Latest news with #JohnBirdsall
Forbes
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
What Is Queer Food? A Talk With Author John Birdsall
A banner reading 'We Are Everywhere' at a Gay Pride march on Fifth Avenue in New York City, USA, ... More July 1979. (Photo by) In his book released a month ago, What is Queer Food? How We Served a Revolution, writer/historian John Birdsall challenges readers to dive deeply into a chronicle of culture that was quite literally curated and nourished by people having to hide a giant piece of their authentic selves. This important record not only reveals so much more about who these figures were--like James Baldwin, Alice B. Toklas, Esther Eng, Harry Baker, Craig Claiborne, Richard Olney, and James Beard, etc.,--but firmly establishes their rightful places in history, and within the culinary sphere of taste and pleasure that hummed throughout the 20th century. Originally set out to produce more of a memoir, Birdsall was encouraged by his editor, Melanie Tortoroli, to see this project as an opportunity to widen the scope, to create something that hadn't been done before, all while still being able to share a sense of his own perspective and experience within a world he knew well and deeply loved. She encouraged him to take queerness in food in whatever direction he saw fit. Birdsall admits there came a well of freedom upon such an invitation to explore. Cover of Birdsall's new book, What is Queer Food? Released on June 3. Cover illustration by Naomi P. ... More Wilkinson and book design by Sarah May Wilkinson (no relation). The Book The result is a book that is truly the first of its kind, one that spans genres and takes risks. In one way, Birdsall picks up where he left off in his 2013 article, 'America, Your Food is So Gay' for Lucky Peach; and from his 2020 biography of James Beard, The Man Who Ate Too Much, in order to take on this next, much broader project. Nevertheless, Birdsall says, 'I think this book has always been in me.' In an unmistakably beautiful, literary voice, one underscored by the intersection of history, emotion, and experience, What is Queer Food? also asks readers to look at the term 'queer' through a sharper lens; to give it more dimension and nuance, something he said younger generations--like the Gen Zers, who've shown up at his book signings and talks--do with a fluency that his own generation hasn't fully grasped. According to recent research, approximately 30% of Gen Z adults identify as queer and LBGTQ+ (HRC) and, as Birdsall adds, 'generationally, there's more nuance; it is not so narrowly defined as it once was--what queerness can be--as just gay or lesbian.' He offers this statistic while noting Toni Morrison's famous quote upon winning the Nobel Prize for literature about being marginalized; it has become an anthem of sorts, a rally cry, for those otherwise othered and hidden in plain sight. Author John Birdsall at Omnivore Books in San Francisco, June 22. When talking to Birdsall further about how he gathered stories for the book, he admits it was not easy given the amount many of the figures explored had to hide who they really were, therefore leaving very little evidence as to their private lives. 'For me, as a writer and historian, my practice has been using emotion to try to illuminate queer and trans histories that have been obscured," Birdsall said in our recent interview, 'We may have scraps of archival information, but there is so much to fill in,' he added. Unfortunately, things like letters and cards or other memorabilia and souvenirs from meaningful relationships were simply too dangerous to keep for fear of damning consequences. Birdsall tells us that even what we know today of some of James Beard's close connections, for example, are due to an assistant's forethought (or nosiness). In some cases, notes were retrieved from a wastebasket for fear of them being lost forever. To people like Beard---who was so visible and in the public eye--it just wasn't safe to keep anything around that would be considered sentimental. Which made digging for the whisps of memory and experience surrounding the many figures Birdsall explores in the book, all the more impenetrable. He saw it, however, as both a challenge and opportunity. He took the bits and pieces discovered over the last decade and assembled them while further imagining the worlds the figures lived in, and, what those worlds and experiences tasted like, so to speak. From a recent signing in June for Birdsall's new book. Part of his solution was to lean on the emotions he knew must have accentuated real events. For example, Sunday women in apartments in NYC of the 1950s he learned would gather together to listen to Tallulah Bankhead who, as Birdsall described, 'Had the power in her to control her own sexuality and still have a public voice and be a star.' Although there's no record that fully reveals what those gatherings encompassed, Birdsall helps readers wonder on the page about how food must have played a role amidst such powerful moments in time. Friendsgiving, Anyone? Birdsall says, despite how ubiquitous this annual occasion has become, 'Queer people know they really pioneered it. It is taken for granted that we choose our family--even if we cherish and celebrate with our blood families--there's a culture of the chosen family that is really encapsulated there.' For many, at one time, this 'holiday' meant one safe haven when there was no other. So, Birdsall investigates the lives of many in the book while filling in the scenes of places like New York City's Café Nicholson with Edna Lewis; in San Francisco at the Paper Doll Club; in Los Angeles with Harry Baker as he created his bewitching Chiffon cake; or even the author's own home on page 473 of the New York Times Cook Book where Birdsall became enthralled by a golden brioche. Readers journey through the stories on precipices of emotion the figures covered quite likely endured. From deeply satisfying displays of creativity and community around food and taste they built to endless moments of pain suffered under the cloaks of lies thrust upon them. This book, Birdsall believes, creates a foundation for more to come. It's a green light to to sound the alarm. It's a marquee to celebrate the tales of the untold, still sitting in boxes in the attic. With such a revelatory foundation, Birdsall is passing a torch to the next generation to to keep every name in queer food present on our plates, on our restaurant awnings, in our cookbooks, and out of the closet. Signing books on tour, author John Birdsall.
