What is Queer Food?
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From KQED.

From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. Elegant and snappy, penetrating and tangy, John Birdzall's new book, What is Queer Food?, is a kind of personal history. Not personal in the memoir sense, but in the way that Birdzall traces a particular genealogy of queer freedom through cooking, friends, through a century.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

There are many ways one could approach the topic of food writer John Birdsall's new book, "What is Queer Food?" A kid's version with a rainbow of queer hero chefs, a playful cookbook sourced from an army of gay line cooks and lesbian farmers, a ponderous history detailing the fortunes of Castro restaurants. But in form alone, none of these straight-ahead approaches would be right.

This book moves through time and across the breadth of the big tent queer world, and it does so with funny, lusty, unbounded creativity. This book is hungry and thirsty. It is about quiche and AIDS, about the tortures of concealment and the ecstasies of revelation, the rewards of truth, and Richard Olney in tighty-whities serving country food on a hot French afternoon.

And perhaps it goes without saying, but this book is tethered to our region, to the Bay, to San Francisco, in ways that cannot be undone. In the long arc of this particular liberation struggle, our streets, our corners, our little restaurants, they are main characters in the drama of a community's becoming. Jon Birdzall, thank you so much for this book and thanks for joining us this morning. Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted.

uh to be sharing this book and especially sharing it with the bay area because as you as you say was really born in san francisco yeah let's start though with brioche who was this tender-hearted brioche loving middle schooler like tell me all his secrets so i grew up in a suburb of san francisco and my mom had a collection of cookbooks wait which one which one come on um it was belmont

down on the peninsula. And yeah, my mom had this collection of cookbooks that she would, you know, dip into on Sundays and special occasions. And the one that she dipped into a lot was this huge volume. It was Craig Claiborne's New York Times cookbook, which was impressive, sort of Bible thick. It seemed important. It sort of declared its importance. And it had a few books

some black and white photographs scattered through it. And even though my mom never made brioche, I was struck, arrested, fascinated, intrigued by this one photo of a table for two, nobody sitting at the table. And there was a brioche with its, you know, shiny top knot at each place and a glass of orange juice embedded in crushed ice.

Here brioche. Yes, yes. Here brioche is shown for a breakfast. It seemed the most sophisticated breakfast

thing that probably I had ever seen certainly in a cookbook I wanted to know everything about it, but the thing that haunted me was Who was the table set for like? Where were the people who were supposed to be having this kind of elegant breakfast and the fact that they were absent sort of as I say haunted me it was absence of

These people and somehow I knew that they were men. I knew that it wasn't you know a couple It wasn't gonna be a woman in a bathrobe. It was gonna be two men I don't even know how I knew that it was just a kind of insistence that was within me to Have some reality that was starting to dawn on me as I was starting to recognize my own my own sexuality

To have that reality echoed, it was kind of appropriate, maybe, that there were that, you know, these two men who I imagined, who I knew were going to break into this brioche were not were not pictured. I mean, but what a lovely flash forward, you know, what a lovely like vision of what a life could be, you know, a happy version of it, not a tragic one.

Yeah. And I have to say that, you know, growing up in Beaumont, sort of our essentially next door neighbors across this little canyon, the house we could see, were a gay couple, Pat and Lou, who became as close to me as my uncles, even closer. You know, I called them Uncle Pat and Uncle Lou. And they were a gay couple who had moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from the Midwest and

And they bought this suburban house. They were shunned by most of the neighbors on our block, but my mom and dad loved them. And so we were, I was treated to evenings at Pat and Lou's with my parents. They would have cocktails together.

We were invited to parties. They had friends from San Francisco, and this is like in the late 1960s. They had friends from San Francisco who, you know, who would come down for parties. I'd be allowed to, you know, sort of be there as a seven or eight year old boy for the first hour maybe before I was hustled home, you know, probably before the real party started. But it was this kind of magical situation that I had never, you know, none of my school friends knew.

