We leave the Umbrian flat towns, the apartment blocks with roll-down shutters and bungalows cluttered with cars, and climb rawboned switchbacks, skirting thick forest with clearings for isolated houses and chickenwire vegetable gardens. Several kilometers along an unpaved ridge road and Perry says in so many words we’re lost. The mountain’s a maze. Our app is bewildered. The guesthouse we’re trying to find—a compound some British guy named Alec has converted to a gay Agriturismo—is invisible even to the unblinking eye of GPS. The digital enginery of modern life is useless here.
With blind hope we turn up a road, though the kids’ toys littering the shoulder make us doubt this is it. A little bandy-legged mutt appears before us in the dirt; I step hard on the brakes. He’s barking, letting us know we don’t fucking belong here, and to underline that lifts a leg and pisses on our bumper. I back out down the hill.
A couple more passes along the main road and we find the hidden turnoff, marked with a small, discreet sign we’d missed. The guesthouse is lovely. A turquoise infinity pool perches above Alec’s fig and quince and apricot trees, his terraced garden, and this valley the Etruscans must have farmed, with views of the Chiascio River, tranquil at a distance, swirling quietly around sandbars. Alec says two families used to live here, thirteen under one roof: sharecroppers tending wheat, tobacco, corn.
Perry and I like to stay at Queer-owned places when we can—no worries about anyone’s potential issues, for the most part their politics.
Our room, decorated with midcentury-modern oils and a kitschy little cherub chandelier, is where they kept the pigs. In an alcove near the bed hang a dozen arty penis photos, members of different shapes and sizes, from flaccid to plumped, bushy or shaved: portraits of past guests.
Instead of crops, this is farm now harvests cocks.
Two other couples are here. Breakfast is communal: a long farmhouse table in Alec’s dining room (it’s too wet to sit in the garden), decorated in English country house, with Victorian portraits, books, silver candelabra—plus a collection of bottle openers with carved wooden handles in the shape of dicks. Our room key, too, is attached to a fat whittled cock.
It turns out that glorifying the phallus isn’t just a thing where we’re staying. We didn’t plan it, but we’re here during the annual Festival of the Ceri, a celebration that brings thousands to the nearby hill town of Gubbio. Said to be the oldest town festival in all of Italy, the daylong feast centers on three teams of men, each bearing a 30-foot thick, faceted wooden pole called a candle, a cero, each topped with a different Christian patron: archbishop or saint. Throughout the day, the men and their supporters race up the steep cobbled streets while trying to keep their heavy pole erect—from touching the ground or slamming into tall houses—up to the church and monastery built into the granite cliffs above the town. This is clearly a pagan party given a Christian makeover, painted thick with Catholic base.
Perry and I keep away from the town, fearing the crush of people, drunk teens puking on walls, but that night we packed along with the locals into a country restaurant at Gubbio’s edge. I eat a rough, rubbery dish of tripe and chew panari, the coarse griddle breads that the Romans and before them the Etruscans must have known. We catch glimpses of the festival rebroadcast on a wall-mount TV: the guys in team colors (blue, yellow, black), united by red neck cloths and sashes, sweating and grimacing under their phallic loads up the roaring, vertical streets. I imagine gods of the Etruscan pantheon topping those Ceri—Eros-like Turnu, or Hercle the buff, or pretty-boy Atunis—the offal on my tongue like an old, old echo of divvied-up animal remains after a ritual offering.
On our last morning at the guesthouse, before handing over our dick keychain, we go in early to breakfast. The other couples filter in surprisingly early looking half asleep. “We didn’t want to miss this,” Paul tells me. After our toast and fruit, soft-boiled eggs from the property’s resident hens, Alec, with a ceremonial flourish, appears at the table and sets down a cake stuck with a single guttering candle. “A day early, I know,” Alec says, “but you’re leaving and I thought we should celebrate.” Tomorrow is Perry’s birthday, a fact he must have dropped in passing in one of the booking emails.
No surprise the cake is a fat penis, with mammoth balls and a pink sugar glaze in a kind of sheath along the shaft. We sing the song, Perry blows. Everyone claps.
Dick cake is the gayest food I could ever imagine, but no. Segregating sex, calling it “sexuality,” is some perverse obsession of the modern world.
To be honest, the only other dick cake I’ve known in my life was perversely obscene. I was 21, working my first job after college, as a staff writer for a trade magazine in San Francisco. I was out to my parents, but definitely not at work (the magazine’s publisher and his wife were proud, Reagan-loving homo despisers). That summer I got close to the magazine’s paste-up artist, Jane. One day at lunch I confided in her that I had a crush on a guy I saw every day on the bus. Long story short, Jane ambushed me: surprised me the night of my 22nd birthday with a party at her house, with some of our cooler coworkers. The centerpiece of the food buffet was a cake from a quote-unquote novelty bakeshop South of Market: a squat, half-sheet penis decorated with tinted buttercream. The pastry artiste had piped wiry-looking hairs on the balls in black frosting, with a wicked vein and droplets of white jizz spaced along the shaft.
Everybody laughed and hooted. That the cake was tinted brown, like it was supposed to be from a Black guy, made it racist as well (nobody at the party was Black).