Los Angeles Times
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Yup, it's gay food. But what does that mean? Two new books tell all
Only seven pages in, John Birdsall offers a conclusion to the question that titles his book, 'What Is Queer Food?' It's a subject that has consumed him for decades, as a restaurant cook in the Bay Area and then as a journalist and author. In the last dozen or so years — when food media began more honestly grappling with identity and diversity in its subjects, and also with who is given opportunities to tell those stories — Birdsall won national awards for feats like his groundbreaking piece, 'America, Your Food Is So Gay.' 'Still, saying what queer food was on a granular level kept eluding me,' he writes in his new work, published this month. 'Lots of us could say that queer food, like desire, exists, but nobody could definitely point through what is was.' Drag-brunch eggs benedict? Rainbow cookies? Intentional diet choices? Suggestively shaped edible schtick? 'It shouldn't have taken me as long as it did,' he accedes, 'but at last I accepted the obvious truth that queer food is not a commodity. There is no essentialized cuisine of queerness, any more than there's one simple answer for what it means to be queer.' Acceptance is a doorway. He is freed to spend the rest of the book coupling meticulous research and gorgeous prose to illuminate lives that, in ways indirect and overt, shaped who we are as a culinary nation. There's Harry Baker, a man who flees from a sullied life in Ohio to Los Angeles and who, true to his name, develops a style of cake that becomes the de-facto dessert of young Hollywood; later it well be reworked and homogenized as a signature recipe for General Mills. There's Esther Eng, an early 20th-century film auteur, her movies now mostly lost, whose fluency with the group dynamics of creating cinema translates to a second act as a New York restaurateur. In her masculine clothes and bluntly cropped hair, she is at once successful and invisible. Birdsall notes that Craig Claiborne, then food editor of the New York Times and the father of modern American restaurant criticism, reviewed Eng's self-named restaurant in the 1960s. Claiborne used his platform to push dining and cooking toward their current cultural status in the United States. Privately he was far more tragic — 'haunted,' to use Birdsall's word, by his difficult Southern childhood and misguided in a mess of a memoir published in 1983, 17 years before his death at 79. Birdsall does not abide counterfeit joy. He narrates lives shaped by society's denials, prejudices and punishments, and he lays their suffering bare. Some (among them Alice B. Toklas, James Baldwin and Richard Olney, one of my all-time favorite cookbook authors) know to leave the country to love in greater peace. Where delight comes easy is in Birdsall's prose. He took the narrative lessons he learned from his 2020 biography of James Beard, 'The Man Who Ate Too Much,' to tighten the intricate threads of this opus. Characters that appear early in the book return for lightbulb impact. No strand dangles. Even when the reader feels his own rage — as when he veers into a personal story about making quiche for a Sunday open house in the storm-center of the AIDS crisis — his eloquence carries us through the bitterest aftertastes. Birdsall centers his elucidation of queer culinary culture on people, and by extension the worlds around them. In 'Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights and Last Call Disco Fries at America's Gay Restaurants,' also published this month, Erik Piepenburg shifts the focus to place. His catalyst for his book: the accelerated disappearance of spaces by and for LGBTQ populations across America. He opens with a requiem for a 24-hour diner in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood where he was a regular in the 1990s. 'The Melrose was a gay restaurant because gay people made it one,' he begins. He watched older men share their meals and drag queens scarf bacon-and-cheese potato skins post performance, and took solace in blueberry silver dollar pancakes when chemistry fizzled with the guy across the table. The Melrose closed in 2017 after 56 years in business. 'When gay restaurants close, gay reliquaries empty of memory and meaning,' he writes. 'Gone are favorite waitresses and go-to-meals, safe spaces and party places in the night's last hours. For me and other gay people who love to eat out, losing a gay restaurant is a kind of dispossession.' Piepenburg traveled across the country throughout 2023, interviewing owners and customers of establishments still present and long gone. Chapters graft careful reporting with his own running commentary, at turns cheeky and poignant and angered by the tenuous state of gay rights and acceptance. Some salute institutions like Annie's Paramount Steak House in Washington D.C.; lesbian-feminist restaurant Bloodroot in Bridgeport, Conn.; and trans safe havens like Napalese Lounge and Grille in Green Bay, Wis. Others seek to debunk myths, including the supposed queer riot in 1959 at a downtown Los Angeles location of Cooper Do-nuts whose occurrence Piepenburg could find little hard evidence to support. To consider the future of gay dining, he considers two recently opened restaurants in Southern California: the Ruby Fruit in Silver Lake and Alice B. in Palm Springs. Piepenburg has been writing for the New York Times for nearly 20 years, concentrating mostly on film (especially horror), television and theater. He is, in the most wonderful sense, not a food writer. He self-identifies as a 'diner gay.' This is a work about history and, above all, community, not exalted poetry on the art of gastronomy. What strikes me most about Piepenburg's frame of reference is how explicitly and organically he twins the subjects of dining and sex. We rarely acknowledge the existence of sex in Food Writing. First, it's the hardest subject to not be cringe about, and food and sex analogies usually land as ick. But also, most of us who cover restaurants are keenly aware of ugly power dynamics that went unspoken in male-dominated kitchens for decades, and the industry as a whole is in a slow but sustained corrective era. The approach in 'Dining Out' succeeds in its matter-of-factness. Lonely people congregate over holiday buffets in bathhouses. Men frequented — still frequent — certain gayborhood restaurants to cruise, to pose, to be themselves. A bit of melancholy also winds through the book, as Piepenburg laments the 'golden age' of gay restaurants that halted at the turn of the millennium, if not before, and also his own aging. Here is where I mention: I met the author 35 years ago, in my early college years before either of us was out, so I relate to his feelings on the passage of time. When in the book he references his '90s-era club kid days, sporting 'shaggy wigs and carrying lunchboxes' at the Limelight in New York … I remember. Of course, the release of Birdsall's and Piepenburg's books was planned for visibility during Pride month. Their merits, individual and collective, make for absorbing, enlightening reading far beyond 30 days of designated LBGTQ recognition.
New York Times
14-06-2025
- 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.