Certainly their parents were not like this. And this was this enchanted world that I felt like I was on the brink of seeing and mostly kind of feeling the emotion of, feeling the happiness, the joy, the, I guess, slightly naughty side

of this household, these men, the food that they cooked, the food that they shared, which was so unlike the food that my mom cooked, the sort of practical, nutritious food. I mean, they... I don't know if they ever ate brioche, but they would have been... You know, I would have been surprised if they hadn't because it was just... It was kind of...

It was kind of fabulousness and joy that had been translated into food. Right, and I mean, they actually are crucial to the origin story of this book, right? They appear in this essay that you wrote in 2013 for the food magazine, dearly departed food magazine, Lucky Peach, in which it was Lou's Burgers, right? That were maybe your first encounter with this idea of this kind of sensuous...

food that went beyond home economics and that could be called queer food in some sense. Yes, yes. These burgers that, you know, nobody, no responsible adult would think of feeding, you know, like a nine-year-old boy. They were impossible to digest. They were, you know, rich, sort of gilded with Dijon mustard and caramelized onions and just enormous. And...

You know, the fact, not only the fact that I had been able to see, taste, experience, feel this food, but the fact also, which I only could piece together later, was that

essentially exactly a month before the Stonewall uprising in June 1969. So in May 1969, my uncle Pat had this heart attack at age 39, which killed him. And this world...

that I knew this kind of swirling world that was fed with such delicious things just suddenly disappears. Pat's family from St. Louis descends, essentially takes everything

Lou had to sell the house. He moved away. We saw him less and less. And so I kind of grew up, especially as I realized my own sexuality came out. I grew up with this sense that all of this was fragile, that this whole world that it seems so fundamental to me could be erased so easily by this culture, society, world of power beyond it.

And so much of my writing, especially since that 2013 essay in Lucky Peach, has been driven by this sense that, you know, it's my responsibility to illuminate this world, to piece together this world that had been erased, that had been disappeared from the culture and from families' personal lives, you know, families who couldn't deal with their relatives' sexuality.

So answering the title of the book, obviously, you know, took 12, 13 years here. So let's start with a slightly easier sub question in the book. Also pandered as the locals here. What was, as you put it, arguably the first queer restaurant in America? I would say, well, it's I.

I would place that right there in San Francisco called the Paper Doll. The Paper Doll opens in 1944 in North Beach in a little alley called Cadell Place, which is not too far from Union Square, but also weirdly hidden from it.

And the paper doll opens in 1944. It has a straight owner, Thomas Arbulich. And for a couple of years, it kind of runs as a neighborhood bar in North Beach. And then Thomas Arbulich sort of hands the bar to this woman named Mona Sargent, who was the proprietor, also straight, but the proprietor of the most famous lesbian bar in San Francisco at the time. Mona's. Mona's.

As one observer put it at the time, Mona just kind of turns it on as a gay bar. I think the interesting thing for me was how the paper doll kind of enforced this sense of respect for gay and lesbian patrons, and it would

allow people to present themselves, to dress, to wear makeup, to wear their hair in a certain way that was unacceptable on the street. So the paper doll was sort of this safe haven. It was a bar and restaurant. The food was pretty basic, but for 1940s, but for the 1940s, it had a kind of luxury about it. You know, it was prime rib and roast chicken.

And it became a place where everyone went. A lot of gay and lesbian bars, especially lesbian bars in San Francisco at the time, also operated as tourist attractions. You know, San Francisco still had that reputation, the glow of the old Barbary Coast. And tourists who came in the 1940s and 1950s wanted to experience a bit of that. So straight tourists would be

welcomed into places like Mona's even where they would see drag shows, you know, drag kings and drag queens. And it was, you know, it was something to sort of giggle over to gawk at.

