In every queerphobic stereotype, what and how we eat is a source of fear. But with an open mind, food might just become a liberating source of power.
“You know my rule about men eating soup in public,” right-wing pundit Jesse Watters ventured on Fox News. “I don’t think it’s manly.” He mimed sipping broth from a spoon, lips pouted in a delicate O, before declaring the same rule exists for ice cream. “A grown man,” and here he is referring to president Joe Biden, “should not be licking ice cream in public.” His co-hosts laughed along. They understood the joke.
If you don’t understand it, here’s what Watters was getting at, and what others online ran away with: Ice cream is soft and sweet and fussy, and it drips sticky onto your skin, and you need to lick it with your fat, wet tongue and your wide, open lips, going until you’ve sucked the last melted drop right out of the tip of the cone and welcome it with a final moan of pleasure, and what kind of man would be seen doing that? As Derek Davison put it on X, “There are many valid reasons to criticize Joe Biden right now. Which makes it incredibly hilarious that the right wing establishment has become so pathological that its main talking point today is ‘eating ice cream is gay.’”
“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” wrote Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in The Physiology of Taste — a sentiment popularized by Iron Chef, and fully embraced by Watters and, probably, your 7th grade bully. In a society concerned with categorizing and being categorized, what you eat begins to say a lot about you. We link diets to class, to race, and to the idea of adherence to good taste. As sexual orientation evolved into a category of identity, what queer people ate became its own category of note.
Queer historians and chefs have a decent handle on what queer food is, whether it’s campy baked Alaska and cake piped in flowery buttercream, or simply food that is inventive and mold-breaking and made by queer people. As a distinctly queer food scene continues to establish itself in America, this sensibility flourishes.
But there are foods, the bullies and the priggish suggest, that alert the world you are gay in a negative way. It’s mostly the stuff of immature oooOOOOOooos and teenage razzing, but studies show men will avoid everything from yogurt to rosé to “products with rounded edges” because they are associated with femininity, and for a man to do a womanly thing could give someone the wrong idea. Because to come off as queer is still the “wrong idea.” The feeling behind the joke is that to be queer is to be lesser, and that you could be perceived that way with the slip of the tongue across a scoop of mint chip.
If it were just the fear of misperception, however, you’d think reality could stop it in its tracks. Any joke would become undone by the fact of identity, countered easily with “I’m not,” instead of further reaction being used as proof that the eater is, in fact, totally gay. But the idea that food can turn you gay speaks to the depth of how food is coded. Food is used as both a signifier of the self and fuel for the body, the singular act of digestion taking what you see on the outside and literally turning it into yourself on the inside. You don’t just enjoy ice cream. Ice cream becomes you. What does that make you, and in return, what do you make it?
Maybe the fear goes deeper, and finally smacks against something it’s been circling around in the dark. We know ice cream cannot make you gay. But if we are what we eat, there is the chance then, that what we eat could reflect, or affect, who we are. And could make us realize, in terror and glory, that who we thought we were is not so fixed.
Foods that make one appear queer tend to fit into a few categories. First, there are foods that evoke cocks. As Julia Serano writes in her book Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back, women, queer people, and other marginalized communities are often “marked by sex,” or inherently sexually visible. And while you could describe any eating experience in a lightly sexual tone — the mouth is a heavy player in both acts — a man eating something that looks like a penis, or makes him perform any oral movements one could also do to a penis, holds a lot of weight here.
This is what Watters is afraid of with ice cream. The same with Top Gear host Richard Hammond, who declared in 2016 that he doesn’t eat ice cream, explaining that his refusal has “something to do with being straight.” In 2018, Wiz Khalifa said that any man eating a whole banana is “sus,” and that he should be breaking it up into little pieces before he eats. Social media is full of men joking that popsicles, corn dogs, and pickles are all too risky. Better cut them up first.
