In 1985 I was working as a cook on the salad station at Hayes Street Grill in San Francisco, a trendy brass-plated fish restaurant down by the symphony hall and city government buildings—meaning the customers I tossed Caesars for were tassel-loafer corporate gays with season tickets to the opera; bureaucrats and politicians, some of course closeted; also the annual rush of Nutcracker families from the burbs, freaked to walk back to their Pontiac wagons post–Sugar Plum Fairy in this “gritty” neighborhood, i.e. Black but rapidly filling with white bistros. What it meant is that my ambition was blunted, the thing I felt like a calling: to express myself—my art, I guess, if that’s not too lofty—as a gay cook in a city that seemed very fucking queer if you were standing in the right place, and actively or inertly hostile to queers when you stood anywhere else, which was most places.
My boyfriend waited tables at the restaurant where I worked, but our schedules rarely overlapped. He’d come home to the Haight after his shift, to our big, echoey, cheap, and dented flat. His breath when we kissed betrayed the vanilla and burnt sugar from the leftover crème brûlée he scarfed while counting tips, or the ends of Pinot Noir from a customer’s unfinished bottle and the pipe hits he’d sneaked waiting for the bus. The way he smelled of food was the universe teasing me, hinting that desire overlapped with food in some deep way but without showing me how.
By day Steve wrote poems about nuclear catastrophe, dipping into his old 35mm-film stash canister, chilling to Miles on vinyl or the Dead on bootleg cassettes and scribbling in his notebooks—poems that racked up a heavy debt to Allen Ginsberg. Poems that, though Steve tried, almost never got published. He’d read me his work sometimes. I’d cook for us.
We were both essentially fuck-ups, both flailing at what we felt called to do. We both felt we’d eventually do something important; stumble onto some breakthrough in understanding. But even if the world didn’t recognize us—even if we weren’t part of the Castro scene, or the mainstream gays, and definitely not hot or mustached or buff, we had this belief in our own sense of mission.
Steve was like, All I gotta do is keep filling up these notebooks and someday it’s gonna happen. And I was like, even if gay world didn’t give seem to give a shit about food in public, beyond the solo drunk-ass consolation pepperoni slice at Marcello’s after the bars closed, or the post-sex patty melt and freezer fries at Orphan Andy’s, I was convinced there had to be more.
That a whole food story had been concealed from me—from us. That being queer had to have the power to explain the meaning of food and the other way around, that food had to be have the power to help me understand the mystery of being queer, in a world that made it so hard just to be that, the world of dominant power that did everything possible to keep me being myself. A world in motion with the pumicing horror of AIDS; a slow-fast wreck of fear, denial, and self-loathing; of panic deferred until deferral was impossible—it made things more critical. Made everything urgent.
I had this concept in my head: the gay sensibility. What it would mean for food, for the food I knew, or was committed to cooking—that Nor Cal thing swirling around Alice and Chez Panisse and all the talented cooks there. Cooking with what made sense with what grew around you, even, and maybe especially, at the micro level, like foraging for wild greens and some native plants in parks and wild lands, miner’s lettuce and coastal sage and stuff like that. I was trying to feel rooted here, or to root my cooking, which was the same thing.
The eighties in San Francisco, for me and all the smartest cooks I knew, were about making sense of cooking; about having some relationship with raw materials—about them making logical sense. The most serious cooks around, and I thought of myself as one of them, didn’t learn to cook in culinary schools, but from books—even literature! Like we were less interested in technique as the core of what we did. I admit: a culinary education would have helped, since, to our constant frustration, when shit went wrong—emulsions broke, etc.—and we didn’t know how to fix it without scrambling for books: to Harold McGee’s new and thick On Food and Cooking, or even Joy of Cooking. I felt like I dedicated myself to cooking (I know, lofty) because I needed to feel anchored in the world, which had otherwise overwhelmed me with how huge it seemed, but mostly how much it hated gays and lesbians—the depth of its contempt for us, the violence it flung at us, the force intensified a million times by AIDS. The world showed this in all the big overt ways, of course, and also (and maybe this was even more abrasive) an infinity of small ones.
