In ‘Gay Gourmets,’ Food and Sex Converge at the Restaurant

Queer people have long known that food, community, and love are the true cornerstones of pleasure

Eating together is a way of creating community, and perhaps no community understands the pleasures of food and a good appetite more than queer writers, artists, and culinary enthusiasts. One such character part of this enduring, dynamic community is Marcel Boulestin, a charismatic London-based French chef, food writer, and restaurateur who embodied the gay gourmet archetype in the early 1900s. In my book, Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex, I explain how gourmet food became coded as “gay” in the 20^th century. Rather than accept explanations that gay men are inherently creative or hedonistic, I locate the historical roots of the gay gourmet in turn-of-the-century bohemianism and the rise of queer subcultures in cities like London and New York.

Gay gourmets and queer-led restaurants made pleasure a core value of modern queer spaces — centralizing the role of the restaurant in queer community-building — and “Gay Gourmets” was, in many ways, the starting point for my book. In this chapter, I write about Boulestin’s influence in redefining the relationship between queerness and restaurant culture, and the many personalities who crossed paths with the chef and found a similar reverence for fine dining and cuisine. In this excerpt, I illustrate a fact that LGBTQ people have long known: Food, community, and love are the true cornerstones of pleasure.

Boulestin frequently remarked on the prudery of English culture and its restrictive approach to pleasure. After serving in France for the entirety of World War I, Boulestin returned to London broke and desperate to restart his writing career. During a meeting with a publisher, he said, “By the way, you would not be interested in a cookery book, would you?” Boulestin’s first cookbook, Simple French Cooking for English Homes, came out in 1923 and was such an immediate hit that he published five more cookbooks over the next decade, along with food columns in Vogue, the Spectator, the Daily Express, and numerous other magazines and newspapers. Boulestin’s food writing went beyond recipes. He aimed to translate the French approach to food and pleasure for English readers. “The English habit of not talking about food strikes the foreigner, however long he may have stayed in England, as a very queer one — indeed, as a quite unnatural custom,” Boulestin wrote. With his typical campy wit, Boulestin flipped the script on Anglo prudery, calling its aversion to alimentary pleasure “queer” and “unnatural,” terms often used for gay men. Boulestin encouraged readers to break free from this pleasure-denying tradition. “One should talk about food and wine; they taste better if you do.” Indifference to what one ate should not be treated as a virtue.

At the same time that Boulestin was finding success as a food writer, he was also making a name as a restaurateur. After the war, when he was trying to scrape together enough money to survive, he had started cooking for people for pay. Luckily, he knew the right people. Aldous Huxley introduced him to Dorothy Todd, the “alarmingly butch” lesbian editor of Vogue magazine, who hired Boulestin to cook a lunch for Virginia Woolf, whom she was trying to cultivate as a writer. Woolf didn’t like eating in restaurants. The lunch proved such a success that afterwards the guests encouraged Boulestin to open a restaurant. Together with his lover, Robin Adair, in May 1925 Boulestin opened his first restaurant, which was decorated by Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell (Woolf’s sister), her bisexual lover Duncan Grant, and the painter Alan Walton. For the next decade and a half, until the start of World War II, Restaurant Boulestin was the chicest and supposedly most expensive restaurant in London. Woolf even deigned to eat out there.

Boulestin’s success with the Bloomsbury set spoke to the ongoing centrality of pleasure-oriented approaches to food and sex within bohemianism. Bloomsbury’s bisexuality, open marriages, and polyamorous arrangements are well known. Less attention has been paid to their cooking. Virginia Woolf wrote that when she and Leonard Woolf, her husband, moved to Bloomsbury in 1904, “We were full of experiments and reforms. We were going to do without table napkins, we were to have Bromo instead; we were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o’clock. Everything was going to be new, everything was going to be different. Everything was going on trial.” At the top of the list of conventions to be challenged was the English diet which, according to E. M. Forster, was guided by a “spirit of gastronomic joylessness.” English menus, he sniffed, “eschew pleasure and consider delicacy immoral.” The Bloomsbury set took their culinary inspiration from France, as helpfully translated by Boulestin. Roger Fry loved to cook in his Provençal diable pot. Quentin Bell adopted the French way to make salad dressing: mixing vinaigrette at the bottom of a wooden bowl, topping it with a piece of bread rubbed with garlic (the chapon), piling the greens on top, and tossing it all together when ready to serve. Virginia Woolf filled the pages of her novels with dinner party scenes, including the famous boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse (1927).

By the 1930s, as Boulestin hit the peak of his success, centering pleasure in one’s approach to food and sex had become not simply a signifier of bohemianism, but of homosexuality in particular. His restaurant attracted a notably queer crowd. For example, the restaurant was frequented by “Lord C. W.” who was “notorious for certain tastes” and was known among the Chelsea Guardsmen as “the terror of the district.” One afternoon at lunch, Boulestin witnessed Lord C. W. ask a handsome young waiter whether the steak was tender, and receiving affirmation, follow up with: “And you — are you tender?” He didn’t seem to care whether anyone was listening, Boulestin noted. You could get away with such behavior at Restaurant Boulestin, whose proprietor himself enjoyed rough trade like Chelsea guardsmen.