But there are other, non-phallic foods that associate men with queerness. In Bruce Feirstein’s satirical 1982 book Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, “real” of course suggests straight; in the introduction, a strawman complains of “pansies” and “wimps” who would balk at his steak and eggs. There is of course the titular quiche that is too effete, and later, Feirstein relegates things like lemon mousse, brie, eggs Benedict, poached salmon, and tofu to the “quiche eaters.” In Slate, David Mehnert wrote of learning from a 10-year-old classmate that gay men are identifiable because they “always order BLTs.” Men will apparently order cocktails without frilly garnishes or “feminine” glassware — that’s just not how a “real” man should drink. And last year, racist and misogynistic social media personality Andrew Tate suggested the very act of enjoying food, any food, is a way for men to “validate a non-existent masculinity.”
The foods that are capable of marking a man this way are not static. As Cathy Crimmins writes in her 2004 book How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization, quiche was a “bit exotic and a little gay” when Feirstein wrote about it, but “now it’s served in airport restaurants.” They also don’t follow any coherent logic. A man may get side-eyed for eating pink ice cream, but not a pink steak. Diet soda may be off limits, but Coors Light isn’t. And a hot dog in a bun is as phallic as anything, but men don’t seem to be cutting them into little pieces at the ballgame.
There are seemingly no foods that make you a lesbian.
There is a sleight of hand happening with most of these associations. The vocalized fear may be that a glass of frosé will make a man look “gay,” but we arrive at that outcome through an action that is deemed feminine. Which is seen as deviant based on the unipolar structure of Western ideas of sexuality and gender, according to Serano, where cis, white, straight men sit at the top, and anyone else is in varying ways inferior. This separation creates a fear of “courtesy stigma” — the idea that if you interact with someone or something associated with a marginalized group, “then others may view you as having been ‘tainted’ or ‘corrupted’ by those associations, and you may be disgraced and ostracized yourself as a result,” she writes.
The fear of courtesy stigma can be seen in things like white supremacist concerns over interracial marriage and panics over “social contagion,” or the idea that your girlfriend touching your butt makes you gay. And these stigmas only work one way; a woman can drink straight whiskey or eschew salad without being accused of being a lesbian or a man, and maybe she’s even temporarily considered cool or low-maintenance, but she will not gain male privilege by doing so.
But if a man eats something that is associated with women, whether because of its color or flavor or calorie count, “that can lower your status as a man,” Serano tells Eater, “or some of that stigma can rub off on you.”
The association of gay men and femininity is a relic from a previous framework for thinking about queerness. According to historian Hugh Ryan, author of the books When Brooklyn Was Queer and The Women’s House of Detention, through the 19th century, sexuality wasn’t understood as something separate from gender; effeminate men or butch women (including people who might now identify as trans) had “inverted” bodies, while those who may have been gender normative but slept with people of the same sex just weren’t identified. A man could share a bed with another man and write poetry about his body all day and not be thought of as queer, as long as he wasn’t gender-deviant. To be gay, to the extent that was an identity, was to be womanly.
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But as urbanization brought changing social standards, so did new ideas of what behavior signaled “queerness.” As more people moved to cities in the 19th century, more people were interacting across gender and class lines. Queer people met other queer people, and crucially, began thinking of themselves as queer. “People who were ‘normally’ gendered but attracted to people of the same sex — a group that had gone unnamed before — found each other in greater and greater numbers and began to recognize themselves as communities with shared identities,” writes Ryan.
The rules of how you’d previously name who was queer just didn’t apply anymore. Now that you couldn’t trust that a masculine man or a feminine woman was straight (and now that “straight” was a concept), you had to suss that information out, or prove yourself to others, in new ways. “Effeminacy” expanded to include temporarily feminine gestures from otherwise gender normative men — now it was gay to share a bed with another man, or vocally admire his body. “It’s really about regulating heterosexuality,” says Ryan. “They want to make sure that the ‘pure’ act in pure ways.”
This determining who is pure and who isn’t is still what happens any time someone laughs at a man ordering a cocktail with a flower garnish. It may be presented as a joke, but “it’s both a call to police yourself and police others,” says Ryan. Commenting on it enforces that this behavior deserves to be commented on; it’s a warning that if you see someone else doing this, it’s wrong and you should let them know, but also that if you enjoy it, well, you shouldn’t. Or you can, but just know that you’ll be seen differently. You’ll be marked.
