Pride Month And Why We Don't Write About 'Gay Food'

Haven't yassified your logo yet? Pop the rosé and embellish everything in multi-coloured sprinkles, it's Pride Month so let's talk about what is, or isn't, 'Gay' food

Jun 20, 2024

We often tilt the lens from where we stand and wonder what non-LGBTQ+ people secretly think about Pride Month. Do they relish the unique opportunity to celebrate the visibility, inclusion and rights of the LGBTQ+ people in their lives or just relish the colourful parade on a sunny Saturday, the excuse to dress up and the community-organised block parties that run ‘til late?

Each June Pride rolls around for a rich, month-long celebration, all colourful and (seemingly) inclusive, and we consider: Do those beyond the LGTBQ+ community understand its significance? Or do they roll their eyes once it arrives?

We are going to delve into what is or isn’t ‘gay food’ and why that isn’t our niche later in this long-read, but before that we want to linger on the concept of Pride Month and the rainbow-washing, performative action and box-ticking that occurs each June. We’re Patrick and Russell, food writers, cookbook authors, restaurant critics and a gay couple who built a content creation brand throughout the last decade called GastroGays.

Put a Rainbow On It — Box ticked.

Yassify-ing their logos, avatars and banners with rainbows and sparkles, corporates really do channel ‘Pick Me’ energy every June.

Pride, as a concept, has been confected by corporate box-ticking and rainbow-washing over successive years, that’s no secret. Whether rallying together a last-minute ‘inclusion’ panel or sponsoring a float at a Pride march to tokenistic bake sales (cue the rainbow cupcakes!), all to convince you they are ‘doing their bit’ for the cause.

Obviously the converse of that is no visibility at all, which is detrimental, but we chose to use that phrase ‘doing their bit’ specifically because it feels akin to recycling and ‘doing your bit’ for the environment. Separating waste and recyclable material in the workplace or home is an act of positive climate action everyone agrees you should be doing consistently and pro-actively year-round, not just when reminded or when the opportunity for a bit of performative action presents.

See, one can appear as performative as the other – opportunistic box-ticking, mostly undertaken with public perception in mind, rather than an internal desire to go above and beyond for something you passionately believe in, and believe makes a difference in the world from your very tiny actions.

Rainbow washing is RIFE, and in a different way to the impending doom of our planet’s climate catastrophe, corporates can look away. Once 1st July rolls around, BOOP, their logo flips right back to the original. Duty done ‘til next year. You notice it too, right? Clock how few keep any semblance of ‘Pride’ colouring or inclusivity-affirming in their visual identities year-round. Almost none. If Pride Month didn’t exist and the kudos with which organising these visible acts of allyship and inclusion didn’t surface we wager they wouldn’t bother doing them at all.

You Are What You Eat: What Exactly Is Gay Food?

Box-ticking and diversity farming happens us often too, since we’re a gay couple in the media whose brand, GastroGays, has ‘gay’ in the very title. There are TV shows who will *only* ask us on as guests if it’s Pride month or gay-related. Podcasts which require LGBTQ+ voices during Pride month and unashamedly slide into our DMs. Magazine feature writers that would never seek our quote and comment on any other subject we have knowledge of suddenly reaching out. PR companies who want to ‘partner’ to boost their client’s LGBTQ+ alignment, visibility or support, rigorously organised within the confines of Pride Month.

From our brand name you may assume our niche is ‘Gay’ Food so if, for a second, we lean into that supposed niche, let’s delve into it and try understand what that really entails…

Here follows a number of things we have all, in one way or another, been told is ‘gay food’, defined as eating or drinking habits mostly associated with the LGBTQ+ community.

Rosé & Frosé

Because it’s pink and girly, frosé is even gayer and girlier. Lesbians only drink bottled beer.

Salads, Smoothies & Poké Bowls

Lighter dishes like salads because we’re daintier than our cis-gendered, straight-oriented counterparts.
Smoothie bowls strewn with edible flowers because we’re fussy and particular. Anything garnished with edible flowers falls under the LGBTQ+ umbrella.
Rainbow poké and açai bowls because, duh, *limp wrist*

BLTs

“Of course fags will eat cheeseburgers, omelettes, pancakes… but if they have a choice they’ll ALWAYS order BLTs”. The BLT is super suss, way too similar an acronym to LGBT to ever be considered straight food.

Potluck

Lesbians own potluck, “Nowadays, the potluck is synonymous with lesbian tradition—so ubiquitous that lesbians have been known to potluck everything from protests to sex parties,” from How Lesbians Potlucks Nourished The LGBTQ Movement on Atlas Obscura.

Ice Lollies

All ice lollies, because they are colourful and fun and you lick them. Especially that pride flag-looking Fruit Pastille one and a Twister because of the very mechanics in how you eat it. Only queer people ‘lick’ food.

