How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [25]
Well, not exactly.
It took a gay man, the famous food writer and chef James Beard, to get husbands everywhere off the couch and into aprons. Beard wrote the first articles and the standard cookbook on barbecuing. He made it acceptable for heterosexual guys to cook outdoors.
“Men who wouldn’t think of touching a switch on an electric stove, much less of preparing a meal thereon, suddenly discover a gift for preparing the proper bed of coals in a grill,” Beard wrote in House & Garden in 1956. “Others suddenly reveal a genius for cooking meat to a turn.” Ironically, Beard made outdoor cooking less “sissy” for the straight men of America.
Beard, like Craig Claiborne, became a gay cooking icon, even though, also like Claiborne, he seems to have had a fairly unhappy life as a gay man. Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1903, Beard had tried to make a living as an actor and an opera singer in his youth until he found his true niche, parlaying his mother’s training in food preparation into a career as a chef and cookbook author. He was among the first to trumpet regional cuisine and down-home American cooking. He excelled at the grill and in the fine task of making unusual appetizers for cocktail parties. One of his specialties was simple but incredibly delicious deviled eggs, which he adapted from the South and then introduced into the hors d’oeuvres canon in the 1950s (which is ironic, since deviled eggs are usually considered the ultimate straight picnic or church supper food).
The butchy Beard really pushed the masculine outdoor grill prerogative, saying in his earliest grilling book, “We believe [charcoal cookery] is primarily a man’s job and that a woman, if she’s smart, will keep it that way.” This irked his coauthor, Helen Evans Brown. According to Robert Clark, in The Solace of Food: A Life of James Beard, “Helen would often say to James, ‘As usual, the boys win.’ ”
The Drag-Queen Chef and Icon: Miss Julia
To some gay men, the gayest food person they ever saw was a straight female chef, the very tall and strangely voiced Julia Child. “Julia is really just a big drag queen,” says Nelson Aspen, forty, author of Let’s Have a Gay Dinner Party! and Let’s Dish Up a Dinner Party.
“Julia is so camp, she even looks like a drag queen, which is wonderful. She could give RuPaul a run for his money any day. I mean, how could we gay boys not be attracted to cooking, growing up with Julia and Graham [Kerr] on television?” Aspen acknowledges that Australian cooking celebrity Graham Kerr was not gay, but says he was certainly gay-friendly, and flamboyant in his over-the-top cooking demonstrations as the Galloping Gourmet.
“With both of them, you felt as if they were winking at you from the TV set, welcoming you into their world,” says Aspen, who escaped into that world as a fat, gay little kid. His own cookbooks are incredible displays of the gay food aesthetic—comforting recipes with kitschy titles like Nelson’s Big Succulent Coq au Vin, A Star is Born Caviar (caviar atop beet and jicama slices made with a star-shaped cookie cutter), Chicken? Dump Him, Darling!, and The Lord Is My Shepherd’s Pie.
Julia was the Martha Stewart of her time, bringing the foreign flair of French cooking into America’s homes. (One Toronto Sun article in 1995 saw it the other way around, saying that Martha Stewart is the Julia Child of cocooning, or household decoration.)
Many baby boomers remember Julia not so much from her famous PBS cooking show in the 1960s and 1970s, or from her many cookbooks, but rather from the hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch in which Dan Aykroyd does an unusual turn of drag. Aykroyd, in a bad wig, dress, and tacky apron, camps it up, cutting himself with a sharp knife and then slowly bleeding to death because the phone in the studio kitchen is fake. He mimics Julia’s high, mincing voice, and as he slumps to the floor, he advises viewers to “save the liver” of the chicken for future