But the paper doll didn't become a tourist stop, didn't become a stop on the Gray Line tour as one regular claimed. That it was really for us, meaning queer people. And there's an early diary of Susan Sontag. She's an undergraduate at UC Berkeley and she crosses the bay to go to the paper doll

And she's kind of astounded, she declares how the servers, you know, the women servers are very cute and they all dress as men. You know, and there was this, you know, places like New York City, there was this rule in bars, you know, that would be rated that, Audre Lorde talks about this in the 1950s, that, you know, you had to wear at least three pieces of clothing that were deemed appropriate to your gender

Or else you would get arrested. And the paper doll said no. We're talking with food writer John Bernthal about his new book, What is Queer Food? How We Served a Revolution. We'll be back with more right after the break.

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Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking with food writer John Birdsall about his new book, "What is Queer Food? How We Served a Revolution." He's also the author of "The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard." He's also won a couple of James Beard awards for his culture and food writing. Of course, we want to hear from you two. What's this conversation bringing up for you? How has food helped you connect within the queer community?

You know the number, it's 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. You can email your comments, your questions, your remembrances of the paper doll. That'd be amazing if someone has one out there. To [email protected] or you can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, etc. So, before we get into a couple of the specific foods that you talk about in this book and

I know that you've begun to answer this question by opening up the paper doll as a place of community and connection. You have to answer the dreaded question, which is the question in the title of your book. What is queer food? Very difficult. Obviously took a book to answer. Yeah. And, you know, I...

partly titled my book, What is Queer Food? Sort of as a challenge to myself, sort of answer that question. You know, since that 2013 piece I wrote on Lucky Peach, America, Your Food is So Gay, you know, almost every interviewer would ask me, you know, what is it? What is gay food? You know, is it, you know, is it this? Is it that? Is it, you know, protein shakes because so many gay men go to the gym? And, you know, the challenge

challenge for me to answer that question before I begin to answer it for you I have to go way back to talk about the inspiration

the person who even put that question in my mind, which is when, um, when I was cooking in San Francisco in the 1980s, uh, in restaurants, um, I started writing food pieces for an LGBTQ weekly called the Sentinel. Um, and the Sentinel had this kind of pioneering arts coverage in the 1980s under this great arts editor, Eric Hellman, um,

And, you know, instead of just writing about restaurants in the Castro, Eric invited me to move beyond the Castro to write about restaurants citywide. But to keep this question in my mind, what is there a gay sensibility of food? And if there is, what would that look like? You know, what would that taste like? How could you describe it?

And so even long after I stopped writing for the Sentinel, that question really hounded me. And so what is queer food? I mean, what is, you know, queer food is a culture and not a cuisine. Queer food, food is queered, you could say, by intention, by context, heavily by context. It could be by subverting traditional gender roles

I tell this story in my book of Shahar Zahav, which was a reformed Jewish community that formed in San Francisco in the 1970s. And there are great reports of their first Rosh Hashanah meal feast in 1978, which Harvey Milk attended a few months before his assassination.

But what was astounding to this mid-century generation who'd grown up in really traditional families was that for this Rosh Hashanah, the men did all the cooking and serving and the women said the prayers, blew the shofar. And for that generation, this was astonishing. And so even though the meal consisted of really traditional dishes, you know, the brisket, the apple cake, that

everyone had grown up with in Jewish households, the fact that they had subverted gender roles, queered this food, it becomes, you know, it's like this magic moment, this sort of magical transformation, when this same food becomes queered because of intention, because of the experience of these people who had known food and known these dishes in very different circumstances.

So, you know, and as you see the 20th century develop as the queer civil rights movement really picks up steam, you see these generations using food in ways to proclaim identity, to push back against erasure, to push back against discrimination, and really embracing certain foods as our own, our meaning queer.

making them visible in the public. You know, there had been a long tradition, especially in the early 20th century of queer people coming together, celebrating over food, building community over food, but in places where they couldn't be public, you know, house parties with the blinds closed or in bars with painted over windows. And so there's this incredible exuberance

you know, in the middle of the 20th century, in the 1960s, and especially after Stonewall, for food to come out, as it were, to proclaim its queerness, to proclaim its essential nature in queer identity and community formation. And that's what I really wanted to focus on. It's not about specific dishes, although there are certainly iconic dishes that have expressed queerness at various times in our history.

