Jue-Let, whom he refers to as his Chinese godfather. Beard briefly attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He was expelled for homosexuality in 1922, having had relationships with one or more male students and a professor. However the college granted Beard an honorary degree in 1976. He traveled from Portland to Liverpool aboard a British freighter, spending subsequent years living and traveling in Europe. In 1923, he joined a theatrical troupe and studied voice and theater. He also spent time in Paris, where he experienced French cuisine at its bistros and central market, Les Halles. In France, he also had the opportunity to enjoy sexual freedom, having a short relationship with a young man. From this period and the widespread influence of French food culture, he became a Francophile.

Julia Child summed up Beard's personal life: Beard was the quintessential American cook. Well-educated and well-traveled during his eighty-two years, he was familiar with many cuisines but he remained fundamentally American. He was a big man, over six feet tall, with a big belly, and huge hands. An endearing and always lively teacher, he loved people, loved his work, loved gossip, loved to eat, loved a good time. According to Beard's memoir, "By the time I was seven, I knew that I was gay. I think it's time to talk about that now." Beard came out in 1981, in Delights and Prejudices, a revised version of his memoir. Of Beard’s most significant romantic attachments was his lifetime companion of 30 years, Gino Cofacci, and Beard’s former cooking school assistant Carl Jerome.

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Queer Wine, Beer, and Spirits

Taste the Rainbow: The Queer-Focused Booze Market. Minerva brewery, Absolute Vodka, Biagio Cru and Estate Wines, makers of Égalité, and Kim Crawford winery are some of the wine and spirits companies actively pursuing LGBTQ drinkers.

The idea that a beer could be "gay" underscored the bizarreness of gendered alcohol advertising. But we've actually had "queer beer" in real life since 2011, when Mexico's Minerva brewery launched their labels Salamandra and Purple Hand, a reference to a galvanizing gay rights protest that took place in San Francisco in 1969.

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In addition to Minerva's offering, there are at least three wines that focus their branding on the LGBT market – Ontario's Chardonngay; Égalité, a sparkling wine from France; and New Zealand's Pansy! Rosé. Sweet and berry forward, the latter is widely available on shelves at liquor stores across Canada. Over in the spirits section, you can celebrate with a bottle of Absolut Mix (same vodka, new rainbow-hued bottle) released to honour Pride month. What makes these beverages gay-friendly? Some donate a portion of sales to LGBT organizations; others, like Absolut, were launched in concert with sponsorships of specific events that fall under the Pride umbrella.

This is a marked change in attitude from 30 years ago, when the organizers of the earliest beer tents at Toronto Pride festivals not only failed to secure sponsorship, but had issues finding a company willing to supply beer at all. When they finally found one, a certain level of discretion was expected.

"The beer had to be served in unmarked cups out of unmarked draught taps and there could be no advertising" recalls Kyle Rae, a Ryerson University professor and former city councillor who was one of the event's organizers in 1985. "And the refrigerated trucks that arrived the night before with the kegs of beer were unmarked, because they didn't want to be seen to be providing the beer for Pride."

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In the mid-1980s, when Pride was still establishing itself, most alcohol was sold by playing up a fictional relationship between certain types of alcohol and conventional heterosexual masculinity. Later, negotiations for Pride sponsorships were made more complicated by the fact that Molson merged with Coors, a corporation that had funded anti-gay political groups and had discriminatory hiring practices in the United States. A decade later, beer companies would engage in bidding wars over the exclusive rights to stock the beer tent bars.

Now, between "brosé" and the long-overdue realization that women also like and drink whisky, some of those rigid associations between gender and drinking are beginning to break down. As an example, when founders of Rendle's Gin launched their pink-tinged spirit last year, they shrugged off critics who cautioned that men might not be willing to be seen drinking pink gin, remarking that they'd be perfectly happy to sell to the segment of the market that wasn't afraid of pink drinks.

Have you ever heard of the Raspberry Kiss? It is served at Eureka Restaurant & Lounge in the Castro District. It is probably one of the gayest of cocktails. This spin on the pinkest of 90s drinks, the Cosmopolitan, is a mix of Smirnoff Raspberry vodka, lemon juice, triple sec, and Chambord.

Is the growing openness a gimmick? A cynical marketing ploy to dial into previously neglected and lucrative markets? Probably a little. But, given the fraught history between Pride and alcohol marketing, there's something satisfying about liquor companies doing an about-face to salvage the relationship with a suddenly coveted queer clientele.

Rae sees things a bit differently. "Well, there's a history," he says.