I know Jane meant to support my being queer, but she made me into the Other, the thing I feared most about coming out: being forced into an identity without complexity; without feeling I was the me who always existed, gay as that was. It was humiliating—as if a craving for cock was the center of my new public identity—which, maybe for straight people, it was; a category straight perception would jam me into: the hyper-sexualized fag. My supportive hetero coworkers were nothing more than a different shade of oppression from our gay-hating bosses. To all of them, I was mostly a hunger, a pathology they were sure they understood and had license, as straight people, to manage—to control
In early June in the town of Amarante in the north of Portugal, sellers hawk penis biscuits under white paper dicks strung on wires that zig-zag above the streets. Bolos de São Gonçalo, or simply doces fálicos, phallic pastries, remember a 12th-century monk, Gundisalvus of Amarante, canonized centuries later as Saint Gonçalo. They’re phallic sweets, these infamous bolos: hard, dick-shaped cakes jutting from perfectly round balls, the glazed engines of an annual festival devoted to fecundity. “In a way the cakes are an offering to the revered saint,” Tania Braukamper writes, “an edible prayer petitioning unity, fertility, and fidelity.” But of course their origins are pagan, as Braukamper notes, surviving even after Christianity took hold. Traditional bolos are dense and unpliable and can measure up to three feet long. Modern interpretations are lighter and cakier. They can be piped with cream fillings.
The weird and also not-weird thing is that nobody really knows why Saint Gonçalo is remembered with phallus cakes. To be honest he sounds like kind of a dick himself: a priest with a hardass moral code, who became even more pious and rigid after a trip to Jerusalem and Rome—his own nephew is said to have sicced a dog on Gonçalo on his return to Amarante. The old man became a hermit on the outskirts of town, maybe out of necessity since he was such an asshole, though he’d drop by to perform miracles sometimes. (Which, in my opinion, don’t sound particularly original—making a river teem with fish for a mob of hungry Amarantes. Big deal, bitch. It’s been done.)
I like to think of the bolos as a fuck-you to Gonçalo and his stuck-up pieties, his self-righteousness. A rebellious celebration of pleasure and the body’s needs, the old human yearning for penetration, for dissolving corporeal boundaries: an edible prayer for the transformative magic of sex.
In a similar way, some scholars believe that hamantaschen, the Ashkenazi Purim cookies visualized as little tricorn hats (Haman’s, the anti-Semitic villain of the Jewish story) filled with jam or poppyseed fillings, is a pagan survivor from a story way, way older. That the cookie we munch today while sweeping a teabag around a mug, represents a vulva, sweet and sticky with the mystery of propagation: the endlessly fertile possibilities within the oilseed of the opium poppy or the inflorescence of the fig. That this vulva, unconsciously celebrated each spring in Jewish bakeries and home kitchens, belongs not even to Queen Esther, hero of the Purim story, but to Ishtar (a.k.a. Inanna), ancient Mesopotamian deity of fertility, sex, love, and yeah: war—all the turns of fate that click beyond the touch of a person’s control. And how Ishtar’s power rests comfortably with queerness; that it in fact depends on queerness, since Ishtar’s priests were bi and trans, expressly fluid
.
That fluidity—third-genderism, and the awesome mystery of transformation—was a manifestation of divine will. The latent fertility captured in a vulva cake or a dick biscuit was more than a reminder of hetero fertility as we think of it today—man and woman (husband and wife) lawfully breeding to spawn blood family, fertility in the least imaginative rendering of that word—but part of some deeper reflection on the borderless possibilities of human identity.
Back in Umbria, Alec’s cake (he’s hidden a preserved cherry in the head for Perry: the birthday boy’s prize) is queer food from the time before the invention of “homosexual” and “heterosexual”: words in the antiseptic formulations of 19th-century science, acrid and reductive. Phallus and vulva cakes are part of an ancient language of symbols, a throwback to something deeply human—some shared need baked into our species—a portal into an old spiritual dimension, to which maybe only Queer and Trans people even remember the path. Blowing out birthday candles is a ritual test of strength, like the race of the Ceri up Gubbio’s streets: A trial before the assembled, to register that air still inflates our lungs and show we still belong among the living; that the gods have granted us another year to walk in daylight on the green, green Earth. We are a community of bodies and need, those who came before, the ones here now, and those to come.
Because we queers have been outlaws and outsiders for a hundred years and more in the west and its colonies, barred from any decent concept of ourselves, we’ve been forced to recycle, keeping alive the old ways, from the times before persecution. We Queers are the ultimate antique hunters: the rehabbers, picking up the things the straight world finds inconvenient; rolling our eyes at what the world of dominant power lies about to stay in control, like the appropriation of pagan forms for an un-Christian god who condemns.
Maybe queer food is by nature only anti-straight, in the modern sense of the word. Food that connects us, across time and its transformations, to the complexities of being fully alive.
Maybe Queer food today is just a renewal of something infinitely older, long before “queer” or “straight” had any meaning—before the notion of an alternative sexuality was comprehended in the west; before sexuality itself, a concept of 19th-century science, had any purpose in the world. Maybe Queer food merely marks a re-flowering of sensuality in modern times—what James Baldwin calls the capacity “to respect and rejoice in the force of life.”
You can think of dick cake as the height of puerility; as frivolous or fetishistic in all the toxic ways; as embarrassing; as sinful. Or you can think of it as a revival of the human need to see our bodies, and not merely our souls, find meaning in the world; connected across millennia to other bodies rocked by the same needs, the same desires. The same ecstasy, the same pain.
Queer food is our communion, and not just within this ghetto community of minoritized sexuality and gender expression. Queer food’s our manifestation of a humanity with no limits; our taste of the world as it should be, which is to say as it was.