Brendan McHugh: So John, why don't you tell me what queer food is?

John Birdsall: Well, for ten, twelve years now, I've been trying to answer that question through a historical lens, looking at the formation of queer communities and the queer civil rights movement and considering that question through the perspective of events in the 20th century. For me, it's food that sustained marginal groups of people throughout most of the 20th century that then became foods of resistance. Even in the pre-Stonewall era, food that was self-consciously reflective of gay and trans ways of being, ways of coming together, ways of living became food that then consciously became foods of resistance. I think after Stonewall, after the LGBTQ civil rights movement was under way, certain foods became important as ways of defining communities and linking all these subcultures into something that people could look at and feel like there was a larger community of queer people nationally and also internationally.

BM: I was surprised by the form the book took because it felt mosaic like more so than a historical timeline where you start in the late 19th century and move forward. None of the stories are explicitly linear. How did you come to decide to kind of write it like that or was there a lot of experimentation on your part? Because your biography of James Beard was pretty standard in terms of how it was laid out.

JB:  I mean, speaking of The Man Who Ate Too Much, the Beard biography. Looking back, I would have probably organized it and written it in a different way. Being my first book, my first kind of solo book, and taking on a biography, I think I didn't necessarily have the confidence to assert my voice, to really assert myself as a writer in terms of form. I think it reflects a kind of first book jitters in nervousness and kind of finding a little comfort somehow in a more traditional form. You know, for a good 12 years since “Your Food is So Gay” in 2013, that kind of mosaic approach to writing has really spoken to me. It has allowed me to unlock my voice. Partly, it has to do with the challenges of looking at queer history, which has relied mostly on oral histories and queer figures of the past. Usually there are fragments of people's lives, people left fragments of their autobiographies in different documents. It's sort of juxtaposing stories and eras and it has felt like a natural way of delving into queer history in a more literary or a narrative way. The ability to do that gives me a certain power. It kind of unlocks my voice. I think it's been a successful way for me to acknowledge gaps and also acknowledge ambivalence in the lives of people who I've looked at.

BM: I appreciated that you did acknowledge the gaps. The earlier part of the book reminded me of a kind of queer history that's not as done as much anymore. But because they were historians and trying to make it a legitimate field, acknowledging the gaps was not exactly a strategy they could use. Because it was proper history with capital H. Seeing you getting to do that, like looking at Harry Baker, even just acknowledging the limits of people's ability to be open by choice or by survival, or how you write about Alice B. Toklas tried to suppress certain conversations around Gertrude Stein’s, as well as her own sexuality and identity. Everything you write about Craig Clairborn. You just mentioned how writing in this style opened up your voice. I noticed that because, having read your work and read your sub-stack. Do you feel that there's a disciplinarian edge per se when it comes to how people write about food and food history and that you were bucking it in this book?

JB: I've felt for a long time that I've bucked what used to be and maybe still is the sort of dominant mode in food writing, which is like a celebratory mode, which is: I've discovered this. It's fantastic. You have to try this kind of thing. I wanted to subvert that by introducing ambivalence. I got my start writing about food in the early 2000s, as an editor in the Bay Area. There were five pretty major daily newspapers that were all independent of each other. Each had its own food editor and independent food section. It was difficult, but it was a better environment as a freelancer. There would be freelancers starting out because they all had—granted they were small—but they all had budgets for buying freelance stories. This one editor of what used to be called the Contra Costa Times, the East Bay Times or something, the food editor that food editor there, Nicholas Bohr, I just sent him this sort of sample restaurant view. He just he happened to need need somebody, and he took a chance on me crazily. I’ll have you know so much I'm so grateful to him for doing that. My idea was to write restaurant reviews that were different. I was sort of trying out voices and he would indulge me. Like Why don't I write a restaurant review just as 10 bullet points, or try to subvert that form by writing, instead of introduction, atmosphere, first course, second course, to write it backwards, What if I started with the sweets. Hopefully, I could pull this off in a way the reader wouldn't notice. That that's what I was doing. At some point he said to me I've read this review of yours, I can't tell if you thought it was good or not. Could you just say somewhere that you think this food is good or this is not good? I was just describing the experience and not wanting to, as a critic, impose my kind of critical point of view, my opinion about the quality of the food, on the reader. That was dumb, but I tried. That's always been my approach in some ways—to try to subvert. Fortunately, I was then able to write about food for the alt weekly papers in the Bay Area, East Bay Express primarily. I became a staff writer after that and was able to have more of an outsider, experimental voice. I've always carried that with me.