Boulestin’s campy persona and wild success affirmed a growing popular association between gay men and good food. While only the wealthy could afford his restaurant, Boulestin’s writing influenced a wide audience, including the British food writers who came after him. Elizabeth David described him as one of the chief influences on her cooking, praising his non-pretentious, creative, and authentic approach to food. She even used an illustrator for her cookbooks, Arthur Lett-Haines, who was a friend of Boulestin’s and the lover of Boulestin’s illustrator, the painter Cedric Morris. (Lett-Haines and Morris ran a painting school together where Lett-Haines cooked delicious garlic-laden French meals.) Along with his books and journalism, Boulestin endorsed food products, gave in-person cooking demonstrations at shops, and appeared in the first cooking demonstration ever aired on British television, in 1937. Reviews of his TV appearances at the time slyly winked at his queerness, noting for example the “delicate pinky-white powder” he wore on his face.

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By the 1930s, men who showed an interest in fine cooking were seen as “effete,” “homosexual,” or “light in their loafers.” This stereotype held more than a grain of truth. In fact, during the middle decades of the twentieth century, many of the most influential authorities in the Anglo-American food world were gay men. Marcel Boulestin represented what became a familiar type: the urbane, witty, campy, professional, gay gourmet. Multiple explanations have been offered for the preponderance of gay men in gourmet cooking. Early twentieth-century psychologists attributed the pattern to gay men’s supposed gender inversion. The 1936 Terman‒Miles Masculinity and Femininity Test, a diagnostic tool used by organizations like government agencies and corporations to identify the homosexuals in their midst, scored a male interest in cooking as a sign of homosexuality. The Terman‒Miles Test assessed answers to 455 questions and prompts to determine degrees of gender conformity. Men who scored as highly feminine and women who scored as highly masculine were determined to be likely sexual inverts, attracted to their own sex. According to the answer key, “the typical male invert” preferred “appliances such as food choppers” to tools that required physical force. Inverts could define a buffet, while straight men appreciated “things cooked in grease.” In short, homosexuals were feminine men who craved penetration and enjoyed activities associated with femininity, like cooking.

These assumptions filtered into popular culture. Magazines and advertisements in the 1940s and 1950s attacked “sissy foods” that were too delicate or refined for masculine tastes. “Give a Man Man’s Food,” a 1941 Good Housekeeping article instructed its women readers. “Men get tired of sissy food. They like dishes they can sink their teeth into.” The article followed with a recipe for boiled beef and horseradish. House and Garden warned wives in 1944 that omelets and soufflés were too “sissy” for men, who needed their eggs augmented “with the lusty presence of minced onions and ground meat.” The advice reflected the longstanding American belief that a taste for French cooking was effete. Masculine men ate beef, the protein most associated with masculinity in Anglo-American culture. Light and delicate foods like salad, or ice cream, were effeminate, which by the 1940s, and the concretization of the hetero/homo binary, had become a euphemism for homosexual.

Gender-determinist analyses of homosexuality were challenged by the gay rights movement in the 1970s, which protested the treatment of homosexuality as a mental illness, and fought against effeminate stereotypes of gay men. The association between gay men and gourmet cooking, however, didn’t go away. After the 1970s, gay men’s supposed gourmet proclivities became something to celebrate rather than stigmatize. New positive explanations attributed gay men’s gourmet tendencies to their innate creativity, or to their shared belief in taking pleasure seriously. But any explanation for the rise of the gay gourmet that depends on the supposedly inherent qualities of queer men, whether negative or admirable, cannot withstand historical scrutiny. A historical explanation for the rise of the gay gourmet must attend to timing.

Gourmet tastes became a significant aspect of gay male subculture in the twentieth century. The elevation of epicureanism within queer culture probably originated with the aesthetic decadent movement of the 1890s. Oscar Wilde, whose turn-of-the-century celebrity played such a prominent role in shaping queer aesthetics, was a well-known epicure who frequently held court in London’s best restaurants. Since the mid-nineteenth century, bohemians had indulged their alimentary appetites as a way of rejecting bourgeois respectability. In the early 1900s, gay aesthetes in London, New York, and other cities, made a taste for fine food into a defining aspect of queer subculture. Cooking’s feminine associations played a part, not because gay men were inherently feminine but because femininity served as an important way to signal same-sex desires, and because queer male subcultures included many people on the trans feminine spectrum. Shared tastes in good food proved a way of creating community. Across time and space, eating together, or eating the same diet, has served as a primary way to forge community. Food served this purpose as queer subcultures took shape in the early 1900s. By the 1970s, the significance of gourmet food to queer culture went well beyond the prominence of gay men in the food business. A whole queer food culture took shape, of gay and lesbian restaurants, gourmet societies, favorite dishes, and countless cookbooks, from the tongue-in-cheek to the heartrendingly earnest.

Additional photo illustration credits: Cover image courtesy Polity Books.