Writing a Book on Queer Food Has Freed Me to Cook Again

On finding peace with past lives—including my own.

I’ve started cooking again. I cooked when I was a young man—cooked like cooking was all that mattered besides reading about cooking. Back then, early ‘80s, mid ‘80s, I cooked like it was the only thing I could do to hold my place in the world. I was with somebody and it was bad, only I didn’t know it was bad, not then.

Me, then.

 I was a gay person apologizing for being gay: apologizing by cooking. The homophobia I carried around in my bones made my whole being heavy. I think a lot of gay guys of my generation carried that internalized homophobia around, and it was sort of like everybody who did had different ways of apologizing: hurting themselves with drugs or sex when there were no effective HIV treatments. Or by running away; washing up in San Francisco to escape the shadow of trauma, only to find out that trauma is impossible to leave behind. I never saw the best minds of my generation etcetera etcetera, but I did see a couple of the finest young gays of my SF tribe, the brightest and the bitchiest, the sweetest and funniest, just…disintegrate.

And I’m not here to revive the tired old trope of the tragic homosexual, if it ever completely went away, but the experience of being queer in most of the 20th century was complicated. Edged with difficulties and compromise. 

Part of what assailed the people I knew was the inescapable negative pressure of growing up in worlds that hated them. This wasn’t true of everyone in my Big Gay Generation. Lots of guys had healthy lives with drugs, sex, partying; guys who survived and guys who didn’t. For some, those things were a corrective against the violence of the lives they escaped. It was seeking a corrective, too, only my remedy wasn’t snorting crystal or cruising the baths, it was food; cooking to be loved, in a big old flat with my boyfriend (I’ll call him Dean). A flat where, despite all the cooking I did, I never did feel loved, though the love was never enough.

Dean and I had this agreement that I’d fill the place we lived with food, and he’d pretend to stay with me. I mean he did stay—we were together for years—but that he’d pretend to be anchored in me. This was the final gesture of my apology: that what Dean gave me was good enough for me; all I could expect of the world. I’d disappointed so many people in my life by turning out Queer. 

If I cooked I could try and make Dean, at least, acknowledge some good in me, because I couldn’t see it in myself: not the me who was standing still. The me taking up space in a room, as opposed to the me who looked after things; who took care of Dean. Making sure the stock never boiled, just tremored along for hours at a controlled simmer that needed to be monitored, meaning I would be tethered to the kitchen and the range; I would have a place to be. I cooked Richard Olney’s eggplant gratin and baked Elizabeth David’s yeasted saffron cake; made Madhur’s green chutney and Marcella’s porcini lasagne, because cookbooks gave me authority. They were validating. Following a recipe by Paula Wolfert, or Julia, or James Beard, the ability to smell and taste and feel a dish those authors once smelled and tasted, meant I had the right to exist in the world beyond the compromised boundaries of my life with Dean. 

Anyway this was supposed to be about how I’m cooking again. 

You know I’m writing this book about Queer food, about the period in the U.S. roughly between the end of the Second World War and the middle of the 1980s. About how we, the people we recognize now as being Queer, used food to define ourselves. How at the beginning we had to sequester those identities, and thus hide our food, our occasions of eating; and then bit by bit over those decades, and then all at once, we didn’t have to keep a screen around it. How food would end up being a very public expression of who we are. How we named, how we defined ourselves with food. And this is a historical take, but it’s an individual story that stands outside history, too: How the internal narratives of Queer lives are about concealment to start, and then, with luck and the space to live, about the gestures large and small that define a reveal. In the book, I use food to tell key narratives, stories about cooking, about eating together; about doing so collectively, publicly in restaurants, in times of severe prohibitions on Queerness.

Writing this book has brought me back to food; has brought me back to the kitchen. For years, after leaving restaurant and catering work some 20 years ago, I avoided cooking, or did the least I could get away with. My interest in cooking rose and sank, overall I’d lost the patience for it, or the heart for it, considering my history of of self-erasure in the kitchen. These days I’m not cooking apologetically. I cook for my husband, mostly for the pleasure of it; the pleasure of us. An immersion in Queer history has made me incredibly grateful to have some level of power and agency in my life; made me feel part of something older, something that’s a mix of sadness and joy. Something that feels like intimacy with others in the past. Including, and maybe especially, the 25-year-old me who tried to navigate a Queer world defined by so much promise and trouble, relying on a stack of cookbooks to keep me lifted; to keep me alive. #