Looking at James Beard, the two existing biographies of James Beard were pretty straightforward in their sort of celebration of American food and this wonderful quirky character. It was very important for me to include difficult information and to try to let the reader decide if they liked this figure or felt like this figure was just deeply, deeply wrong. Someone who practiced sexual abuse and took advantage of younger assistants. At the same time was this kind of very life affirming figure in American food history. So yes, it's always been very important for me to include very deep shadows of any figures in what is queer food. Of course, Craig Clairborne kind of becomes that central character who can take and carry that ambivalence. But someone like Harry Baker, as well. Seen objectively, Harry Baker is not very appealing, not a very attractive person. He abandons his family. We don't know what his private relationships are like. He apparently has a relationship with a much younger assistant. I think I'm very sensitive to those earlier generations of gay men. It's been hard for me because I have tremendous sympathy for the conditions under which they lived—the restrictions, the deep homophobia that they lived with and participated in out of necessity. I thought about how to describe those lives, hopefully in a way that feels true and that doesn't shy away from the dark places, but that also gives them a kind of dignity. I think those gay histories that you had mentioned –– a really early influential one is Jonathan Ned Katz's Gay American History, which was published in '76, took an approach that was common in the San Francisco that I came out into in the early 1980s. It was celebrations of figures of the past, lists of people who are gay and lesbian in history –Alexander the Great, Eleanor Roosevelt depicted as figures of pride, but, of course, when you look at their lives, it's very complicated. By no means would they be figures who would necessarily be on a pride float. The book and podcast Bad Gays is an important corrective to a certain extent. 

BM: What you just mentioned about your biography of James Beard, that's what I appreciated about it so much. I definitely knew who James Beard was, I definitely know who Craig Clairborn is, but I didn't know so much about the behind the scenes aspect of their lives as semi -closeted gay men. And the stories of all those people in those early chapters I wasn't aware of. They had these sometimes vibrant lives, sometimes pretty sad. But in a way you're moved to look at what accomplishments there are, what contributions there are, plus the parts that are uncomfortable. I mean, that is what is queer about the book to me. It could have just been a celebration. You write in a shorter chapter about how cookbooks in and of themselves are a conservative project, which I liked and I had never thought of before. Where you also talk about Julia Child's own homophobia and how complex that is for you. I think its complicated for many queer people who also idolize her. That wasn't ever something she got over but it's still like her whole thing is quite fabulous. It's difficult. That's one part I felt of what Queer Food was also doing– looking at that side of things that are more difficult to take in. 

JB: I think Julia is key to understanding these earlier figures like James Beard, Clairbourne, and Harry Baker because Julia was quite warm and quite close to a lot of gay men in the industry while, at the same time, just feeling free, apparently, to express this homophobia. When I was doing research for the Beard book, I spoke with Marion Cunningham, who's passed away now, but I was speaking with a man, a gay man who had kind of worked with her as an assistant. He said that Marian was always just completely befuddled by Julia's homophobia. She remembers picking Julia up at SFO once she came to do some appearance. They drove up the freeway where you can see the San Francisco skyline and Julia just said casually in the car something like, “San Francisco, such a beautiful city. Too bad the faggots have taken it over.” You know, just like out of nowhere, they weren't talking about that. I mentioned Laura Shapiro, who wrote this great short biography of Julia Child and takes on her homophobia and concludes that it wasn't her distaste of gay people, of gay men, per se. It was that this was a violation of the social order. This was a violation of the rules. If you happen to be gay, you conducted yourself in a certain way and you just didn't talk about it and you kind of lived your own quiet private sort of secret life. And that's the way it should be. You just didn't violate those rules. What is Queer Food? In a way it is about generations finding the confidence to violate those rules, finding the necessity to violate those rules, using food and cooking and for lack of a better cliche, coming together at the table.

