What Is Queer Food? How We Served a Revolution

For a limited time, we have copies signed by John Birdsall.

A two-time James Beard Award winner and the author of The Man Who Ate Too Much, a revealing biography of James Beard himself, John Birdsall tackles the thorny question of this book’s title with insight and revealing detail.

Sure LGBTQ+ people eat and cook, but what does it mean that they do? Birdsall’s account of nearly a century of social and political oppressions, rebellions, subterfuges, epiphanies, escapes, and tragedies, any and all of them public and private, connects a myriad of dots. 

Alice B. Toklas is here, and Harry Baker, inventor of the chiffon cake. Craig Claiborne and James Beard once again. James Baldwin and Richard Olney. Filmmaker Esther Eng and Sunset magazine food editor Genevieve Callahan. Ernie Mickler of White Trash Cooking and Truman Capote photographed by Andy Warhol while holding a quiche.

This is not a comprehensive history. It’s a demonstration of enduring threads running through the lives of famous and ordinary people whose experiences are united by their efforts to define a place in the world.

Hardcover.