What exactly is queer food? If a queer person cooks something, does that automatically make it "queer food"? That's the topic of John Birdsall's new book, conveniently titled What Is Queer Food?
Evan Kleiman: Can you start off by painting a picture for us of Lil' Deb's in Hudson, New York? In the prologue to your book, you call it the queerest restaurant in America. Why?
John Birdsall: Well, for multiple reasons. I went to Lil' Deb's in 2022 and it's in Hudson, New York, which is kind of like a hip satellite of Brooklyn or something in the Hudson Valley. Lil' Deb's has gone out of its way to make itself a welcoming queer space. There's signage everywhere, you know, like, "If you gay, perfect!" Its decor changes. When I was there, it was this wild, sort of tattered Mardi Gras vibe of streamers that were falling from the ceiling, you know, purple beads.
And the food is quite delicious. It hails from different places in the world, reflecting the owners' backgrounds. When I went there, I just had this sense that for the first time, maybe for the first time ever, in a restaurant, I was just seen as a queer customer. And it made me think how much armor I carry around normally in non-queer spaces, and how Lil' Deb's let me relax and feel like I was surrounded by queer people in this affirming queer space, eating affirming queer food.
In your work, you've explored the challenges of expressing queerness through food. You write, "Saying what queer food was on a granular level kept eluding me." In the intervening years — and this speaks to the title of your book — where have you landed on the question. What is queer food?
Well, to answer that question, I felt like I needed to go back into history and to basically trace queer experience across most of the 20th century. My book starts in the late 19th century, at the moment when the word "homosexual" is first used in the United States. I go all the way through to about 1985, which is sort of the beginning, first few years of the AIDS crisis in the US.
I wanted to basically overlay a map of food stories over the history of queer consciousness and the queer civil rights movement of the 20th century. So I wanted to braid together all these stories from figures, some of whom are well known, and others who are obscure, who somehow reflect that history in their food lives, and who have very diverse food lives, but hopefully together, all of that spells what queer food is.
How queer food is has been this consistent pushing back against this kind of normative culture that in most decades of the 20th century has been really homophobic.
"It made me think how much armor I carry around normally in non-queer spaces," says Birdsall about discovering Lil' Deb's in the Hudson Valley. Photo by Rachel Marei Castillo.
I'm fascinated by Chinese American filmmaker and restaurateur Esther Eng. She was working during the 1930s, '40s and '50s, at a time when homosexuality was very much frowned upon. How did she manage to live openly as a lesbian, and what was her restaurant like?
That's one of the most fascinating angles of my book. I was completely immersed in the life of Esther Eng, whose story has been revived a little bit, but she's still not known the way she deserves to be.
Esther Eng was born of Chinese American parents in San Francisco's Chinatown. And as you say, in the 1930s she became a filmmaker. She actually made the first Technicolor talking picture in Cantonese that was made in Hollywood. Then later, she had this brilliant career making films in Hong Kong until the start of World War II ended all of that. Later, she resurfaced after 1949 as a restaurateur in New York City's Chinatown, and opened a string of restaurants and was really a celebrated figure within the Chinatown communities.
As you say, she lived her life unafraid. She didn't present herself in ways that women were expected to in those decades. So she would wear tailored suits. She had her hair cut very short, and she was quite uninhibited about being photographed with women whom she was involved with, who were usually the stars of her movies, these actresses.
What's striking to me is how little this history is known, or was known. To me, how little it's been a part of American history, but how progressive China was in the early 20th century, between the fall of the last Dynasty and the rise of the communists. Unlike the West, where homosexuality was really stigmatized, it had a place in Chinese culture. I think this helped Esther Eng live this fearless life. Granted, she did it in the US, but she was quite an extraordinary figure.
Sadly, when she died in 1970, she was kind of eulogized, or, you know, there was an obituary in the New York Times that just described her as a restaurateur. Her film career had basically been been forgotten about, and one of the figures who kept her alive is Craig Claiborne, The New York Times restaurant critic, who himself was queer and had a complicated queer life, but who really was fascinated by Esther, not only the food in her restaurants but how she presented herself publicly.
Let's turn now to James Baldwin. You paint this wonderful portrait of him arriving in Paris in 1948. He has used the last of some fellowship money to get there. He's broke, often hungry. How does he find ways to feed himself, both literally and metaphorically, and how does this connect to his queerness?