The idea of marking, though, lingers from before the concept of sexual orientation broke away from gender, back when to be queer was to be an “invert.” Queerness was a fact of the body, and rather than being “born this way,” many believed it was actually something that could sneakily spread through a population. Mostly, it was transmitted through sexual behavior, writes Serano, like masturbation and promiscuity. But what caused a man to want to spend all his time masturbating, or to become so libidinous he winds up pursuing other men? According to many theorists in the 19th century and earlier, part of it was one’s diet. Food really could make you gay.
In 1493, Spanish colonizers were not having a good time on the island they named Hispaniola. They were sickly and dying, and the problem, they believed, was the food of the New World, unfamiliar things like cassava root, pineapples, guava, and local fish. The solution, then, was also food — Christopher Columbus was convinced that they would get better once they began eating a Spanish diet again, like wheat bread, meat, honey, and wine.
This belief came from the widespread “fear that living in an unfamiliar environment, and among unfamiliar peoples, might alter not only the customs but also the very bodies of settlers,” writes Rebecca Earle in The Body of the Conquistador. “Or perhaps it might instead transform the European body in less lethal but equally unwelcome ways, so that it ultimately ceased to be a European body at all.” Spanish conquistadors became singularly focused on maintaining a European diet, which would fuel the entire project of colonization.
Humoral theory, which was popularized by Hippocrates, was still the dominant scientific belief system at the time, categorizing different personality traits within four bodily fluids. The Spanish classified themselves as choleric (traits: aggressive and ambitious) and classified Indians (and broadly, women) as phlegmatic (traits: reserved and calm). But the humors were definitionally mutable. American Indians weren’t phlegmatic because they were born different — the Spanish believed they all shared a common Biblical ancestor — but because they ate differently. The Spanish viewed their own diet not as just culturally or nutritionally superior, but the very thing that would keep them Spanish. Spanish men were particularly concerned about losing their beards, symbols of machismo and masculinity that they believed were gifted from God, and which they did not see on the faces of American Indians. The wrong diet, they thought, could erase your very manhood.
These ideas about food and self remained dominant for centuries to come; Brillat-Savarin wrote in 1825 that what we digest “makes us habitually sad or gay,” as in happy, “taciturn or talkative, morose or melancholy, without our even questioning it, and especially without our being able to deny it.” These theories were replaced in the 1860s by the knowledge that all food could be measured by its carbohydrates, proteins, and vitamins, but humoral theory’s 2,000 years of prevalence continued to influence Western thought.
What foods would keep men men, which inherently meant heterosexual, was subject to interpretation. In the 19th century, minister Sylvester Graham was of the belief that a rich diet, specifically one with too much meat, would make men hypersexual, “which back then could lead you to do homosexual things,” says Ryan. But for many Europeans and Americans, a manly diet meant the meat and bread they already ate — fitting, as they were often the ones defining masculinity in the first place. In 1884, neurologist J. Leonard Corning wrote that the European meat-heavy diet gave them an advantage over the “effeminate rice eaters of India and China,” and essentially justified colonization (as Ryan notes, “queer people are always being viewed through a bodily idea of white supremacy”). Eating meat was seen as the right of white men, the very thing that defined their white masculinity.
We have largely moved on from believing things like “effeminacy” are solely a fact of the body, or could be transmitted by eating rice or too much steak. But as Ryan notes, many of our ideas around sexuality and queerness are a little incoherent, built on shaky foundations. What these theories all espouse is a belief that the state of the body is changeable. And there are remnants of these beliefs that still show up in how we think about both queerness and diet.
“The [rumor] I’ve heard the most is if you eat soy, or potentially other foods, that are supposedly estrogenic, that it will make you less of a man,” says Serano. It is a persistent whisper, one Ryan says he’s also heard since he was a vegetarian in the ’90s, stuff like “tofu was going to give you breasts” on sensationalist daytime talk shows. This is the third category of food that makes you gay: Food that might actually queer your body.