But this idea of coming out, eating food in queer spaces in public, being seen in public, opening restaurants, opening queer restaurants, ones perhaps inspired by the paper doll and even beyond,

proclaiming queerness in ways that residents of the paper doll couldn't have imagined in the 1940s. You also do trace a couple of, I guess I want to say intellectual strains or just historical movements within what you're calling queer food. I guess you say, this is just reading back to you from your book,

these kind of two strains of queer identity building at the table, the egalitarian and communal, more interested in collectivity than purity of cuisine, versus the epicurean and hedonistic, the cliché of the politically and ethically grounded lesbian vegetarian potluck versus the cliché of the glittering gay dinner party. And those two things do seem quite far apart on whatever dimension of the world that is.

But they are united by a way of building community, right? I mean, there's some deeper connection between them. Yeah, absolutely. And what struck me in doing my research was...

How those ideas really declare themselves in this series of salons, really, that took place over a nine-month period in 1956 in Paris with James Baldwin and Richard Olney, who would, you know, in the 1970s, write these really iconic cookbooks, French cookbooks,

And in those salons, which were just these sprawling affairs, they called them Saturday night function, you know, named for this Duke Ellington stomp that's, you know, threatens to sort of spin out of control this music. And the same way these salons, which would, you know, start on Friday night and end on Monday mornings with food, smoking, lots of drinking, talking, you know,

how you really start to see how this divergence presents itself. We think of Baldwin as someone who had this robust food life, but he was much more interested in expressing this empathy circle, bringing people to the table, calling people to the table, calling allies, friends, lovers to the table.

the nature of the food is not so important. And on the other end of the scale, you have Richard Only who is working on this project in the 1950s of sort of queering Escoffier, of taking these classic French dishes and also very rustic French dishes and turning them into stages for queer performance. You know, you mentioned at the top, Only in his tidy whities,

in his house in the south of France, entertaining guests on the terrace, including Alice Waters, who was tremendously influenced by only

But this sense of being seen, of turning food not only into this epicurean experience, but into this performative experience where we, meaning gay men, queer people, are flaunting everything, everything that's inside us. You know, all of the exuberance, all of the.

Ways that we're transforming culture and transforming society with food, you focusing on pleasure, focusing on the taste and the aroma of food, something which Americans in the mid 20th century were very uncomfortable with. You know, we still had this very sort of Calvinist idea that food should be.

muted, you know, that food should be about nutrition and about budgets, not about this experience that expressed joy and exuberance in the world. So I do think, you know, it's a cliche to say that there are those two strains.

But they, you know, and of course they coexist. They cross lines. They cross over. But these are two ways where a queer voice in food, a queer voice in the kitchen, in restaurants, in dining rooms, really, really, really, really do start to assert themselves. Let's bring in a first caller here. Let's bring in Barry in San Francisco. Welcome, Barry.

Hey, Alexis, thanks for taking my call. When I was younger and had just arrived in San Francisco in the late 80s, in the early 90s, there was a breakfast joint in Lower Hague called The Beehive. And what was wonderful about it, and it wasn't the food, the food was just...

just okay but it was this place that all the servers were drag queens or one of them was the artist and what was really fun about it was he got sassed and there was it was very performative because the way the food was delivered and who delivered it

was part of the fun, but the main thing was that it was a place in the middle of an AIDS epidemic when the whole community every week there'd be literally tons of obituaries in the newspaper, the BAR, and then there was this place among many where we had fun and we could exist as gay and lesbian and transgender people.

and just sort of enjoy something and have a relief. And I remember that really fondly because it was in Lower Haight and just like east of Fillmore Street on the south side. And it was wonderful. It was this great place. And maybe the author went with it. Thank you for letting me just describe that place.