Yeah, Baldwin. I love Baldwin in that period where he's so unsure of what he's doing, and just kind of feels all this guilt for abandoning his family, his poor mother and siblings back in Harlem, but realizes if he wants to write, if he wants to be an artist, that he really has to do this selfish act and go to Paris with the last of his money. He figures out a way to survive through the kindness of strangers, as it were, by becoming part of this poor, impoverished bohemian community of artists in Paris.
Rather than being this sort of romantic romp as an expat in Paris, it's pretty grim where he lives. At some point, he sings in this Paris club. He sings the man I love, you know, just to get a chicken dinner. I think what really drew me to James Baldwin was I'm so used to thinking of food as this wonderful, communal sharing experience, everybody welcome around the table. What I saw in Baldwin was someone who wrote about hunger as the ultimate queer experience.
In a way, Baldwin was much more interested in who was sitting around his table, who he was sharing with, and just the act of sharing, the act of empathy around the table, rather than celebrating this glorious food, which he couldn't afford in Paris anyway, and I think it's the heart of Baldwin's art.
As a writer, as a novelist, to take this idea of hunger as a virtue and definitely a queer virtue that queer people had to struggle so much in the United States, especially after the war, when things got extremely homophobic in American society, that just finding each other, being poor together, eating whatever they they could sometimes, sometimes eating well, sometimes not having food for days, was something that really sort of defined this queer community of the table.
"What is Queer Food?" traces the queer experience across the 20th century through the lens of food. Photo courtesy of W.W. Norton.
Starting in the 1980s there's the devastation of the AIDS pandemic. How does that shape queer cuisine?
Harvey Milk, the great out gay supervisor in San Francisco, the first openly gay elected politician in the United States, he's elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, was assassinated in 1978. But in those few years, certainly in cities like San Francisco, LA, Miami, and New York, there's this burgeoning political power of gay and lesbian people. AIDS/HIV comes along, and in a way, they re-stigmatize gay men, for sure.
In the restaurant world, there was so much ignorance, and I think so little intervention, certainly from the federal government, to educate people about the disease. I'm sure you remember from back in the day how there was this fear that perhaps you could get AIDS from a waiter's fingerprints or a drop of sweat that might have fallen in your food. All that is, of course, incorrect. But I think it made people burrow deeper in the closet.
Apart from that, because there were so few resources, certainly federal resources, that were directed at the problem… Certainly, I know from my experience living in San Francisco in the 1980s, we really felt like we were this tribe who had to fend for ourselves. We had to create alternate ways of being. We had to teach each other about safe sex. We had to teach each other about staying healthy. Food certainly plays a part in that.
A lot of people that I knew in the 1980s would suddenly turn to what we called natural foods, eating better, eating healthy, eating fermented foods, to try to stay as healthy as we could for as long as we could. Unfortunately, I think it kind of underscored this idea that queer people were a subculture that was just left to figure it out for ourselves.
Where are we now, in the year 2025, with queer cuisine? Do you have any better of a handle on what it is and where we can find it? What are its hallmarks?
I have to say that it's hard to keep up with it. There's so much going on right now. I wrote the piece that got me really, really thinking about queerness and food in 2013 in Lucky Peach. At that time, it still felt like there was really nobody talking about this or that. It felt super, super niche. In the last few years, it's really exploded.
Last month, I was in Boston for the Big Queer Food Fest, which was this week-long celebration of queer chefs from around the country. There were panels, there were discussions, there were dinners, there was this real celebration of queerness and food. Last spring at Boston University, I was at the first queer food conference, which was an academic conference talking about queer food history but also talking about where we are now.
I looked around at the conference attendees, and they were mostly people in their maybe early or mid-20s. So I feel like there's this generational shift toward accepting the idea of queerness in food, of embracing this idea that our identity as queer people is intimately tied up with food, how we cook, who we cook, for what we profess in our food, and all of the ways that we can take care of our community and take care of other communities, be good allies to other communities through food and cooking.
There are more and more chefs who are coming out and proclaiming this idea that their food is shaped by their queer experience. I think of Telly Justice in a restaurant in New York City called Hags, who is a trans chef and she cooks food that layers things that feel like surprise when you pull back the layers and eat this food. So it's this wonderful expressiveness that's happening in queer food right now.