In His Latest Book, John Birdsall Excavates the Roots of Queer Food

John Birdsall’s newest book, “What Is Queer Food? How We Served a Revolution,” is subversively cheerful. Like the storied rainbow confections that grace the cover, its vivid, candy-colored appearance belies a weighty, moving work of cultural history and food criticism. Queer food is far more than iced coffee and bottomless brunch; it’s Richard Olney’s five-page salad manifesto, the restaurants of gender rebel Esther Eng, and, of course, quiche.

In a recent conversation over Zoom, the two-time James Beard Award-winning author sat down to discuss the importance of flaunting pleasure in the face of oppression, coming out in Ronald Reagan's America, and what he’d serve at his gay gourmet dinner party.

I just noticed we’re meeting on the day the James Beard Foundation is announcing the Media Awards, which is interesting timing because you wrote the book on James Beard. I think the fact that the awards are named after him really punctuates the point that, whether America wants to accept it or not, our food is very queer and has always been influenced by queer people.

Yes, absolutely. My kind of impetus to write that 2013 Lucky Peach piece, “America, Your Food Is so Gay,” [was] as someone who had come out of kitchens and kitchen culture, I sort of saw it as this injustice. So many people — not only who I happened to work with in San Francisco, and then later in Chicago, when I was cooking — but also just historically, in the mid- and even late-20th century, these sort of architects of American food and what would become American restaurant food were unacknowledged. They had complicated identities as gay — as gay men, mostly.

So this book, “What Is Queer Food?,” very much felt like I needed to go deeper. That original Lucky Peach piece sort of let something slip out of the bottle that I thought I was done with, but then kept coming back to. And it definitely became the focus of my writing.

And the James Beard bio was a way of dealing with it, a way of going deeper. And then this book sort of expands on that. I wanted to step back and look at figures, even figures who aren't primarily food figures, but who had something interesting to say about food.

Were you influenced by the direction our country was heading when writing the book?

I started writing the proposal for the book, I guess maybe three years ago, and I think we sold the book maybe two years ago. And I was hopeful that we wouldn't be in this particular political moment, but very cognizant that even if the presidential election had gone differently, that perhaps a third of the country, or perhaps even more, is reconsidering all of the advances in LGBTQ+ civil rights over the past 10 years and longer.

I came of age in San Francisco in the early 1980s, so my political grounding was as a young gay man coming out in a city that still was, in some sense, Harvey Milk's City. Harvey Milk was assassinated in 1978 and those coalitions [he had built] were changing, and they were dissolving somewhat. But that political activism was very much a part of my experience as a young gay man coming out. And it was coming out into Ronald Reagan's America. Two terms of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and, of course, the devastation of AIDs — it felt like we were completely abandoned by the federal government, so that grounding is very much with me.

“That there's not a steady arc, that movement forward is interrupted all the time, and that progress happens in fits and starts, and so not to be discouraged.”

And even though, obviously, I couldn't know the outcome of the most recent presidential election, I did very much feel that we were in a climate of backlash in terms of the LGBTQ+ civil rights cultural achievement. And so it made my look at food feel a bit more pointed, because I felt like the story of queer creation in food hadn't been told. I was doing it, telling the story of this creation, very much aware that a challenge to that story of creation was kind of looming.

What are some of the lessons you learned in researching this book that you think younger queer people should pay attention to?

That there's not a steady arc, that movement forward is interrupted all the time, and that progress happens in fits and starts, and so not to be discouraged.

I consider some of the people who I read about my ancestors, our ancestors, people who created these vivid lives around food, where food and eating and writing about food were central to their identities in many ways. I just recently came across this story of Sylvia Rivera, we would call her trans now, but [she was] one of the protesters at The Stonewall Rebellion in 1969 [and] was a sex worker. And after Stonewall happened, Sylvia and Marsha P. Johnson got together, and they wanted to create this collective of trans sex workers in Manhattan. And so they were able to persuade this mafioso who owned a vacant building to give it to them. And they would pay rent, and they would sort of create this housing — Sylvia Rivera cooked a big dinner every night — and this kind of joyful life around food.

But this only lasted like three months. It was the sort of typical tragedy. The woman who was supposed to be paying rent kept the money instead and absconded. And so the mafioso, who was kind of a scary figure, said, “You gotta get out, or we'll kill you.” And so there's this scramble to take everything that they had installed. They sort of created this kitchen out of nothing, including a fridge. And on their way out, they toss the fridge out of an upper story window. We're not leaving anything behind for you assholes!

So that makes me think that progress, that creating these little moments of community can be fleeting, can be temporary, but that together there's a movement forward. So I'd say, to anyone in or outside of this community who feels disheartened by what's going on now: Do the things that create joy for you and your friends and family, your community, and do it when you can, and look at that as a triumph. Look at that as a victory, even if it might be short-lived.