Yeah, I don't specifically remember the beehive. I must have known about it at the time. But I think, you know, one of the huge queer innovations was visibility. You know, Billy West opened Zuni Cafe in San Francisco in 1979. And, you know, he's really inspired by restaurants in Provincetown.

And it was important to Billy to have his restaurant sited sort of at the edge of the Castro. So it wasn't a restaurant that, you know, because a lot of restaurants in the Castro kind of existed in this gay ghetto where, you know, they were clearly in gay zones and there were all these expectations about them. But Billy was very proud that his restaurant was close to City Hall. And so once the restaurant took off,

He knew the importance of having servers who were gay and let you know it through their just presentation. Servers who were gay, there were other servers who were not. But it was this sense of here at the heart of San Francisco power was a restaurant where you were being served this amazing food by clearly individuals

gay waiters and that was that was a you know that was an important step toward visibility and especially as you mentioned during the AIDS crisis when there was so much fear and misinformation you know this irrational fear that you know you could perhaps be infected by you know a drop of a drop of sweat from a waiter that that that fell into your food this was a real declaration of

our power and our resilience. You know, you have a section in the book. Many people know the restaurant Zuni, absolutely legendary, longtime San Francisco restaurant. I didn't know that there was a tradition during the period Barry's talking about that was Mondays at Zuni. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, Zuni, of course, you know, like every other restaurant in San Francisco in the 1980s and 1990s was hugely impacted by the AIDS epidemic. I remember Vince Calcagno, the co-owner of Zuni Cafe, telling me that I think, you know, in that period, I think 24 Zuni employees had passed away as a result of AIDS.

And in this period, Zuni and other restaurants, I mean, they tended to be closed. They tended to be dark on Mondays. But Zuni started this tradition of holding memorials on Monday nights at Zuni for friends and lovers who had passed away because of the AIDS epidemic. You know, they could be people directly related to the restaurant or they could be the loved ones or friends of regular customers.

But people would gather in the restaurant. There'd be margaritas or champagne, a few snacks, and people would stand up and eulogize their lovers who had passed. It's incredibly moving to me. I mean, someone who grew up in restaurants in San Francisco, essentially, I started my first

cooking job at Greens in San Francisco in 1983. Fort Mason. Yeah, at Fort Mason, you know, the same time I was coming out. So my experience of coming out in San Francisco happened at the same time that I was becoming part of restaurant families. I was learning to cook. And so there's something incredibly powerful to me about cooking

Being at a restaurant on the nights when it's closed, you know, when all the usual hubbub, all the usual magic is gone, you know, you're really aware of the smells of a closed restaurant, you know, the buzz of the coolers. And it's this sense that, you know, restaurants exist to nurture us, to give us pleasure and delight.

And that same thing was happening in a very different context in places like Zuni when there were memorials for people who had passed. Food could also become something that could carry the force of eulogy, that could

underline our sense of community, even at a time of tremendous sorrow when many of us were pulling back from these queer lives that we had established for ourselves in the city. A time of deep mourning and restaurants like Zuni, like others, could adapt

to this time and still offer comfort to those of us who would have been celebrating in these same places on other nights. We're talking with the food writer John Birdzall about his new book, "What is Queer Food? How We Served a Revolution." Birdzall is also the author of "The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard," just

To be clear, James Beard was gay. And so obviously this has been a theme in this work for a while. And James Beard also arises in this book as well. John has won two James Beard awards for his work.

culture and food writing and of course we want to wrap you into this conversation as well in what ways do you consider food queer do you think there's such a thing as as queer food what does it mean to you what's this conversation uh bring up or maybe you remember some of the places like barry did uh the beehive there in the lower hate you can give us a call the number is 866-733-6786

That's 866-733-6786. If you can't get through there, you can try the email. The email is forum at kqed.org. And, of course, we're on Blue Sky. We're on Instagram. And we have our Discord. We're kqedforum. We are going to get to quiche. And when we get back, Noel on the Discord writes, whatever happened to quiche?

