Skip to main content

*Pre-order* What Is Queer Food?: How We Served a Revolution (John Birdsall)

$29.99
 More payment options

EXPECTED JUNE 3, 2025. AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW!

Signed copies will be available after John's event with us on June 22nd. Please let us know in the notes section at check out if you'd like us to ship your copy after the event and if you'd like it personalized.

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 readers 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.