An informative and expert analysis of the culture of food fueling a queer revolution.
Exploring how food has helped define the act of queer survival across decades of sexual prohibition.
Sectioned into four chronological parts, Birdsall, a celebrated culture and food writer, explores how the art of gastronomy became integrated into queer culture despite the prevalence of a closeted 20th-century “homosexual underground.” His narrative first probes the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when same-gender desire was considered a pathology and restaurants like San Francisco’s Paper Doll provided a safer haven for gender-challenging individuals. This was also true at the marble tables of Café Nicholson in Manhattan, which emerged as one of several queer-friendly “spaces with a dynamic mix of art and performance…where people’s masks could slip.” As the book meanders into the “audacious tang” of mid-1980s queer liberation, Birdsall expansively cites influential queer pioneers and disruptors like Harry Baker, inventor of the chiffon cake in 1927; Café Nicholson’s renowned chef Edna Lewis; James Baldwin; and Truman Capote, among others. Birdsall emphasizes relevant volumes like The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, scouring it for cloaked queer meaning, as well as 1940s food editor Genevieve Callahan’s lesbian-coded The California Cook Book, since, at the time, the publishing industry imperative was to “scrub manifestly queer voices from cookbooks.” Through an enthusiastic narrative, Birdsall names names and cites legacies of those responsible for ushering forward the evolution of queer food despite “a system determined to deny, prosecute, marginalize queer existence.” Naturally, Birdsall’s toothsome, astute four-course queer culinary history lesson begins and ends with cake.
An informative and expert analysis of the culture of food fueling a queer revolution.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781324073796
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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