I remember the joke in the 1980s, real men don't eat quiche. And it turns out that has like the nastiest history, which we will hear about when we come back. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more with Jon Birdsell when we come back.

Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities. Where AI and sustainability are integrated into every facet of business education.

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Welcome back to Forum, joined by Jon Birdzall. He's got a new book out called "What is Queer Food? How We Served a Revolution." And it is time to talk about quiche. I have been waiting. This is one of these fascinating topics where you sort of-- as a kid, I sort of picked up a bunch of cultural accretions about quiche, but had no idea of the actual real history. So what is the-- how did quiche become what it is? So I have to say that in the research for my book,

really led me to Quiche. I was doing some searching in digital archives and I found this contact sheet of Andy Warhol in the Andy Warhol collection at Stanford. And it's a contact sheet of Andy and someone else

at Truman Capote's apartment in New York City in the 1970s. Obviously, they've arrived for lunch. And Truman, you know, this is a really difficult time for Truman. You know, he'll die a few years later. And, you know, he's been pretty much racked by people

writers block, alcoholism. But you see Truman welcoming them and he's welcoming them with this enormous, gorgeous, luscious looking quiche. He probably took a taxi to La Cote Basque and bought this quiche and brought it back and he's just beaming. It's not the Truman that we know from Studio 54 in a big fedora and sunglasses. His face is sort of naked and

But, you know, through this obviously difficult time, he's just beaming over this quiche that he's going to serve to Andy Warhol.

And it struck me that quiche is pretty much the most expressive food of queer emotion and queer power that kind of develops in the 1970s and 1980s. You know, Americans before the 1940s were not likely to know quiche unless they traveled to France a lot. It was an exotic, unusual, luxurious dish, you know, quiche Lorraine. It becomes popular in France.

broad American kind of gourmet circles. And then it really falls out of fashion. It becomes this kind of unloved thing. It's kind of, you know, de classe by the 1960s.

But of course, you know, gay people, we are masters at finding discarded stuff, you know, an old sofa on the sidewalk and taking it home and making it amazing, making it fabulous. And that's kind of what happens to Quiche. You know, if you look at the archives of the Bay Area Reporter, the Gay Weekly,

in San Francisco, you find all of these celebrations that happen and they're fueled by quiche, you know, so there might be fundraisers in bars, wet jockstrap contests, and Leatherman contests. And the draw really is that, you know, you get a fat slice of quiche Lorraine. Is that really the draw, John? Well, maybe it will sort of fuel your

appreciation of you know the wet jockstrap contest but it also then becomes this incredibly expressive thing you kind of see quiche adapting within different sub communities in queer culture I have this self-published cookbook

that was done in 1980 by these two lesbians who lived in San Francisco and they had a sh*tty apartment that where they had you know a glimpse of Castro Street from their apartment and they have this recipe for Castro Corner Quiche they call it

And it's a very different quiche than the sort of quiche Lorraine that was happening in leather bars. And this is, you know, vegetarian broccoli quiche, you know, with a salad oil crust. There's this wonderful drag queen who's popular in San Francisco and L.A. in the 1980s named Billy Gordon. And Billy has a cookbook called You've Had Worse Things in Your Mouth.

And Billy Gordon sort of adapts Quiche Lorraine, she calls it Quiche Luanda. It's this real assertion of identity, identity, power, pleasure, enjoyment. Of course, Quiche becomes the draw at brunch, which becomes this

essentially gay weekly party. Weekend brunch is something where we assert our new identity, where we're remaking

socializing, remaking, partying, remaking the family as it were. And of course that's followed by this nasty reaction, a sort of surprise hit book called Real Men, Donnie Kish. Yeah, Real Men, Donnie Kish is published in 1982. The author is Bruce Feierstein. Parts of it appeared in Playboy magazine.

And it's a pushback against this new, quote unquote, soft masculinity of the Jimmy Carter era.