"I don't know if there's a relationship. But I can tell you that, by the end of the night, the representatives could not believe the amount of beer that was consumed at Pride. They were shocked. And they were eager to come back the following year."

[Source: Christine Sismondo, Globe & Mail, 2016]

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Crawford talks about the relief and healing they experience by embracing freedom from restriction in the kitchen, by creating their “own delicious utopia of ever-expanding techniques and flavors, whether or not they’re ‘supposed’ to make sense.” Crawford’s capacity to see beyond kitchen convention is part of how they won the MasterChef title: combining ingredients that “aren’t supposed” to go together, flaunting the so-called rules, imagining other ways of making: mint cotton candy and lamb shanks, Nova Scotia donairs dressed up as a pâté croûte, elaborate “treat cereals” with smoked milks—possibilities proliferate.

Beyond survival, Queer Food is “a daily reminder that we need and are deserving of nourishment, joy, care and love, and that we can create those nurturing moments for ourselves and others.” Crawford is beautifully candid about their own mental health challenges: “2018 was wild. I hit bottom and got sober in February. I had to do something with my hands to keep them off booze, so was perpetually in the kitchen. The more I healed, the more my creativity and capacity for feeling regrew. In August, I started a trauma treatment program.” Halfway through that program, and with newfound courage and strength, Crawford successfully auditioned for MasterChef Canada 2019.

Today, Queer Food is keeping Crawford sober, one meal at a time. “It’s soothing the usually well-managed PTSD that’s been banging at my door, every day, since quarantine started.” Crawford also worries about “all the queer kids in lockdown with homophobic and transphobic families. Most media paints an idyllic picture of domestic bliss, meal prep with your kids, and gathering around the family table. For lots of people, a full table is the loneliest, scariest place in the world.” It’s not hyperbole, then, to claim that organizations such as The Trevor Project and the LGBTQ Youth Line are doing life-saving work. Food banks, too. Queer Food is a call to nurture and sustain queer bodies.

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Our queer bodies will, for the most part and out of necessity, spend this Pride apart. I keep hearing people lament that Pride is cancelled. But that’s only partly true, only one version of this year’s Pride story. Rather than crowding into bars and parks, onto streets and parade floats, we must re-invent and re-imagine Pride. Crawford wonders playfully, promisingly: “Can we cruise while at home, food pics the new hanky code? Landscape orientation, left pocket. Portrait orientation, right pocket. Sourdough, switch. Pride 2020 has the potential to be so campy, intimate, and revolutionary.” Crawford goes further: “And there’s no Pride without queer liberation for all. For me, Queer Food feels powerful in this context because not only is it invited into homes; it’s invited into people’s actual bodies. It very literally transcends the spaces between us, and don’t we need embodied connection now more than ever?”

Pride is an opportunity to rethink and re-create family, community, activism. As Crawford muses, “I’ve been thinking about how a lot of us don’t have those handed-down, learned-at-grandma’s-knee legacy of family recipes.” But we create our own culinary legacies as an act of queer love, “every recipe a portal into someone’s queer story of survival, vulnerability, and pantry. And with ample notes in the margins, where so many of us feel most at home.”

[Source: Kerry Manders, 2020]

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Gay Food is Here

Pride Month comes but once a year every June, and with it comes rainbow-colored sprinkles, rainbow layer cakes and, well, rainbow everything. But beyond kaleidoscopic novelties, the food world has long played an important role in both the establishment and progression of LGBTQ communities.

Queerness has always had a place in the culture of gathering to eat, drink and be merry. After all, the gay bar may be the most quintessential archetype of what it means to meet up.

Dining establishments were the place where many of the first protests for LGBTQ equality began. From Stonewall to the Compton’s Cafeteria, spaces where the gay community of the 1960s gathered became sites of ardent fights for their right to come together and enjoy one another’s company.

In the Western dining tradition, restaurants have often been places of privilege, whiteness and heterosexual norms. Historically, restaurants and bars were a place to take a date, a place to meet ― a place, for those with the privilege to do so, to escape and dine. Before the Stonewall riots and other protests during the civil rights era, restaurants and bars where the gay community would gather were policed, with guests harassed and owners threatened for simply existing.

While the Stonewall riots brought a wave of progress and gay bars and queer-friendly establishments have become commonplace, we still live in a cultural climate where discrimination and prejudice still exists. This month saw the Supreme Court ruling that bakeries are allowed the right to refuse to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples. We saw a straight white man who was accused of sexual harassment and aggression able to continue his successful businesses.