BM:  I'll allow it. On the other hand, you have Julia and you have Edna Lewis. I wasn't expecting Edna Lewis to show up in the book. And, granted, I'm not going to act like I'm some expert on Edna Lewis, but I know who she is. So, it brings me to the way you use the analysis and lens of queer and how you center for a good portion of the book Edna Lewis in connection to all these gay men. I just was so pleased to see her in the book and also, as you very clearly state, we can't make any claims to what her sexuality was when she was alive.

JB: I mean one thing that I wanted to do with the book was to or try to do with the book was to expand the notion of queerness inspired by that essay by Cathy Cohen. To challenge people to think about queerness as something beyond desire. And also take it out of the dominant hands of the gay white cis male power structure that the TQ movement was under and to think about queerness in a different way as resistance of marginalized people more broadly. It felt like Edna Lewis was the perfect figure to carry that and take that on. The more I looked at Edna Lewis—and again, there's not a lot on Edna Lewis's life that's out there—the more that I looked, the more I realized that we don't know, just going by published accounts and by some oral histories of Edna Lewis, we really don't know who she was. We don't know a lot of things about her private life and certainly about her heart. I wanted to sort of look at Edna Lewis through the lens of being a queer figure. I was nervous about doing that because I don't know what the reception will be. There's such general admiration for Edna Lewis in the food community. She's such a hero of so many things for so many people, but a queer icon has not been one of them. I was very sensitive about appropriating her for my own agenda. I tried very hard to try to bring the reader along. You know, I think the thing about Edna Lewis, much like James Beard previously, was that certain powerful voices shaped the public perception of Edna Lewis. The editor, Judith Jones at Knopf, Julia's editor, James Beard's editor for his final decades, wanted Edna to be a certain thing, which was this Julia Child of Southern Kentucky. Very offensive. But, that's certainly a strong part of Edna's reviving, reframing foods of the South. But it felt like there was so much more about her and this period of her –– creating, cooking at Cafe Nicholson with Johnny Nicholson and Carl Bissinger just felt like this kind of wonderful moment, both in her life story and also in the restaurant history of New York City and of the United States. I want there to be so much more information out there. Of the early days of Cafe Nicolson, there's some information there, but sadly, a lot of it seems to have just happened without people recording it in any way.

BM: I'm gonna compliment you a lot then and I hope you're fine with that. The way you brought that period to life, I would have thought that there were ample resources available, that's how alive those sections felt to me. I was also kind of surprised, taking in Edna Lewis and had never considered her as a queer icon. I was like, Well, I do really like her and I do think she's a fascinating person. I never thought to think about it this way. Even learning her background and being part of the various super lefty groups during the great depression and beyond, who she was crossing paths with and how she had this prowess as a cook, as a chef, and getting it started. It was a revelation. Your explanation by bringing Cathy Cohen, how are you are using multiple definitions of queerness clarifies that. Other times fucking is the center of the analysis and other times it's this more adjacent thing that is the margins of the margins. I was working through that while I was reading it.

JB: A lot of queer people have and certainly my generation have that experience of coming out and moving to a city and your life just starts. There's this sense of rebirth. I saw that reflected in Edna Lewis's move as a teenager and landing in New York City. She’s part of the Great Migration, of course, but also seems like a figure whose life corresponds to sort of great queer migration. Like after Stonewall where people were able to realize themselves in a city, cut loose all or almost all of the things that had rooted them to small towns or suburbs or whatever. That felt like an overlap of Black experience and queer experience. I'm looking through her subtly and directly answering many of the questions.

BM: I know that some of these stories that are in the book are from pieces you've written prior. How did you kind of decide what was going to be braided together?

JB: This is the book that I pitched, the one that my great editor, Melanie Tortoroli at Norton, bought was a little different than the book I delivered. One of the things I love about Melanie is—and this was true of the Beard book as well—she allows a manuscript to evolve from the original pitch. In the original pitch, I was much more focused on known figures, better known figures, like Clairborne, like Alice B. Toklas. The more that I researched and thought about it, and once I started writing it was just kind of an organic experience. I became less focused on names and more focused on trying to find stories that reflected this bigger narrative that I wanted to tell. Minor figures like Herman Smith and like Harry Baker presented themselves to me as figures that could tell certain stories about secrecy, about the closet, about erasure. In Harry Baker's case and also Herman Smith's case, coming up with strategies for expressing queerness in food and yet keeping it completely, or almost completely cloaked. I wanted to represent those generations of people who had to kind of devise those ways of expressing themselves while keeping themselves protected at the same time. When I pitched the book originally, I didn't even know who Harry Baker was and his story came to me as I was researching. Writing and researching are not two separate activities where, I'll research and then I'll be done and then I'll write. Research goes on and it becomes part of the writing process for me. So that's how the book and the cast of characters evolved. In some cases after the first draft, Melanie came to me and said, I think we need more about this or more from this period, you're shying away from this here, but you need to figure out some way to tell this part of the story as well.

