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Last weekend a gay friend of mine arrived at my house for lunch and he bought a quiche. The association of quiche and gay men did not pass either of us by but I chose not to make a big deal out of it in the same way that he said nothing as I placed a selection of organic salads, legumes and wheat-free breads before him. That night I went out to dinner and I decided to make a mental note of what everyone at the table consumed.
The two straight(ish) girls shared three entrées comprising of stuffed pork, spiced meatballs and a mesculan salad. Out of the three lesbians two had the fish and the other had some sort of tired looking vegetable stack. Two of the gay men ate eye fillet (medium rare) while the other had pasta with a cream-based sauce. All males had dessert. None of the women had sweets but all six females agreed that more wine was needed. I don’t think I need to point out any of the clichés that are apparent given who ordered what.
I remembered my days in hospitality when I hated serving lesbians because someone always had a food allergy and they tended not to drink which meant they tended not to tip. I was also not keen on serving big tables of gay men as they tended to try and out do each other on who knew more about the menu, who knew the chef and who had eaten at Tetsuya’s. These people were the stereotypes that restaurant staff love to hate, and while there were plenty of lesbians who did tip and loads of gay men who knew nothing about food, it is undeniable that certain characteristics of culinary appreciation apply to lesbians and gay men accordingly.
Like tofu for example.
It is not hard to work out why lesbians embraced tofu so readily. If food had a sex, tofu is undeniably all woman, and the ’70s saw lesbians turn against meat like it was synonymous with patriarchal oppression. From that point on, we girls cannot walk past a health food store without ducking in for organic soy this and organic soy that. And while gay men’s sugar addiction is perhaps a little more obscure in its origins, I can only assume it is because all desserts are blatantly camp.
The association between sexuality and food is socially ingrained. I am never more shocked when I walk into a lesbian’s kitchen and she is using Saxa Table Salt as opposed to Maldon Sea Salt. She may as well be using Bonny Bell instead of Lucas’s Papaw Ointment – her dedication to the sisterhood becomes questionable. Or if I were to visit a gay boy’s home and he didn’t have a freezer full of skinless chicken fillets or the ingredients for a cheesecake, I’d have to wonder whether he’d ever tasted pillow either.
Most would argue that this is all social conditioning but I think the answer to the elusive gay gene could well lie in our taste buds.
After all, you are what you eat.
Rachel Cook
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