Every few years, often fueled by the right-wing corners of culture, there’s some panic about phytoestrogens in soy making cis boys lose sperm count and appear more feminine. In 2010, Bolivian president Evo Morales claimed that when men eat chickens that have been injected with hormones, “they experience deviances in being men.” A recent self-published, non peer-reviewed “study” claims sugary and fatty foods have made people homosexual. And in 2020, some men tried to save their masculine brothers by warning them that eating the Impossible Whopper would make them grow breasts.
These fears have been debunked over and over. “If all men’s sperm counts were dwindling down to zero because of hormones in foods that all of us eat on a regular basis, I think we would definitely notice that,” says Serano; millions of men eat soy every day and remain men. Instead, it is the cultural fear of contamination again, but with a dash of body horror. We’ve just updated the language — instead of eating pineapple making you lose your beard, now it’s phytoestrogens. The language of modern science gives it an air of plausibility: It just feels like it could be true. After all, it’s not like your diet doesn’t affect your body. If diet can change your cholesterol levels or blood pressure, it’s not such a leap to think it could make you wake up with a body you don’t want.
Or more excitingly, that it could make you wake up with a body you do want.
A few pages into the novel Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin, Beth and Fran have to eat balls, “the best source of estrogen five years of reckless experimentation and desperate medical-library raids had been able to turn up.” A plague has turned everyone with over a certain amount of testosterone in their system into bloodthirsty monsters, the majority of which were men, so Beth and Fran have to hunt them, cut out their testicles, and sometimes eat them to keep estrogen in their systems. There are other things that help, too. “To suppress testosterone, they chew licorice root and drink black cohosh tea, which is an herb you can find throughout America and Europe,” says Felker-Martin in an interview. “And then to introduce estrogen to the body, aside from testicles, the big one is clover.”
To be clear, Felker-Martin didn’t invent these effects for fiction. There’s a long history of food having the imagined ability to queer one’s body in the negative. But there’s just as long a history of people, specifically queer and trans people, who have actively attempted to change their bodies through food, whether it was because hormone replacement therapy was inaccessible, or because they were acting on the belief that certain foods could masculinize or feminize the body.
In her research, Felker-Martin found stories of people experimenting with food and herbs to achieve different bodily effects. “Most often, you run into this stuff, and it’s been decoupled from its context,” she says — these records weren’t being kept for trans people, much less by anyone who understood themselves as trans in our modern-day sense — but there was plenty to learn from. In researching castrati, or boys who underwent castration before puberty to maintain a higher-pitched singing voice, “there was this belief that if they ate enough estrogenized material, it could actually increase their pitch,” she says, though it didn’t actually work. She also found eunuchs in China and the Ottoman empire eating special diets to counteract not being able to produce hormones naturally, and those in the Middle Ages being served “a bland diet of the kind recommended to women and children.”
“Even before we really know what hormones are, that stuff is very much in play. People are assigning masculine and feminine qualities to food,” she says, and using them in hopes of achieving desired outcomes.
Eventually, humans did figure out hormones’ effects on secondary sex characteristics, and that some plants and foods contained similar hormones that could affect our bodies. This knowledge has been passed around queer communities for generations. For example, a 2009 zine suggested transfeminine people eat sage, fennel, and clover to achieve feminizing effects. And the Instagram account @sexchange.tbt, run by author Jamie Lauren Keiles, recently posted images of a 2011 self-published manual offering a “three-step program for transitioning without exogenous testosterone,” which included a diet plan rich in milk thistle and dandelion capsules, and lots of protein to boost muscle growth.
“The book came out at one of the last moments before Obamacare when it was still pretty hard to get hormones in the U.S., especially if you didn’t live on a coast,” writes Keiles. “Though this book does have some bias against ‘unnatural’ transition (injecting testosterone), I think it probably has more in common with DIY abortion guides as a text oriented towards enabling bodily autonomy.” It offers an option in a world designed to keep queer people from what they need.