That kind of meshes with these two strains of queer identity at the table that you talk about in the book — the egalitarian and communal versus the epicurean and the hedonistic, the cliché lesbian potluck versus the glittering gay dinner party. Would you say those are the two main definitions or expressions of queer food?

Yeah, that's very much how I saw it. I'm just sort of looking at figures, looking at cookbooks, even looking at what people had written and how they lived. Yes, definitely those two poles of queer food experience, wrongly sort of categorized as “lesbian queer food” and “cis male queer food,” I see those strains still as being very active on my Instagram feed of queer chefs. And a lot of the queer food movement that's been pretty recent is a celebration of this sense of flaunting pleasure.

It really comes down to family, nurturance, care and community on the one hand, and then sort of pleasure and this kind of outsized expression. And I see those things happening still in our communities, and people being able to sort of toggle between the two, or even combine the two.

I was just in Boston for the Big Queer Food Fest, which was a week-long celebration that is mostly centered around chefs who identify as queer from across the country coming together and cooking for people. And I find the community, the empathy part of it has been so necessary for us just to survive over the 20th century. And then the pleasure celebration, sort of flaunting it, like, “Bitch, we're eating brioche” part of it is so much a part of our collective sense of togetherness, of joy, of being able to make it together, being able to carve out spaces that we can show off to the world and say, “This is who we are. This is how we do.”

You could dog whistle that you hated gay people by saying, “Real men don't eat quiche.”

The straight, maybe patriarchal world that most of us have come from may have set the rules for this, but we're expanding beyond your rules. We're breaking out of your rules, and we're showing you how it's done. I wanted to create that narrative of quiche in the book, how quiche became something that queer people adopted kind of as their own, especially in the context of brunch, and then adapted it to all kinds of different situations — fancy champagne weekend brunches or a lesbian couple who would clear out the fridge and make broccoli quiche with a crust made from vegetable oil. It really reflected the diversity and nuance and adaptability of people in the queer food space.

I won't have you go through the whole quiche timeline, because people should read it in your book, but I didn't know the phrase “Real men don't eat quiche” was the title of a book.

I talk about this a bit in the book, not in the context of that phrase, but my first cooking job in San Francisco in ‘83 [was] at Greens Restaurant, which still exists. The great chef Deborah Madison had already left by the time I started working there. But the legend was that Deborah had banished the word “quiche” from the menu, even though we were making a lot of quiche. But it was just such a problematic word for so many reasons. It's weird, the power of food to carry political, cultural meaning. Quiche really was that at that time — you could dog whistle that you hated gay people by saying, “Real men don't eat quiche,” or maybe even refusing to. It was a handy way of being able to safely express homophobia. You could be in a liberal enclave — like San Francisco, even — and you could use that phrase, and that was an acceptable way, even among the liberal.

Is it reasonable to say that an aspect of queer food is that it challenges the nuclear family in some way?

Yeah, absolutely. The challenging of the nuclear family, in the 20th century, was the great work of feminists and queer people. And it was a completely domestic way of pushing back. It was resistance that played out in people's lives in the domestic realm. So much of LGBTQ+ history has been told through politics and protest and being out on the street and public action. And the great untold — or only partly told — story of that civil rights movement was what played out in domestic spaces and food. Not only what we cooked and how we cooked, but who we cooked for is a major part of our struggle and our liberation.

Challenging and exploding the nuclear family has been a key part of what we've done.

The fact that we could define families, not only define ourselves, not only define what our sexuality was, in all its various expressions, but also defining what a family was. It's insisting on saying what a family was. For skeptical friends or people I meet, I tend to use Friendsgiving as a sort of example of how transformation of this very prescribed food life of early- and mid-20th century America — it's almost hard to imagine what that was like now because it's been so thoroughly exploded, although I guess with tradwives, it's back. But explaining that what we call Friendsgiving was just a very necessary adaptation of holiday celebrations in queer communities and other communities as well. But I argue that queer people really did sort of pioneer that sense of radically redefining who's welcome at the table and what the relationship of the people at the table is, even in the context of child-rearing. So yeah, challenging and exploding the nuclear family has been a key part of what we've done.

The tradwife thing kind of illustrates the point of pleasure in cooking and queerness. These tradwives are cooking for the pleasure of their husbands. But looking at James Beard and Edna Lewis, they were both champions of fresh ingredients. They were kind of anti-Jell-O salad and casseroles, but it was from a place of “You deserve to eat well.” Do you think that's part of it too, cooking for your own pleasure?