And it's also this incredibly homophobic attack on quiche and it becomes a bestseller unexpectedly, I guess. And it also becomes this vehicle for the broader culture to kind of reassert homophobia. You know, you have these sort of national newspaper columnists, you know, who now have permission to go, you know, ask

a gay hairdresser if he serves quiche. And it's just kind of dripping with-- Nothing has made me want to eat quiche more than reading about that book and its reception in 1982. It's just this sort of toxic book that's sort of dressed up in what a later generation would call politically

incorrect humor. So it was, you know, it sort of allows the culture to reassert the patriarchy, to reassert itself. You know, Phyllis Schlafly, the famous anti-feminist

in Washington when something like 50 or 52 senators, U.S. senators, declare that they're open to passing the Equal Rights Amendment, Phyllis Schlafly sends each one of them a quiche, you know, as if to say, you know, you're not real men, you know, if you support the rights of women. So it is this just really kind of dark moment

dark inflection to a community, queer community that is finding its voice, that is finding its power before AIDS sort of changes the calculation for everyone. Real men don't eat quiche becomes this weapon of the patriarchy to kind of push back on this new enlightened

culture that's been forming. I mentioned cooking at starting to cook at Green's restaurant in 1983. Deborah Madison who founded the restaurant who's amazing, tons of respect for her. We essentially would serve various quiche at the restaurant but we weren't allowed to call it that. You know, we called it savory tarts because quiche had been so debased broadly in the culture.

Let's bring in Tony in San Francisco. Welcome, Tony. Hi there. I just wanted to thank the guests for, again, for bringing this to the forefront. At least today, it was a total surprise listening to the show. And it harked back to me very emotionally to a period of my life as a child. I grew up in a restaurant here in San Francisco.

thanks to my granddad and uncle, who, my grandaunts, there were two sisters actually from Chile that came and started a restaurant here. But they were compelled by their son, or in this case, Gabriel, who was unfortunately, you know, he was depressed.

taken too early. He died at 33, taken by the AIDS pandemic. But he was always such a beautiful host, really kind of was the front of house for this restaurant, and really just came to life every day that he was at this

at this restaurant and his community that supported him and of course his mother and our family that just also kind of found comfort and refuge in this small restaurant or a few down the line. And it just struck me

uh... in such a way that i'm getting a little emotional right now but uh... we miss him dearly and uh... and i just really appreciate that that a restaurant and the comfort of food hospitality the human nature of it all uh... what it does for for us and uh... and and you know now it is just immortalized in in time and place

in San Francisco and Hayes Valley. Actually, Rich Table is the physical space. Oh, really? Gabriel Vidal, Gabriel Vidal, and Lucia Prado, which is his mother. And yeah, the corner of, if you're familiar with Rich Table, the corner of, I believe, Hayes and Fell, that was Lucia's restaurant. And yeah, just vivid memories. We miss him dearly, but thank you for today's show. Thanks for bringing him into the conversation. Thanks, Tony.

Yeah, I'm so sorry to hear that. I mean, I, you know, having been of that generation that was so devastated in San Francisco, it's, I mean, we, those of us who, through some crazy circumstances, you know, luck or whatever, happened to survive, I do feel sorry.

I do feel a tremendous responsibility to try to tell the stories of the generation that didn't, of the people who didn't.

I don't think we've ever adequately, I mean, I know that we haven't adequately addressed the effect of that pandemic in food and restaurants in San Francisco and elsewhere. You know, the enormous loss that we suffered and how it transformed restaurants, how it transformed American food that a whole generation, brilliant generation who pioneered American restaurants,

is gone. We lost that generation. I'm so glad that you were able to mention his name and to conjure him in this conversation. I feel really honored and thank you for that. I want to turn to a few comments that have come in. Kate writes, "The things I think of while listening to this conversation

New Dawn Cafe on 16th Street in San Francisco circa 1990 to 1995. Broken mannequin, arty baby doll, campy tchotchke decor, the cook was queer, maybe trans woman, often in a frilly apron. Best home fries ever and everyone was welcome, including the well-known street characters whom outsiders would tend to avoid. My partner and I are still trying to replicate those home fries.

