How food helps in being gay and happy | Economic Times

Pride Month commemorates New York’s Stonewall riots in June 1969, commonly said to have kicked off the LGBT rights movement. It is now being marked in India by organisations as varied as the Bengaluru FC soccer team and a North Goa bakery which has produced bread in rainbow colours. But the gay community existed before Stonewall, and one entertaining proof is The Gay Cookbook by chef Lou Rand Hogan, published in 1965. Subtitled “the complete compendium of campy cuisine and menus for men… or what have you”, it offers a window to a surprisingly open and ribald gay world, combined with an excellent guide to mid-century American cooking. Hogan was born in 1910 and tried his hand at theatre before finding work on Pacific cruise liners. The closed world of the ships, effectively beyond the reach of the law which still penalised homosexuality, was a haven of sorts and of the 500 stewards, Hogan wrote, “probably 486 were actively gay”. This gave them the freedom to be flamboyant, with “female nicknames and jokes about their sexual exploits and desires”, writes Stephen Vider, in a paper on Hogan and his cookbook. This kind of exaggerated sexuality was one of the few ways to be openly gay back then, but it still took courage and carried dangers, as Hogan shows with one throwaway bit of advice: “When you have enticed someone in… and the character starts playing with his switchblade as he says, ‘Lay some bread on me, hear?’, he is NOT asking for a sandwich. Ya better get out the billfold (the one with the single small bill), edge the door open, and prepare to scream the house down, Gert.” Mostly, though, the book is a collection of standard recipes, chattily told with risqué jokes and innuendos — no cucumber or banana goes unmentioned. Yet this conceals how genuinely revolutionary the book was, not just for being openly gay, but also for being unashamedly camp at a time when activists were trying to downplay this aspect of queer life in an attempt to gain mainstream acceptability. By the 1960s, the mainstream was allowing more depictions of homosexuality, but gay men were either shown negatively as perverse and predatory, or more positively, but depressingly, as sad and lonely or tortured about their sexuality. And this was where Hogan was really pathbreaking, because by showing gay life through cooking, and an anecdotal world of parties and dinners, he presented the radical notion of being both gay and happy. Food normalises life, because we all must eat. So many people, still coming to terms with their sexuality, have been helped by meeting other LGBT people, in a café or restaurant, or just invited home for a meal. When the GayBombay support group began in 2000, its first meetings were held in McDonald’s. It felt a bit odd to be surrounded by parents and kids, but it also felt like a step towards normality, a family meal, just of a slightly different kind.