BM: Can you talk about what didn’t make it into the book?

JB: My editor had to sort of rein me in at some point and keep telling me, This is not biography. This is a different kind of narrative. You don't need to be so detailed. I get so obsessed with small details. When I'm researching, I want to know the exact newspapers that somebody was reading. I have to cut myself off. I'm fascinated by James Baldwin's first decade after moving to Paris, moving back and forth between Paris and New York. All those details of his life there became a kind of major obsession of mine. But they didn't need to find a place in the book. I also did much more literary analysis of Baldwin's writing that felt maybe a little more academic, breaking down food information from some of Baldwin's novels that didn't really need to be there.

BM: The stuff that you do have with Baldwin, those traces are still there, and it works well. It's a nice contribution toward bridging readers into New York and Cafe Nicholson.

JB: James Baldwin was important for me to counter a kind of foodie narrative, especially around Paris. Certainly Richard only kind of became that figure who used food and used the traditions and history of French food to craft his own voice, his own queer voice, I argue. Baldwin is the perfect corrective to that, because he doesn't care about food in a certain way, in a way that a lot of us who idolize French food, those of us brought up on Julia Child, get obsessed about some of these French dishes and traditions of eating. Baldwin is the perfect character there, like No, this is not what's important. What's important is how you eat and who you eat with and the spirit in which you're eating –– it's all just pork chops.

BM: I loved that. I was wondering if that was what you were doing. This is sort of anti-foodie. 

JB: The foodie. 

BM: You were talking about your form and wanting to do like ten bullet points for your reviews. That just made the quiche chapter make a lot more sense. Not that it didn't make sense to me, it did. I was like, “Oh!” This form is one of the things I really liked about the book. You get to do a lot of things with time where some nonfiction writers can't move forward quickly or be as full of information yet pithy at the same time. That is kind of a hallmark of food writing and food reviews, as it is. You read them because we're supposed to be reading something quickly, to go out and eat the thing. It made me think about that kind of like signaling, a Baldwin push back on the foodie narrative. Even your attention to form and talking about the recipes of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, how it starts with the recipe and ends with the anecdote. Actually, can we talk about quiche? I want to talk about quiche.

JB: Oh yeah, please.

BM: It's so funny because whenever I think of quiche outside of the spaces of the suburbs. But for me, I was a server at the Deyoung Museum Cafe in San Francisco. Every time I think of quiche, I just think about these extremely assertive old rich women wanting to pay $16 for their egg cake. I mean, it was a really good quiche. I just always think of it that way. And then it's like, “Oh, there is this other aspect to it of it being brunch food.” Could talk about what led you to include a fractured timeline of quiche in your book? 

JB: It was important for me to kind of talk about my own history with quiche or savory tarts at Green's restaurant. I remember at the time, cooking at Greens in the 1980s, there was this queer woman who was also a Zen priest who worked at Greens named Ms. Harper, and she was amazing. I don't know what happened to her, but she would joke that we were doing this elevated food at Greens. It was kind of mandated to assert we're doing serious food, we're not doing cafe food. We would do these quiches, but they could not be called quiche. They had to be called savory tarts because quiche was cafe food. Quiche was a sort of cheap microwaved thing at a cafe. I do remember a place near campus—it was like the film Institute or something—they had this little cafe and they served quiche in there. That’s what you serve. It was kind of intellectualized in a certain way. It was French. It was quiche. You got a little piece of baguette with butter with it. But it all felt divorced from what it must have come from. I was interested to look at the roots and the history of quiche. One thing I didn't include was Craig Claiborne's take on quiche. I think he felt offended that quiche became this populist food. He wanted to keep it elevated. So, taking quiche from the French idea that took off in the late 1940s and 1950s as this fancy food that hostesses would serve as a course at a dinner party, or as a cocktail nibble and then how it sort of became transformed by out gay and lesbian people. How quiche became this thing that's like okay we are taking this we are totally remaking that remaking this whether it's lesbian, vegan, broccoli, quiche. Whether it becomes the centerpiece of some still elegant, gay Saturday or Sunday brunch that could be served with cheap champagne. It felt to me perfect, the perfect medium for expressing cultural change and how gay and lesbian people took a dish and kind of made it their own. Of course, it became reviled in the straight world. Not only the straight gourmet world, like at Green's Restaurant, but in the broader culture. I wanted to do the fractured timeline to hopefully show how it evolved in the queer community as well while still being Quiche Lorraine that was served at the Leatherman beer batch fundraiser.

