From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman and this is good food.

What exactly is queer food?

If a queer person cooks something, does that automatically make it queer food?

That's the topic of John Birdsell's new book, conveniently titled, What is Queer Food?

Hi, John. Hi, Evan. Can you start off by painting a picture for us of Little Debs in Hudson, New York? In the prologue to your book,

you call it for sure the queerest restaurant in America. Why? Well, for multiple reasons, but I went to

Lil Debs in 2022, and it's in Hudson, New York, which is kind of like a hip satellite of

Brooklyn or something in the Hudson Valley.

And Little Debs has gone out of its way to make itself a welcoming queer space.

There's like signage everywhere, you know, like if you gay, perfect.

And it's the decor changes.

And when I was there, it was this kind of wild, sort of tattered Mardi Gras vibe of streamers that were sort of falling from the ceiling, you know, purple beads.

And the food is quite delicious. It sort of hails from different places in the world reflecting the owner's backgrounds.

And when I went there, I just had this sense that for the first time, maybe for the first time ever in a restaurant, I was just seen as a queer customer.

And it made me think how much armor I just sort of carry around normally

in non-queer spaces and how Lil Debs just sort of let me like relax and just feel like

I was surrounded by queer people in this affirming queer space eating affirming queer food.

In your work you've explored the challenges of expressing queerness through food.

You write, saying what queer food was on a granular level kept eluding me.

And in the intervening years, and this speaks to the title of your book,

where have you landed on that question? What is queer food? Well, to answer that question,

I felt like I needed to go back into history and to basically trace queer experience across most of the 20th century.

...