Brunch

Poached eggs that burst under a blanket of buttery Hollandaise? (poached eggs are gay, fried eggs are straight, scrambled eggs are bi — just watch this TikTok). Pop playlists and overhead disco balls? Pitchers of bottomless cocktails? [“BOTTOMLESS”!?] Brunch is super gay, and with that every brunch is basically drag brunch. You might as well be sitting IN drag as you eat brunch. [Serious side note: Read Shamím De Brún’s great telling of brunch on Char as the queer ritual that reflects pop culture and offers a space for community to gather together over food in the cold light of day.]

Iced Coffee & Bubble Tea

Iced coffee (even though the combination of coffee and dairy is often NUCLEAR for our sensy stomachs, btw all LGBTQ+ have digestive difficulties and/or obsessions over digestion). LGBTQ+ people must not drink the same ‘coffee’ straight people drink, even if all of us are at the same coffee shop. Straight people don’t drink iced coffee, so, therefore, adding ice to coffee must be the source of gay.
Bubble Tea, not least for the fact B and T are key letters in our abbreviation.

Cocktails + Anything Fruity

Cocktails because they are colourful, fussy-flavoured and served in dainty (read: gay) glassware. Yes, certain glassware is also gay. And a cocktail isn’t a cocktail without a big gay umbrella (note: actual umbrellas now gay, too, even if it’s raining, only gay people use them). A cocktail served in a hollowed-out pineapple with a paper umbrella is possibly the gayest drink ever.
Anything fruity and a bit exotic, like melon or pineapple, because effeminate men can be classed as fruity, so those fruits are gay and eating them makes you gay. Peach is inextricably gay now solely because of Call Me By Your Name.

Anything Pink

Anything pink, ANYTHING. This ties into the fact straight women and gay men are the same, they all enjoy the same thing because of sexual preference - both being men, so, the same - but straight men are not allowed eat anything pink because they will turn gay immediately once pink passes their lips.

Everything Phallic & Yonic

Your food is inextricably linked to your sexual preference (because sexual orientation is LGBTQ+’s entire identity, but being straight is DEFINITELY not straight people's’ entire identity) so your preference is to only eat phallic-shaped food (bananas, hot dogs) and yonic things like raw oysters slurped from the shell and steamed mussels.
On that note, all trans, intersex and asexual people are vegan, all gay males seem to be vegetarian and lesbians only eat fish [Serious side note: one of the most depressing and baffling sexualised misnomers rooted in food directed at the community] because only straight people are allowed eat big boy dinners of meat and three veg or hunks of steak dripping in garlic butter. Bisexuals actually don’t eat, and survive solely on cigarettes.

Anything Rainbow-Hued

Naturally anything and everything coloured to look like a rainbow. Why is it when a group of employees eating rainbow cupcakes in an office ‘Pride Month’ celebration is not gay if they are straight (yet celebrating queerness and gay culture?) but anyone eating a rainbow cupcake outside the office and definitely outside of Pride Month is considered incredibly gay? It’s because LGBTQ+ people are drawn to rainbows and will always eat rainbow-coloured things, where possible, of course.

Anything Cream-Stuffed & ALL Pastry

Anything stuffed with cream is gay. That is pure edible euphemism at play.
Croissants and delicate pastries are definitely gay, and most pâtissiers are gay — anything that fussy (however technical and super skillful) must be gay.

Baked Alaska & Most Desserts, Especially Served on Trolleys

Baked Alaska. In the same article as above: “Baked Alaska is definitely queer… it breezily mocks the threat of damnation, goes to hell and back, and lives to tell the story. Baked Alaska’s very identity, in fact, depends on having suffered an accusation of weakness, on surviving a trial by fire. It even gets a tan. What could be queerer than that?”
Most desserts are seen as gay because they are sweet, dainty and often creamy. Again, fussiness points inextricably towards LGBTQ+-ness.
Anything served on a trolley which trundles to your table, especially a dessert trolley. The vessel of the trolley is blazingly gay, a total camp queen, and so eating from its bounty makes you gay and most of what is on that trolley is now gay food.

We could do an A-Z a few times over, probably. Even though the above section is totally tongue-in-cheek topped up with jest, it comes from a place of reality.
There ARE insinuations, in different ways and levels, with all the above, so sarcasm aside there are things which are deemed gayer than others when it comes to food.

What Isn’t Gay Food? Rainbow Cupcakes, For a Start…

So if all the above is gay in one way or another, what isn’t gay food? Well, rainbow cupcakes - a product as gay as they come - have become iconic of straight behaviour and performative action. Totally ironic. Kyle Fitzpatrick at Eater writes, in ‘Queer Food is Hiding in Plain Sight’, “the one thing queer food isn’t is a rainbow cupcake — just ask the viral (and extremely straight) rainbow bagel. It is less about what is literally eaten, but it’s more than just the presence of queer people at the table”.

