What do gay people eat?

What Is Queer Food?
Notes on camp cuisine.
By David Mehnert
Posted Wednesday, April 3, 2002, at 12:42 PM PT

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty
"You can pick out fags in a diner because they always order BLTs."

My friend Joe told me this when I was 10 years old. He had only just explained what "fags" were. Now he was telling me what they ate. "Of course fags will eat cheeseburgers, omelettes, pancakes," said Joe. "But if they have a choice, they'll always order BLTs."

I remember feeling alarmed because I loved BLTs. Joe was nearly a year older than me and infinitely more sophisticated in worldly manners. Although I didn't quite believe that foods could signal sexual preference, I had to agree that the BLT was a dubious invention: not quite a sandwich, not quite a salad, and showing suspicious shifts of register. As if to draw attention to its flamboyant self, the BLT was usually cut on the diagonal and skewered on toothpicks with curly plastic bits of frill. The more I thought about it, the more I believed Joe was right. The BLT was definitely queer.

Did my family know about BLTs? Perhaps they already suspected odd tendencies in my psychosexual makeup. I stopped ordering BLTs. They became an occult pleasure, something I made for myself. I took the BLT with me into the closet.


There you have it folks... Gay people eat BLTs.

 

That just sucked the fun out of BLT's and this thread. Way to go man.