Dining Out
First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America's Gay Restaurants
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- 12,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
From a New York Times journalist, a culinary tour of gay restaurants—their history, and how they evolved as a space of safety and celebration for the LGBTQ+ community—full of joy, sex, sorrow, activism, and nostalgia.
Dining Out explores how gay people came of age, came out, and fought for their rights not just in gay bars or the streets, but in restaurants. From cruisy urban cafeterias of the 1920s to mom-and-pop diners that fed the Stonewall generation to the intersectional hotspots of the early 21st century. Using archival material, original reporting and interviews, and first-person accounts, Erik Piepenburg explores how LGBTQ restaurants shaped and continue to shape generations of gay Americans.
Through the eyes of a reporter and the stomach of a hungry gay man, Dining Out examines the rise, impact and legacies of the nation's gay restaurants past, present, and future, connecting meals with memories. Hamburger Mary’s, Florent, a suburban Denny’s queered by kids: Piepenburg explores how these and many other gay restaurants, coffee shops, diners, and unconventional eateries have charted queer placemaking and changed the modern LGBTQ civil rights movement for the better.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York Times culture reporter Piepenburg debuts with a nostalgic cross-country tour of the eateries that "nourished, changed, and continue to inspire" LGBTQ+ communities in the United States. Among the venues spotlighted are Annie's Paramount Steakhouse in Washington, D.C., which served as a haven for closeted gay men in the 1950s and '60s; Pfaff's Saloon in Manhattan, which opened in 1856 and was frequented by Walt Whitman (sometimes with his lover Fred Vaughan in tow); and mid-20th-century New York City's Automats, which served food via vending machine and drew in gay patrons with their cafeteria-style seating and promise of relative anonymity (though diners could signal "their same-sex attraction to other customers" by wearing purple or lavender). The author's joyously randy personal anecdotes about coming of age in the gay restaurant scene, combined with his discussions of such topics as drag culture and the AIDS epidemic, enliven this intimate ode to the intersections of queer and culinary culture. It's a sweet and sincere celebration of what it means to be welcomed in body and spirit.