I felt different than other cooks who were tapped into the baby local mâche and artisan chèvre vein. All they had to do was follow the emerging rules for a fetishy allegiance to proximity: all ingredients had to come from the restaurant’s watershed; or within an arbitrary magic circumference of a hundred miles in any direction; or, in the case of a short-lived restaurant in Boonville up north in the Anderson Valley (from Panisse alums), that it all had to be grown or harvested and butchered on site. Any serious restaurant in SF or Berkeley had to score little salad greens or stinging nettles or borage from the small, steadily growing typed-up and xeroxed phone list of farmers out in Bolinas or down in Santa Cruz committed to supplying chefs. Farmers markets like we know now didn’t exist.
At the time I don’t think I realized it. Now, it occurs to me that my restlessness as a cook—my hunger for wanting to anchor my food in something that felt right but that I struggled to articulate—was that I was trying to express being gay through my cooking. To align my food with being a queer, make the two line up like glimpses from twin eyes through binoculars, until the brain clicks and the merged image suddenly comes together. The view becomes dimensional.
I realize now I was chasing that phrase, that gay sensibility in food, a queer food aesthetic. Breaking down what it meant to be a homo in ways that felt truthful, beyond the stereotypes of leatherman or clone or queen or drag, bulldyke or flamer or flower-skirt lesbian. I’d always felt like an alien on that colonized gay planet—it’s why I didn’t live in the Castro, or feel it was where I had recognized my omphalos, the nub of rootstock from which I’d sprouted, there among the bars and tanning beds and dildo shops. Whatever my identity as a queer was, I had an overwhelming conviction that I would find it in my cooking, or through my cooking.
Queer food was something like Soto Zen practice for me: you realize it in practice, no separation between doing and understanding. My homosexual food practice was cooking food that aligned with my queer gaze on the world around me. In the Nor Cal food esthetic I trained under, there was always this trope about community. Alice Waters’ 1989 manifesto in The Journal of Gastronomy, “The Farm-Restaurant Connection,” would fuse this idea of the restaurant as a hub of community—never mind the glaring paradox of an expensive, exclusive, overwhelmingly white restaurant identifying itself as the socially committed heart in a collective body; a business creating a myth of inclusivity about itself; flaunting its high social mission.
It seemed to me that food could have a better chance of expressing the experience of being a faggot or a dyke. That for all the differences, all the queer tribelets carved out from San Francisco and across the bay—S&M clubs, hippie fag co-ops, Empress balls, HIV care circles, womyn’s onsens—most of us had been initiated into out lives with a similar set of experiences: joyful and terrified moments of self-recognition; alienation from blood family, from the futures our parents plotted for us, with all the guilt and satisfaction of seeing their hopes gutted; that sense of stumbling onto a shared history on our own, since nobody from dominant authority ever told us that being queer was normal; the realization that sex was threaded through our destinies, and that we practiced what Natalie Barney had called queerness: a religion of the body.
The problem sat like humid air. How could we honor this new-old religion with food? How to carve out enough distance from the demands of the straight power structures we gay and lesbian cooks had to bend to in order to survive? “Remove the outside pressures,” John Rechy says in The Sexual Outlaw. “Remove the imposed guilt… Then we can view our own homosexual world as we make it, not as the straight world’s hatred forces it to be.” What foods would feed the queer culture that we, on our own, could construct, or satisfy the hunger that gnawed at so many of us? How could we express our own joys and resistance—Rechy called it our “noble revolt”—with food? #
John, this is lovely, and I hesitate to comment upon it, but I do want to point out one poignant thing. In fact, I didn't "try often" to get my poems published, though I know that's a stereotype that's hard to resist. In fact, I tried only very rarely because I was a coward, and often succeeded anyway. But here's why that's important to more than my own ego: the great gay poet Thom Gunn saw one of my poems on the layout wall at the SF Sentinel and told the editor there they should hire me to do something, because for a brief time, the SF Sentinel was a haven for gay bohemians like you and me who didn't fit into the Castro scene and wanted to read and write about more than bar gossip and obituaries. I proposed writing a restaurant review column with my boyfriend, who was you, and as I'm sure you remember, we did that and went on to share another column at San Francisco magazine. The SF Sentinel was a very interesting queer cultural moment for people like us, and it led to your career in food writing, which has been fabulous. I don't think we were "fuckups." I think we were in our 20s, and I'm very glad to say we both made good on whatever promise we had as writers.