What Is Queer Food? We Ate Some and Still Aren't Sure
What is queer food? Danny and Soleil go to Deluxe Queer to eat and find out what “queer food” is.
Life
What Is Queer Food? We Ate Some and Still Aren't Sure
What is queer food? Danny and Soleil go to Deluxe Queer to eat and find out what “queer food” is.
Soleil: Nearly every essay that I have read about queer food begins with the question, “What is queer food?” so I will oblige with a bit of context.
James Beard biographer John Birdsall shot the first volley of such a concept with his 2014 essay on the gay progenitors of new American cuisine, titled “America, Your Food Is So Gay.” For Birdsall, who expanded the piece into a whole book earlier this year, the queerness of food is all about context: who’s cooking for whom; where they’re doing it; and why. Queer food is the cannabis brownie dropped off at the doorstep of a person living with AIDS; it’s the composed salad that conceals the closeted garde manger cook’s flashes of rage and frustration within its tangles of frisée.
Sean Ang, left, chef and founder of Deluxe Queer, serves Lo Hei and small bites during a Deluxe Queer dinner. (Estefany Gonzalez/COYOTE Media Collective)
In a 2018 article for Eater, trend writer Kyle Fitzpatrick continued Birdsall’s initial thread: “The one thing queer food isn’t is a rainbow cupcake …. 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.”
Queer food is having a persistent moment, serving as a conceptual foothold for so many branching paths in the culinary world. You have Queer Soup Nights in Sonoma, Portland, and Queens; a whole-ass Queer Food Conference, now entering its second year; and even a christening, three years ago, of Oakland as “the queer food capital.” (It’s also worth noting that the strongest example in Oakland, Friends and Family, plans to shutter in December.)
Is that clear enough? Probably not. Some may still be vexed by queer food in the way that I’m personally vexed by a beautiful person who I’m not sure is flirting with me or not. What are you about? What did you mean by that? Why did you touch my shirt? Where do we go from here?
In pursuit of clarity I took my colleague Danny Lavery with me to Deluxe Queer, an Oakland-based collective that’s been throwing roving, themed dinner parties for queer people for the past three years.
We brought a bottle of the finest non-alcoholic bubbly on the market (Heinz Wagner’s Pinot Noir Rosé), our winningest smiles, and a shared desire to get to the bottom of this question. (And question some bottoms.)