How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [23]
It’s interesting that one of the most popular television shows on today, Six Feet Under, was created by a gay man and features a funeral home run by a gay man and his straight brother. One episode featured the request of a gay mourner to mount a scene from an opera at his lover’s funeral. Although it is difficult to prove, I would argue that the gay community’s response to AIDS deaths has influenced mainstream America’s attitude toward the memorial service. Above all, gay funerals are coming out of a new tradition of individuality, and the idea that friends are as important as family and deserve to be part of memorials. As is the case with most trends, straight mourners are beginning to adopt these new practices. In the future, the flair and uniqueness seen in many gay funerals will also become a part of heterosexual rituals.
Book Two
Body
Chapter 4
Eat Me: Gay Dishes, Straight Appetites, Common Thirsts
It follows that all food pretending to be something else is food in drag.
—David Mehnert, Slate magazine
Brunch is a gastronomic bandage, a meal designed to carry middle-aged homosexuals and other disappointed people through the nameless terrors of the weekend and, generally, into a resigned, more starchy future. The food is less important than the tone of the experience, because brunch is a consolation meal and should be served as if offered at one’s sickbed. It’s the least a handsome waiter can do.
—R. M. Vaughan
U Stareho Songu, Prague’s first queer restaurant, is a kitshy, roomy space . . . serving traditional Czech cuisine rechristened with delightfully campy names.
—from a gay travel guide to Eastern Europe
A brief look at Bruce Feirstein’s 1982 hyper-masculine humor book, Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, shows how threatened straight people once were by homosexual tendencies related to food, and how far we’ve come. Quiche once seemed a bit exotic and a little gay—now it’s served in airport restaurants.
Food lacks specific connotation until prepared, and there’s no doubt that food cooked and served by gay men has a certain flair, or sensibility. Nouvelle cuisine was invented by mostly heterosexual French chefs in the early 1970s. It featured reduced amounts of fat and butter, miniscule portions of fish and meat, and strange sauces made with fresh herbs. Its greatest proponent was Craig Claiborne, the openly gay food columnist for The New York Times from 1957 to 1986.
Claiborne’s influence is still felt in kitchens everywhere. His New York Times Cookbook, first published in 1961, sold three million copies, and he was generally acknowledged to be America’s most well-known food writer throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Born in 1920 in Mississippi, he was a gracious “man’s man” who served in the navy during World War II and then again during the Korean War, after he had trained as a chef in France. Claiborne never really had a steady homosexual relationship. Yet he firmly remained a part of New York gay society while also influencing heterosexual family cooks throughout the country. He was the first of the early food writers to experiment with health trends, such as low-sodium foods, and to bring a new, more delicate way of eating to the general public. America learned about fresh herbs from Craig Claiborne long before Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower and the whole California-cuisine revolution started.
It’s hard to exactly define queer food and drink. But I’ve certainly encountered them. In the early 1990s, I was a member of a Shakespeare reading group. Every month we would meet to read a play and have dinner, switching from house to house. There were two single