Absolutely. Part of the control mechanism for the mid-20th century housewife was most of the cooking literature that she would have had access to — cookbooks, magazine articles — were based on this sort of foundation of home economy. And I don't want to belittle home economists, because a lot of these women who worked in the 20th century, who worked for daily newspapers and were the food editors and food reporters, couldn't do any other kind of journalism because they were women. They were forced into writing about food, fashion and family and they needed a grounding in home economics. So I don't want to put down that profession.

But on the other hand, people like James Beard and others, even M.F.K. Fisher — home economists were sort of their unstated enemies. Food that discounted pleasure, that took into account what was understood as good nutrition in those days. Budgeting, keeping your family “happy and healthy,” those were the primary considerations. And it does seem to me that foregrounding pleasure in cooking and in daily cooking was really radical. And I think you see the cookbook publishing industry, which was pretty rudimentary in the mid-20th century, trying to adapt to that, to incorporate pleasure in a way. M.F.K. Fisher got away with it because she was a literary writer, first and foremost. She wasn't a cookbook author. Somebody like James Beard was problematic because there were plenty of men's cookbooks, but they were for men who considered themselves gourmets, who cooked infrequently, who would make these lavish, crazy dishes, and then leave the dishes for their wives to clean up.

Even today, it seems like there is a subset of both readers and cookbook authors where it's not really about pleasure, it's about doing something correctly. And it reminded me of the distinction that you make between Richard Olney's “Simple French Food” and Julia Child's “Mastering The Art of French Cooking.” Richard's is art, it's very poetic and lavish. And Julia's is very technical. It's just two starkly different approaches to the same cuisine.

Yeah and definitely Alice B. Toklas, whose cookbook [“The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book"] preceded Olney and Julia. It came out in 1954. If you read contemporary reviews of her cookbook, some are kind of admiring. Most don't see it as a serious cookbook. Alice and Gertrude [Stein], for so long, had been seen as these sort of quirky, wacky oddballs. It was a way of kind of acknowledging that they were a queer couple without doing it; they were just strange companions. And I think Alice's book was notable to most mainstream writers at the time, because she had stories about Picasso and Hemingway, and they were sort of gossipy and literary. The reviews that take on her recipes are just like, “Oh, these are ridiculous. These aren't serious.” One [recipe] could say that you need to find a dozen pigeons. “Where would we find a dozen pigeons? And using a pound of butter? This is absurd.”

And I see that invitation to just sort of blast through the walls of convention with Alice, but also with James Beard in a much more measured way, and challenge readers... I think Olney’s cooking is very much like performance art. Mainstream America, I think after World War Two, became obsessed with how to cook French food in the United States. Pillsbury had an office in Paris where they would try to use American flour to duplicate French bread and croissants and stuff like that. Julia was very much in that tradition. I remember interviewing Alice Waters once, and she did the best Alice Waters thing I've ever seen her do, which is to imitate Julia's voice. Julia was convinced that you could make a wonderful roast chicken with a supermarket chicken. All you needed was the right recipe and the right technique. Alice was like, “Julia would say, 'Oh, Alice, you just need the right recipe!'” And of course, Richard Olney comes along and is like, “Well, no, you have to move to France. You have to cook what's around you. Grow and forage. Your food will very much reflect where you live.” Most of us take that as gospel now, but that was a really radical approach.

What would you serve at a queer dinner party?

It would definitely have to come from Richard Olney, in part. I think his salade composée, his salade canaille would be the central part of it. I probably come down more on the sort of epicurean, queer gourmet side of queer food, rather than having a potluck. I talked about Lou Rand Hogan, who wrote “The Gay Cookbook” that was published in 1965, and those sort of punny, campy recipe names — he has a few of them. But I think I might draw on one of those. I have a deep affection for Quiche Lawanda, Drag Queen Billi Gordon's version of Quiche Lorraine.

So, I think Olney's salad, I think Quiche Lawanda and then something from — there's a cookbook called “The Myra Breckinridge Cookbook.” It was done by Gore Vidal's longtime partner, Howard [Austen]. He worked in Hollywood. Gore Vidal wrote the novel “Myra Breckenridge,” which was then made into this kind of crazy movie with Raquel Welch. And Howard wrote “The Myra Breckinridge Cookbook,” which is about Hollywood gluttony, movie-based gluttony, and is very, very gay. And he has really cringe recipe names. One he claims is an adaptation of an old Roman recipe, which is called Cumin Covered Cock. Which is so bad, but I think I might have to slip that in.

Any asparagus on the menu?

Oh! Actually, that's good. Asparagus would be perfect. I do love Proust's crazy description of the ultramarine, veiny asparagus in the garden, with dirt clinging to the bottom. It's such a randy image. And I think intentionally so. So, yeah, maybe some veiny asparagus.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Claire Lower

Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.