Jeff Smith and the "Failure of Homosexuality"

The Frugal Gourmet was a bad, bad gay.

How many times have I thought to pitch some editor a story on Jeff Smith. How many times have I scrolled through the bookmarks on my laptop, the curdled allegations never allowed expression in a court of law. How many times have I thought it was my duty to write about a mostly forgotten villain of food in the United States, someone who stood atop the worlds of cookbook publishing and TV food for more than a decade. I pulled back every time, though. Smith’s story was too ugly, too fraught, too presumedly perilous for his alleged victims and too full of pain for his surviving family. I deleted the bookmarks; buried Smith’s second cookbook, The Frugal Gourmet of 1984—the only one I could bring myself to pay a buck for at a thrift store—on a shelf in the basement.

If you ever cooked dinner in the 1980s or ‘90s, or tried to sand off the edge of a Saturday-morning hangover with the soothing cadences and anodyne visuals of PBS cooking shows, or walked through any Barnes and Noble, you knew the face of Jeff Smith, The Frugal Gourmet, Methodist minister and former chaplain at the University of Puget Sound in Washington. He was unavoidable: The stage-seven male-pattern baldness, silver wire aviators, and coarse gray shag-bush goatee. The jade fish on a leather neck thong, swinging against a Mervyn’s button-down dress shirt, necktie, and striped yoke apron. Smith appeared always the same, clad in the same bland armor of rectitude, and always with the same preachy sign-off line, “I bid you peace.”

In YouTube clips from Smith’s shows, I find him annoying as hell. He’s fidgety and sanctimonious, skitting around his enormous woodeny Craftsman-style kitchen set—deep and wide—back-walled in faux stained glass. It signals a sober kind of early–twentieth century U.S. artistry: solid, rectilinear—masculine.

Smith natters scratchily on and on about America, and history, and regionalism, pausing to underline a point with “you see,” lubricating the phrase with condescension and professorial unctuousness. Worse, Smith’s food, his plating and styling, all look like shit, though I guess that was sort of the point. Despite the implied craft, the Frugal Gourmet—Frug as a pastry chef I once cooked with mockingly referred to him (she said it like froog)— is merely a tinkerer, a lovable cookbook-worm dad puttering in some enormous fake great room of a kitchen.

Food media in the 1980s and ‘90s was all about the testosteronic duende of restaurant chef bros, a leaked strain that would eventually mutate into Jeremy Allen White. Smith was a wonk, like Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton and Al Gore. (In 1992, the year they won the White House, Clinton-Gore were dubbed the “double-wonk ticket.”) In the so-called crisis of American masculinity of the 1990s—the flaccid refractory period following the pump-hard Reagan-Rambo years of the 1980s—Frug, for all his irritating sanctimoniousness, looked like welcome relief on those hangover Saturdays with the TV on.

Whatever it was, whatever combination of wonkiness, rectitude, puttering dad, and geat-room energy, the Frugal Gourmet brand took off. “At its most popular,” Amy Bell writes, “15 million viewers at a time were watching [Smith’s PBS show].” He sold a staggering 12 million of the various companion cookbooks to his TV series, which puts Frug in the same vaporous realm as Ina Garten, said to have 14 million books in print.

Between 1977’s Recipes from the Frugal Gourmet through 1995’s The Frugal Gourmet Keeps the Feast, Smith was a publishing machine, squeezing out 11 books. Titles got a little strained—you can imagine the pressure mounting for new product, new sales. The Frugal Gourmet Cook American (1987) sounded fine if you didn’t mind melting-pot platitudes and a Europe-y POV, but then came The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines (1989), The Frugal Gourmet on Our Immigrant Ancestors (1990), and The Frugal Gourmet Whole Family Cookbook (1992). Five years after that last book, the Frugal Gourmet engine of commerce skidded to a sudden, inglorious halt.

By October 1998, when PBS let The Frugal Gourmet’s broadcast rights expire, 20 or more men were known to have stories of sexual abuse by Smith. Most were minors at the time of the alleged incidents. Seven filed suit against Smith. They were high school students at the time, when Smith—before TV, before cookbook—ran a deli and catering company in Tacoma, Washington, called The Chaplain’s Pantry, a name, in retrospect, glutted with haunting echoes.

Publicly, Smith denied every leaked allegation. But on July 1, 1998, Steve Behrens reported in Current at the time, “four days before he was to face trial in Tacoma, Wash.,”—a trial at which 12 other alleged victims were poised to testify against him—“Jeff Smith . . . agreed . . . to pay an undisclosed sum to seven young men who had accused him variously of groping, kissing, and raping them when they were teenagers.” In a separate suit an eighth man, who’d reached a quiet agreement with Smith in 1991, accused him of reneging on hush money promised. After reaching a settlement with the first seven, Smith faced no criminal charges. A judge dismissed the eighth man’s suit. Smith avoided any public reckoning for his alleged assaults. All this time, he wasn’t what he appeared to be. Or he was exactly what he appeared to be: the pietistic face of male authority masking the corrosive prerogatives of male power.

Smith, who had a history of heart disease, died in his bed in 2004. He was 65.

How do we talk about powerful men and the economic interests and moral compromises that insulate them from reckonings? Accusations against Mario Batali burned hot enough to laser-etch a window into restaurant culture’s rape room, but wasn’t that an anomaly? Something to do with the scale of Molto Mario’s arrogance rather than our commitment to victims’ stories? Over the years there were other whistles blown for other crimes, but like the allegations by Smith’s accusers, they sounded at a time when the news framed charges of sex abuse as scandal: an embarrassment for the accused and an amuse for those with a taste for hubris roasted.

What’s more important for me, as I look at Jeff Smith and the heinous things he did (I’ve little doubt that most or all of the charges against him were true) comes down to how we talk about bad gays. I take the expression from Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller, hosts of the podcast Bad Gays and authors of the 2022 book of the same name. By telling stories of, well, bad gays throughout history—the racists, fascists, and transphobes whom we today identify as queer, though such a concept may have been unavailable to them in their time—Lemmey and Miller pose a simple uncomfortable question: “If we are to accept that some of the greatest artists, activists, and poets of history were guided and motivated by their sexuality,” they write in their book, “why not the criminals, despots, and bigots?” Their focus throughout is “the failure . . . of mainstream, actually existing white male homosexuality to enact liberation,” since, after all, liberation has been the theme of the great queer and trans civil rights battles of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

If we conceive of queer and trans affiliation as a community, what are we to make of Peter Thiel, Alice Weidel, Richard Grenell, and Caitlyn Jenner—queer and trans individuals whose political projects support the curtailing or erasure of queer and trans freedoms, if not identities? Are they merely an inconvenient shadow to the great movement we have imagined? Apostates to the faith project of queer and trans progress?

For me, a writer consumed for more than a decade with articulating the historical resonance of queer food, how am I to think about Jeff Smith? Were the recipes he urged us to cook the reactionary cover for dangerous desires he could not allow himself? His focus on orthodox faith, heterosexual family, and conventional history—was it a screen for things he could not accept in himself? Was the alleged raping of boys a perverse attack on the very things he championed in public, the honoring of children within the sanction of the nuclear family? Can I allow myself compassion for someone who brought pain and destruction to so many?

As Lemmy and Miller muse in Bad Gays, “Maybe all of us are lost and scared, subject to forces beyond our control, and trying to figure out how to configure our unruly desires and our politics into an ethical way of being in the world.”

Perhaps. Still, despite the reactionaries, the despots, the abusers, and the bad gays, I fervently believe in the power of food to exist as a collective expression of queerness.