BM: It's also a dance event now in San Francisco. It's like a rave kind of a dance event that happens during the warmer parts of the year underneath a freeway pass.

JB: Really? Is it, is that true? Oh, fantastic! Oh, that's cool!

BM: It's true. It is called Quiche. I thought about it when I was reading the portions about Wild Planet and the B-52s. I am not used to reading certain kinds of food writing where so many other aspects of culture are brought in. But if you're going to write about something like queer food of course it's going to have to have that because we're multifaceted people who have our fingers in everything. 

JB: I wasn't going to write too much about quiche. And then I found a contact sheet that I think that's at Stanford. I was at the Andy Warhol photo archives and I saw this contact sheet of going to lunch at Truman Capote’s where he serves this beautiful quiche and that was like Oh okay this is this is the sort of culmination of this certain cultural evolution where we see this absolutely shattered, sad-looking Truman Capote welcoming Andy in and [he’s] just beaming at this lovely quiche. There are photos of him in the kitchen cutting it out, but he's just making a total mess of it. It's just like a hash. That rang a bell for me. 

BM: You’ve talked about Greens. Love it when I can afford it, I love Greens. I appreciated when you were much more personal and focused on San Francisco, which is the last bit of the book. Are we going to get more from you? Are we going full blown memoir? 

JB: I have spent like a year writing like a memoir pitch. I kind of struggled with my agents about it. It was like draft after draft, and what is this really about? I have struggled with memoir because I felt like I don't know what it's about. I'm very drawn to memoir but, I'm also very mistrustful of any truth in memoir. I am well aware of how false and invented memoir can be and maybe just because of the form that it inevitably has to be. And I'm not comfortable with that, even though it's to tell this story and then sort of wrap it up neatly. I had a ten year boyfriend pretty much right after I came out in San Francisco in the early 80s. I met Steve and he shows up in a scant way in the later part of the book. We lived together for ten years in The Haight. I've tried to come to terms with that. He passed away last year, which was a huge jolt for me thinking, Wait, there are all these unresolved things about our time together that I assumed someday we'll resolve them. Of course, that's not possible now. Memoir is still kind of haunting me, the idea of doing that. But I, it was…sorry. It's such a, you know, that time of AIDS in San Francisco. I had so many elaborate ways of trying to protect myself from the truth and the horror of what was going on that it's, I still haven't found a way to sort of step out of that protective bubble. Then also just feeling guilt for having survived those years, for whatever stupid reason, just luck, stupidness, not getting the virus. It felt like more than I could bear to even look at that too hard. Which of course perhaps is every reason why I should be looking at it, but I haven't allowed myself to do that yet. I read people's accounts, especially the 1990s because certain writers have sort of taken on AIDS from the perspective of the 1990s, which was a different period. It was the post-ACT UP period where there was a strong sense of activism. In those early years, before even there was a test for HIV, it just felt like such a different thing. A lot of us were already just coming to terms with coming out and the extreme homophobia of those years, of the Reagan years, and AIDS felt like it was a big piece of that. I know I have the work cut out for me. I have a next book brewing that might be a way to come to terms with that. For some reason, I feel like food has to be part of what I say. I don't feel yet that food is exhausted for me as a way of talking about the past and as a way of dealing with my own past.

BM: I remember that piece you wrote about Steve. It was nice to see him pop up in this book. Because I felt like the parts of your book where you dip into your personal life, they work so well in this. I look forward to when you decide to go there. 

