The History of Gay American Restaurants is Now in a Book!

I chatted with New York Times writer Erik Piepenburg, whose "Dining Out," an affectionate tour of queer eateries of yore as well as the ones that have survived, is out this week.

Happy Pride Month, Caftaners! I just found out this morning that I have Covid—ugh! (I can’t wait to go back to sleep.) Between that and the fact that I'm going to be away next week, this will probably be the last Caftan before I return the week of June 16-20. Just a reminder that the next big single day of nationwide protests of our current administration is called No Kings and is on Saturday June 14. On that link, you can find the protest nearest you.

Happy publication day to New York Times writer Erik Piepenburg's Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights and Last Call Disco Fries At America's Gay Restaurants.

Here’s Erik. Photo by Peter Larson

I just finished it and it is so fun, with a lot of heart—a great summer read. It's especially fascinating to read about places that weren't conceived to be gay restaurants—something that didn't really happen until the 1970s—but that somehow organically became "unofficially" gay because they were located next to a gay bar (or a strip of them) or because somebody knew somebody who knew somebody who...that sort of thing. Erik, whom I've known a bit here in NYC through mutual friends, has done a great job reporting this book, traveling and eating at many of the existing places in the book, from the unpretentious Napales Lounge and Grill in Green Bay, Wisconsin, that has become a hub for the regional trans community…

Outside Napalese recently (from the restaurant’s website)

…to the 1980s (and now defunct) "hustler brasserie" Gallus in Atlanta…

…to the late, great bistro-diner Florent in Manhattan's (once deliciously sordid, now boringly consumerist) meatpacking district…

…to—of course!—Hamburger Mary's.

The original Hamburger Mary’s in San Fran

We learn how cafeterias and donut shops were the (alleged) site of queer uprisings and cop pushbacks even before Stonewall, and we learn how so many restaurants became places where even the loneliest gays could find a semblance of safety and family—including the frequent buffets at the Flex bathhouse in Erik's hometown of Cleveland, Ohio!

The buffet at Flex bathhouse (from Erik’s book, courtesy of Flex Hotel Gym and Spa Cleveland)

Erik and I had a chat, which I hope you'll check out below. As for future Caftans, I'm talking on Wednesday to one of my literary idols, so that'll be an upcoming post, and I'll also have something very beachy and summery for you soon as well. If you're already a paying subscriber, THANK YOU as always. If you're not but you've been liking Caftan for a while, would you please consider it? THANK YOU!

Here's my chat with Erik...

Erik, thanks for talking today and congrats on the book, which is such a delight. I know the book began with this Times story on gay restaurants you wrote in 2021.

That’s the gay-owned and gay-friendly Laziz Kitchen in Salt Lake City

Tell us more!

In 2017, my favorite gay restaurant of all time, the Melrose Diner in Chicago, closed after about 50 years in business.

Sad!

I was there three or four times a week in the 1990s when I lived in Boystown. I went there for brunch with my friends, for dates, and after my 4pm-to-midnight shift at the NBC station, when I'd have the broccoli cheddar omelet and the sweet and sour cabbage soup. Its closure hit me hard.

So I pitched my editor at the Times a story on: "What's going on with gay restaurants? Are they still a thing?" Chelsea, here in NYC, had become a shell of what it was in the '90s in terms of gay restaurants. But elsewhere around the country, gay restaurants were thriving. I had so much material left over from reporting that story—interviews with people who were thrilled to talk to me because they'd never been asked to talk about their restaurants before. I thought, "You know what? This is going to be my first book."

You traveled all over the country to visit restaurants. How'd you figure out where to go?

I wanted to stay away from the quote-unquote "hot new" places in NYC or Miami. Yawn. That was not interesting to me. I wanted to go where gay people in midsize cities were eating. So, yes, while I did go to L.A., Atlanta and D.C., I also went to my hometown of Cleveland as well places like Columbus, Green Bay and Ft. Lauderdale.

The book jumps around not only geographically but in time. It's not a perfect chronological history.

I realized that most of the restaurants I'd talk about in the book would be closed, but a book of only closed restaurants would not be exciting. So the places in the book are both closed and open, with some of them still going for decades.

But what would you call the oldest gay restaurant in the U.S.?

The more conceptual answer is Pfaff's, a nineteenth-century downtown Manhattan beer cellar where bohemians congregated and where Walt Whitman went with his boyfriend.

An illustration of Whitman at Pfaff’s (from the Village Preservation blog)

But if we're talking about the capital-G gay restaurant, I place that as Annie's Paramount Steakhouse in Washington, D.C., which has been open since 1948 and became gay in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the Lavender Scare (when the government was trying to root gay people out of its ranks). Government workers who were gay were terrified, but Annie's was a safe space run by a gregarious, bosomy woman, Annie Katina, who was like your momma-bear protector.

Here she is in 2009, before her 2013 death at age 85 (from her Wikipedia page)

Tell us one restaurant that defined the 1960s.

I'd say Annie's again, but I'd also say Bloodroot in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a real lesbian feminist vegetarian institution, even though it opened in 1977, not the sixties. It's still open and it feels in there like the 1970s never ended.

from Bloodroot’s website. Cofounder Noel Furie, with the silver hair, is seated. (Her cofounder Selma Miriam died a few months ago.)

What about the 1970s?

The Eagle [leather bar] in NYC at that time had a restaurant where they'd serve steak, lobster, baked Alaska. Just think of being there in your chaps and having a delicious dinner, then come 11pm, they clear the tables from the dance floor and the music starts and you take out your poppers and have a night of leather extravagance. It was a one-stop shop.

The original site of NYC’s The Eagle, which opened in 1970 after being a longshoreman’s pub since the 1930s called Eagle Open Kitchen (from The Eagle NYC website)

The 1980s?

I think of places in NYC like Company and Rounds that were these aspirational white-tablecloth restaurants where men of a certain age and style would have their prime rib and glass of wine and maybe you could meet a gentleman there, a hustler, for an assignation. The Gallus in Atlanta was an insane place where you could have a fancy dinner and then go downstairs and pick up a hustler.