Usually,

I was right and they had just equated the two and for the patio cafe in the Castro with young cute men serving in pink polo shirts.

Let me get one more question. That's such a great comment, Kate, and let's make sure we leave it up. Kiki writes, "For me, queer food is embodied in the venerable upper Midwestern delicacy known as Queen Anne Cherry Salad. It is of course not really a salad because it has mini marshmallows, heavy whipping cream, Miracle Whip, and lots of canned fruit. The star of the show is of course the Royal Anne Cherry, which my mother misnamed Queen Anne Cherry.

I moved to San Francisco in 1994 law school, made a big double batch of it for a Thanksgiving party where it was ridiculed. Until people discovered it was an excellent topping for pumpkin pie, it has been a mainstay of queer camp celebrations here in the Bay ever since. So much in those, one thread I want to pull out for you because I think you really address it beautifully in the book is how camp, like the varieties of camp that end up serving as

entertainment, but community building. Talk to me about camp and food. Yeah, I mean, camp has been such an important influence on our food. I mean, some of the commenters there sort of describing some of the ways where this kind of exuberance about

kind of putting together foods, some of which we remembered growing up. I also, you know, in my book, I write about Ernest Matthew Meichler, who wrote White Trash Cooking, which was published in 1986. And Ernie passed away because of AIDS a couple of years later in 1988. White Trash Cooking becomes this unexpected hit,

You know, Ernie grew up in coastal Florida and basically had to leave, you know, like many of his generation had to leave the place where he was born and grew up in order to express himself, in order to be queer. He does spend time in San Francisco, but he writes this book, White Trash Cooking, that

basically goes back to the kinds of communities where he grew up, where he was essentially exiled from and kind of embraces this food, this southern cooking that was based on a lot of canned ingredients and, you know, pudding mixes and jello. And instead of making fun of it, he uses camp to

to embrace it, to reclaim it. I love that idea of camp being used to reclaim places of exile. You know, a place like coastal Florida where you could so easily make fun of people who live in trailers and the kind of people who wouldn't accept you, wouldn't accept you for being queer, but kind of going back and saying, you know, this is part of me. This is part of my queer identity, even if

the people who still live here can't accept me. So it's really this loving tribute. I find that incredibly moving how people were able to express difficult things through camp, not only joy and fun, but to go back home, as it were, by using camp as a way to embrace and elevate

certain dishes, recipes, traditions. Yeah. You know, one of the things that is very difficult this time is, you know, the Trump administration has been really quite specifically targeting people around, you know, gender, sexuality, gender roles. Do you think there's a queer food response? Ooh, yeah. I mean, part of the reason why I wanted to write this book was to look at

previous generations, to focus on previous generations and the way that though people couldn't express openly, though they couldn't come together in public spaces, they couldn't present themselves as they wanted to, as they needed to, they were able to survive. They were able to do it

in the safe spaces that they could carve out. In my book, I talk about the series of lesbian potlucks that happened in New York City in the early 1950s during the Lavender Scare where people were afraid to go out to bars because they felt they would be spotted. Somebody would see them going into a queer bar and they'd be reported, they'd be fired.

But the way people persevered, the way they created alternate forms to survive and thrive, is really drawn to my sense of queerness, my definition of queerness, is really influenced by a comment that Bell Hooks made.

The wonderful writer once said when she was asked to define her sexuality, she said that she was queer. She considered herself queer not because of who she slept with, but in the sense of queerness as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent, has to create new ways, new creative ways to survive and to express itself.

And, you know, in our current moment, so much of our history is being erased. You know, erasing a letter from LGBTQ, you know, photos and stories being disappeared from national archives. But still, we can, you know, we can thrive in new ways that we're just imagining now.

John Birdzall, thank you so much for joining us. The new book is What is Queer Food? I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim.

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