JB: Thanks. I think it's important because I don't feel like…You know, I read all the memoirs, I read all the histories, and there still isn't one specific work that examines how people whp were doing things with food, whether in their community or in restaurants professionally, were impacted by AIDS. Alice Waters and Vince Calcanio of Zuni co-organized two events called Aid & Comfort. I volunteered—there was a call about restaurant cooks in the Bay Area to come and volunteer. There were two. I did the one at the Greek Theater.

BM: The second one was at the Greek theater. The first one was at Fort Mason. 

JB: That's right. So, I went to the second one. There were tons of cooks. There really wasn't anything to do. I was at the Chez Panisse tent; they were doing dessert with Lindsay Shear. I think my thing was I had to put one candied rose petal on each blade. It was so silly, and I had weird mixed feelings about that because it was the restaurant community saying that they wanted to do something. There were tons of straight cooks there who wanted to participate in some way. But it also felt dispiriting in the way that AIDS or the acknowledgement of AIDS was not in our community anymore. That it was part of this broader Bay Area foodie community. And the idea too, that you had to do this spectacular dinner where Chez Panisse was doing a course, and Zuni was doing a course and all this stuff. It just felt like, really? That's what fundraisers are: they get rich people who are insulated from disasters to get rid of some of their money. That just felt so pathetic to me. I haven't expressed this before in this way. It was opening this sense of rage in me, angering me like, This is how this is all going to be remembered? That people are doing good and writing checks so they can say that they had this Alice Waters curated experience? I remember running into Tracy Chapman there. I just sort of turned the corner and she was there. She was one of the performers. It just seemed like she was—and I am, projecting here—she looked as completely embarrassed and lost and small as I felt there. I know, you got to show up and do it, but this is not who we are. 

BM: I've written about that first Aid & Comfort benefit from the perspective as a former server. I thought to myself, so many gay men are servers, and so many gay men living with AIDS in the city who were also servers died. There's no real conversation about it. Or what does that mean for that specific kind of labor? I do feel that in the '90s, alongside AIDS activism, there was a major push of all the non -profits that were very community based to become super professionalized alongside this rising profile of California food. 

JB: And there’s also that trend in food of elevating restaurant chefs.

BM: Yes, yes, absolutely.

JB: To take it back to James Beard, when he died in '85, of course that had been going on for maybe 10 years, eight years or something like that. He kind of seemed like a diminished figure because Wolfgang Puck and Alice and Jeremiah were the sexy figures. At the same there became this almost professional circuit of national high-end chef fundraisers. I remember when I did a Jeremiah Tower story, he talked about how—sometimes for AIDS but also for other causes, hunger and things like that—those events became the model. That's when Ruth Reichel, writing for The LA Times, coined the term rockstar chefs. Because they were on tour at these galas. So, yes, that all had left that taste in my mouth of the inflated show culture of these fundraisers. One of the things that happened to me, because of my food stories that I did for The San Francisco Sentinel, I remember writing a piece about strawberries and talking about wild strawberries. I got a letter from a reader, this man who said that he was a gardener and, the Fairmont Hotel had a rooftop garden and part of that was like vegetable gardens in the 80s. He was the gardener. He said, Oh, I grow alpine strawberries, fraises de bois. Why don't you come by sometime and I'd like to give you a tour of the garden. So, I did and he was really charming. We tasted the strawberries that he grew and all that. Then I looked at the obituaries and—I don't know how much later it was, six months, a year—I saw his obituary. He had passed away. For some reason, that was one that really did it for me. I mean, I didn't even know him that well, but it was just like, I don't know, it still affects me so much. The experience of an alpine strawberry is so intense, and so immersive. Just to think that someone who had this kind of poetic appreciation for something like that—something that's fleeting—that they themselves could just kind of disappear… And that the world could just go on in the long run. That it didn't matter. He was just another number. He was just another gay man who kind of succumbed to this. That feeling, talking about survivor's guilt feeling like there's nobody left to [pass] that knowledge to. Obviously, there are other people who loved him and they knew him. But the weight of having that information with me, something that I think nobody cared about, but that I have to carry around and have complicated emotions about for the rest of my life. I just felt like it was way too much.

BM: Thank you so much for sharing that with me. It's a beautiful story.

