Hello and welcome to Outward Slate's podcast about the importance of eating three square gay meals a day.

And what better place to break our daily bread than at the homosexual diner, the trans coffee shop,

the lesbian vegan joint, and all the other places where our queer ancestors have flirted and gossiped and broken up and made up and cried on each other's shoulders over pork chops and tempe burgers and a sweet and sour cabbage soup that tastes like home.

I'm Christina Cotarucci, a senior writer at Slate, and I love a gay restaurant. Really, I love a gay

anything, but there's something particularly homie, I think, about a place that serves food

and a place where you can sit around a table and actually hear each other talk. But gay

restaurants aren't always easy to identify. And if you're like me, you probably don't know much about their history.

Gay bars are a much more common cornerstone of queer social life. They're where the parties are and where you'll almost always find people looking to make friends or hook up. But the LGBT's, we're only

human. We need to eat. And for more than 150 years, we've been opening queer restaurants or

commandeering straight ones to have our meals together. There's a new book coming out at the

beginning of Pride Month that fleshes out that history in

gorgeous mouth-watering detail. It's called, appropriately enough, dining out, first dates,

defiant nights, and last called disco fries at America's gay restaurants. And the author,

Eric Pippenberg, joins us this week to talk about how gay cafeterias and bistros and lunch counters and fine dining establishments have been essential to queer culture across the country.

We'll also talk about what place they might hold in our lives today.

We'll be right back with Eric after the break.

Thank you. in our lives today. We'll be right back with Eric Pippenberg, the author of the new book, Dining Out.

Eric, welcome to Outward.

Thank you for having me. I'm so glad to be here. So I think it's obvious to many of us why gay people have gravitated to bars, but why do gay people need restaurants?

Yeah, I think that's a really important distinction because we, for so long, in the LGBT community, have valued bars as places where people can gather for friendship or romance or sex or entertainment.

But really, the point of this book for me was to

demonstrate the ways in which gay restaurants serve very different purposes from gay bars. They

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