Among this cultural reckoning appear small signals of change, such as the appearance of self-described queer and gay restaurants. As Pride Month comes to a close, let’s ask how we can move the food industry forward and how the idea of a queer restaurant can be a potential site to spark a revolution for the restaurant industry and beyond.

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A gay restaurant doesn’t necessarily have to be a bar with a rainbow flag waving outside its door and a poster for drag bingo in the window. Instead, to actively queer a space means challenging mainstream culture and our assumptions around dining out.

Carla Perez-Gallardo and Hannah Black, the owners of Lil’ Deb’s Oasis in Hudson, NY, explained they’d wanted “a restaurant/community space that felt deeply inclusive to all kinds of people from all walks of life.” They wanted the restaurant to be imbued with “the energy and vibrance we associate with the food we love to make and share — bright, bold, overwhelming.” To bridge the gap between restaurant and customer and build a true community was something they believed in from the start. They did this through intentional details such as “always having a $10 plate that provides a nourishing, full meal — so that we can always guarantee having delicious food at an affordable price point.”

The idea that nobody should be turned away because of the price allows for Lil’ Deb’s Oasis to feel inclusive and inviting to anybody who wants to enter. The power and potential of a queer restaurant lies within this idea of inclusivity. Describing themselves as a “woman-powered business” and restaurant, the restaurateurs say the intention behind a place like Lil’ Deb’s is not only to feed a customer but also open them up to new experiences. To challenge one’s assumptions, a queer restaurant works to progress antiquated views of how restaurants should be, both for a customer and its staff.

As John Birdsall wrote for Vice’s Munchies, “For workers, restaurants are manifestations of power in the rawest sense. They use socially acceptable forms of coercion and domination to enforce certain standards of performance,” and for a long time, this was to be expected. From the early European beginnings of the kitchen brigade system, restaurants were run in a hierarchical system that favored authoritarianism. It is no wonder bullying and harassment among restaurant workers is commonplace. To many, it just came with the territory of working in restaurants. But with more restaurants like Lil’ Deb’s defining their space as queer and progressive, the culture is changing. With the advent of the Me Too movement and the fall of many a male-chef empire, female chefs, restaurant workers, and writers are trying to answer the question of how to create a sustainable environment for hospitality that extends from dining guest to chef to server.

Another dining establishment challenging the status quo is MeMe’s Diner, which owners Bill Clark and Libby Willis have described as “a very, very gay restaurant.” While most of the restaurant team self-identify across the spectrum of sexuality and gender, Bill and Libby make it clear that it’s not what having a gay restaurant is all about. They emphasize that queerness in a restaurant extends to expanding our traditional notions of hospitality.

Both of these restaurants, and many more, are working hard to dispel the old misconceptions of masculine kitchens and of restaurant culture being raunchy, sweaty and just plain abusive. Hiring queer staff, demonstrating “an awareness of the potential for our verbal and nonverbal communication,” and creating a warm, hospitable environment for the staff as well as the customers is an integral step in queering restaurant norms. Servers are trained to not assume the genders of guests with greetings such as “good evening, ladies,” while Clark and Willis aim to maintain a work culture that is comfortable for all.

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But most important, how’s the food?

The food served at these restaurants is meaningful, as much of it honors personal roots and heritage. Gay food can, is and should move past being thought of as a rainbow-colored novelty served one month out of the year. Gay food isn’t rainbow sprinkles on an ice cream cone. Gay food is attentive, engaging, and pushes our notions of what dining can be.

In much of Birdsall’s work, he explores what “gay food” can be. He thinks of food as “a galaxy of potential stories;” food has the ability to tell a story, share a culture, and honor who we are or hope to be. Gay food, he believes, is food that not only sustains, but brings joy. Joy and pleasure, to exuberantly and unabashedly be you in the face of systemic oppression, can be an act of resistance. Gay food can show us that “the pursuit of pleasure at the table is a political act.”

At MeMe’s Diner, brunch guests are welcomed with complimentary bowls of familiar cereals such as Lucky Charms or Trix. This helps set a tone for what’s to come: a homey place where hospitality and kindness greets each customer, providing a sense of ease. Their menu has been described as veering “towards comfort food as camp” with nostalgic, Americana references in dishes like BBQ meatballs served with toothpicks to beautiful layer cakes. The flavors are familiar but elevated, like an Everything Bagel Babka or a fluffernutter sandwich. These menu choices are meant to include, not to intimidate, and “to bring you joy.” And isn’t that what dining should be?

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