In an episode of LGTBQ+ food podcast Queer The Table, cookbook author Julia Turshen, who also spearheaded Equity At The Table, says “food is part of all sorts of movements (particularly social justice), so that’s nothing new… it doesn’t matter what you’re eating, but the act of having something as familiar as a meal is a very, very powerful thing and the highest purpose of food is to bring unlikely people together… I always like to say a table without food is a meeting”.

Indeed many articles and podcasts we’ve delved into in the last few weeks have urged that queer food is not a cuisine, it has no flavour profiles or geographical origins and is not about ingredients or dishes. It’s more about who is cooking, who is serving, who else is there and where the gathering around food is happening — that’s where queer food is born. Queer food is about the people present, the hands that make it and the appetites it sates, not a particular dish or ingredient, however colourful, fussy or insinuatingly-shaped.

Fitzpatrick’s same Eater article delves into Hamburger Mary’s, a chain of drag-influenced burger restaurants dating back to San Francisco in the early 70’s now with 20 locations across the USA, which is “presenting one of America’s most iconic foods in a decidedly gay context”. The company self-identifies as “the only national restaurant branded with an LGBTQ history” and its co-owner, Ashley Wright, puts it so succinctly: “A hamburger is as straight a foodstuff as it comes, but when you change the context (setting, surrounds, service) it can be totally gay, too. [Hamburger Marys is] taking something as all-American as a burger but making it gay.” Food is non-binary.

“In a society concerned with categorising and being categorised, what you eat begins to say a lot about you,” Jaya Saxena writes on Eater in ‘The Food That Makes You Gay’. “We link diets to class, to race, and to the idea of adherence to good taste. As sexual orientation evolved into a category of identity, what queer people ate became its own category of note.”

Why GastroGays Has Never Had ‘Gay Food’ As Our Niche

The origin of Pride was, and still remains, protest. Protest for rights, visibility, equality, acceptance and change by the very act of people power. Protest for fairness, for good and for inclusion, where minority communities are regularly shunned, excluded or kept in a box.

“Why do we still need Pride in 2024?” we hear a faint holler. Need we point out the increases in LGBTQ+ hate crimes (second only to racism-fuelled instances) and a stark rise in LGBTQ+ youth feeling unsafe in school settings? Much more in this important RTÉ.ie article from 2023.

Our brand name has its roots in protest, too. We’ve written and produced under the moniker of GastroGays for our entire intertwined professional lives. It was a catchy little tittle that summed us up 11 years ago when we decided to start sharing our content together as-one. Silly and slightly unconscious trying to pin a name on it, yet it was also intentional and specific — doing exactly what it said on the tin: two gay guys in food, which over the years has sometimes been confused with “two guys in GAY food”.

It takes balls to have your orientation laid out constantly and how you identify so interwoven in your professional output, a dichotomy as powerful as it is uncomfortable. It hasn’t been an easy road, but we’ve historically never taken the easy road with anything we’ve done (hello, we wrote a cookbook on deep frying when air frying was everywhere). It could have been FAR easier without the word ‘gay’ in our brand name, and we would - sadly - have had way more success more quickly.

People for over a decade have continuously judged what we do and brought to the table incorrect preconceptions that our content and output will have a gay agenda (as if the more you’re exposed to queer identity and ideology the more chance you will ‘catch’ it) or that our content might only apply to LGBTQ+ people, simply because of our catch brand name. Neither could be further from the truth.

Our sexual orientation is not something we hide behind, it’s right there in every email, every article, every interview. Every meeting, every client pitch, every proposal, invoice and report. Subtly visible and quietly loud as clearly queer voices, year-round, not just annually linking in with our gay identity once June rolls around and affords the stage.

Every day has to be Pride for us because our brand has been about honesty, visibility, transparency and truth from day one. A staunch declaration of who we are and what we do in an overwhelmingly cis, hetero-normative world, and often that riles people up and stokes unwarranted discussion about who we are, what we do or places us into a box. So if every day for us has a dash of Pride about it, every day is underpinned in a whisper of protest, too.

Though our content is mostly food-based, sexuality has never dictated our approach to our subject. We are ‘food content by a gay couple’, not ‘gay content by a food couple’. Queer food, Gay food or whatever way food is viewed through the prism of LGBTQ+ perspectives is all about people, place, ownership and community, not about tropical cocktails with umbrella garnishes, disco ball brunch, bananas, oysters or baked Alaska.

Straight people are the ones who have consistently deemed, declared or decreed food to be, or not to be, gay, not LGBTQ+ people.

Remember that this Pride Month as a rainbow cupcake is thrust into your hand.