What Is Queer Food?

How We Served a Revolution

By: John Birdsall

Narrated by: Adi Cabral

A celebrated food writer's expansive, audacious excavation of the development of modern queer identity and food culture.

Food in America and Europe has long been shaped, twisted, and upended by queer creatives. Beloved food writer John Birdsall fills the gap between the past and present, channeling the twin forces of criticism and cultural history to propel listeners into the kitchens, restaurants, swirling party-houses, and humming interior lives of James Baldwin, Alice B. Toklas, Truman Capote, Esther Eng, and others who left an indelible mark on the culinary world from the margins. Queer food is brunch quiche à la Craig Claiborne, Richard Olney's ecstatic salade composée, and Rainbow Ice-Box Cake from Ernest Matthew Mickler's White Trash Cooking. It's the intention surrounding a meal, the circumstances behind it, the people gathered around the table.

With cinematic verve and prose that dazzles, What Is Queer Food? is a monumental work: a testament to food's essential link to a modern queerness that reveals how, like fashion or tastes in music, food has become a language of LGBTQ+ identity.

©2025 John Birdsall (P)2025 Tantor Media

My life experience in food

I purchased this in a moment of whimsy thinking – what as an 80-year-old lesbian who came out in 1969 so much of this evoked wonderful as well as painful memories. In this moment of America’s life, I found myself proud of what I had become and how that happened through community, chosen families, and lots of food and parties, where we exalted in each other’s wonderfulness. I love this book.