JB: Thanks

BM: No, I appreciate it. I'm very touched.

JB: But at least I got to put a candied petal on a dessert. I mean, maybe that's just the practice, you know, maybe I should have just gotten over myself and said, I can play a miniscule part because that's all it needed to be. Somehow, maybe that was enough, placing that placing that rose petal.

BM: You just even sharing that story, I mean I live near the Fairmont. I live right below it. So, I know exactly what kind of view you would be seeing up there. I think that it is about that loss of knowledge. It is something I write about in my own work. It wasn't just a loss of a person or people; it was a loss of a highly specific way of looking at the world that can't be replicated. I mean it makes sense why that is rage-inducing.

JB: I think of Edna Lewis. If you thought about Edna Lewis as being somebody who had this really difficult challenging experience growing up as a girl and all this responsibility and what they put on her to work and support her family. Then arriving in New York and finding her way and then five years later, ten years later, something like that happened to her and she was gone, you know, before she became famous, before anyone who she was. That is a powerful idea for me. You asked about those unknown figures in What is Queer Food, somebody like Harry Baker who just kind of slipped away. I felt this a bit doing research for the Beard book, a responsibility to tell what I know, to try to kind of elevate these kinds of nothing figures, these overlooked figures, these erased figures, these figures who erased themselves even in some cases. To try to give them meaning and in some cases the dignity that they deserved.

BM: Do you feel like that's what you're trying to get your readers to take away from this book? 

JB: Absolutely. Especially…I mean, I'm 65. With Steve having passed away recently, it's just, there's a limited amount of time. I was able to see things in my time and in my generation that I want to pass along. I want them to be out there in the world somewhere, even if I don't understand them or if I have a complicated relationship with them. Yes, I feel this imperative to get stories out. Telling stories is a way that I've found to be comfortable for me to get information out there. The driving impulse in my life for the men that I wrote about in America, “your food is so gay.” My gay uncles were Pat and Lou who passed away. Pat who passed away in 1969. It's weird because it was like a month before Stonewall. It was like May 1969 when he died and how I didn't understand it very well at the time because I was 10 years old, but in retrospect seeing how completely and how quickly lives like theirs could, [disappear]. This system could come down and completely obliterate – obliterate knowledge of it, obliterate memories of it. That feels like an engine that is running away inside me to sort of tell stories that I know.

BM: Well, I definitely came away with that upon reading it. So, I'm going to shift to my more playful questions. If this book was a piece of queer food, which one do you think it would be? 

JB: I think it would be Edna Lewis's chocolate souffle. I wanted to give air, to give breath to stories in a way that souffle does. Even Harry Baker's cake has this leavening from human labor, human effort, but also just that sort of guerrilla attempt at making something intense and brilliant. Intensely pleasurable out of almost nothing but intention and labor and doing it in a place that is not equipped with the proper tools, where you've had to scrape together [even] the bowls to make it in. You've had to feel your way for how to make it. That feels like it's an essential part of the LGBTQ experience, especially in the 20th century. I had this metaphor before of just being on a beach or even in Johnny Nicholson's case, just being on the streets of New York City and somehow trying to fashion a life together out of the shit that you've found. The things that other people threw away or the things that just washed up from the ocean and building something beautiful out of that with these scant materials, materials that society at large has no need for, has no interest in. Creating something so beautiful that society takes notice, that they celebrate you ultimately. Someday. Just that scrappy act of creating something beautiful. I think Edna's chocolate souffle really, really expresses that. 

BM: Which recipe do you think people should try out for their queer potluck?

JB: It's funny because I'm doing some events for the book tour where I see I was wondering if you know anything like snacks and stuff. I have a fondness for Billy Gordon's Quiche Lwanda. Just like a quiche with bacon and Swiss cheese and mushrooms. So, I think that's pretty amazing. I also think of Alice Toklas’ tender tart, especially Alice Waters who made the recipe work. But I think that's a really beautiful dish. I'm going to but have yet to make Reba's rainbow ice box cake from White Trash Cooking. I'm like, I don't know, can I do it? But, I'm definitely going to try.

BM: You should definitely document it if you do.

JB: I will, for sure. 

BM: Thank you so much for answering all my questions. 

JB: Oh, yes, thank you.