Serano, who says she took herbs with natural phytoestrogens and anti-androgenic compounds early in her transition, emphasizes that there’s only so much herbs can do. “I felt like maybe they were doing something to me. But then when I transitioned and I actually took hormones, that was very, very different,” she says. Crucially, to achieve even the smallest effects, she was taking herbs in quantities that the average person could not accidentally ingest. It required substantial, intentional consumption, not just eating chicken nuggets a few times a week.
Most cis and straight people’s sense of their own gender and sexuality is unintentional — they have not asked themselves why they are straight, have not tried out new pronouns in their head and made the decision to keep the ones they already use. Being presented with a behavior that could change your body raises the question of why you have the body you do now. And instead of being open to that question, many react by doubling down in terror. This fear of contamination is what’s fueling the current wave of anti-trans legislation, hate crimes, and prejudice against queer people. “It’s people seeing something that they haven’t had cause to understand and losing their goddamn minds,” says Felker-Martin. “Which would be sad if it didn’t make me murderously angry.”
What these fears of food marking one as queer recognize on some level — whether it’s with a corn dog that makes a man look gay to his friends or tofu with phytoestrogens — is fluidity. Because what if? Chewing licorice root with the intent of changing your body is an acknowledgment that the body can be changed. Which means that none of this is static. “I think what [my research] really gave me is a sense that all of this stuff is very fluid, very arbitrary and extremely, extremely dependent on the perspectives of the thinker,” says Felker-Martin. Just as our associations of what is masculine, feminine, gay, straight, and trans have fluctuated, so do those very categories. “As soon as you realize that our bodies are changeable, you start to ruminate on the incredible fineness of our ideas of gender,” she says. “What makes you a man? Is it just that you don’t have tits?”
Food is a portal for these thoughts and fears because eating is the first way many of us understand our bodies and brains as sites of change. There was a moment when you didn’t like a flavor and then you did, a moment you figured out your discomfort was actually an intolerance, the time you put chile crisp on your peanut butter sandwich just to see what it was like, and now you won’t shut up about how much you love it. Little changes open the door to bigger ones. If you suddenly like olives today, maybe tomorrow you’ll suddenly like something else.
“I just typed ‘asexual’ into my Google search bar, and the first thing that comes up is suggesting ‘what’s with asexuals and garlic bread?’” Ryan tells me as we chat about what the future of queer food associations could look like. He sends me a Reddit thread explaining how asexual people have started making memes and comics about how garlic bread is as good as sex, and how gushing over it is a sign of asexuality. The difference is, the association is coming from within the community.
Ryan believes we’re going through another cultural shift in our ideas of queerness, similar to the one brought on by urbanization. This time, the internet is the driving force, connecting queer people across physical space and allowing us to speak about ourselves without gatekeeping by straight people. It might seem like a greater understanding of the changeability of sexuality and gender, even within one person across a lifetime, would signal the end of these behavioral associations. But new ones are being built, because “we’ve got to find ways to express our identity,” says Ryan.
Identity is a squishy concept, material and immaterial at the same time, existing both in our minds and in our actions. To be queer has to do with who you do and do not have sex with, but also how you approach those interactions, what it feels like, and how you sit in your own body. So these associations with food, a thing we all must consume and often be seen consuming, become a way to externalize something intangible. Eating a lemon bar won’t make you bisexual, and not liking them won’t take that identity away, but it’s a gentle in-joke. A welcoming offer from the queer world, instead of an accusation from the straight one.
As these new identity markers come about (and as, I hope, there remains a healthy skepticism of them all), existing rules and affiliations continue to attempt to keep straight people, especially straight men, in line. Even children are being affected. But the verso of that is these external rules are not meant to mean anything to queer people. If you’re already gay, you can’t be made more gay by eating quiche. “I think one of the beautiful things about being out as queer is that all of those heteronormative rules don’t apply to you anymore,” Serano says. You can eat corn dogs whenever you want, drink a cocktail showered in fruit garnishes in a big pink glass, and enjoy soup in public. You can celebrate what you crave, what you hunger for, instead of being defined by fear. Take another lick of ice cream and be made.
Marco Tirado is a digital illustrator based in Philadelphia that creates vivid, colorful and energetic compositions about the relationships between people.
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