Gay restaurants in dc

A drag brunch? Or something more subtle, an energy maybe? These books provide very different pathways into the study of the gay experience with food; Dining Out through restaurants, where the gayness comes from the clientele and sometimes owners, with What is Queer Food? I spoke with Erik last month about his inspiration for writing Dining Out, how and where he found gay restaurants across America, and what he discovered about them during his travels.

Dining Out is now available on Bookshop, Amazonand wherever books are sold. Laura McLaws Helms: To start, could you tell me a little about your background and what drew you to writing about the history of gay restaurants? Erik Piepenburg: Sure. I should say I'm not a historian.

I am not a food person. I have really never worked in the food industry other than a terrible week at Burger King when I was in gay school. Those are the qualifications that I don't have. What I am, though, is a gay man. I've been a journalist for 25 years and have always just loved eating at gay restaurants.

I came out and came of age in the '90s when gay restaurants were just everywhere in the gay neighborhoods that I lived in. I'm just someone who loves eating with other gay people at restaurants and is curious about what happened with gay restaurants, at least in the numbers that I remember back in the '90s.

All of that sparked a pitch that I sent to my editor in the food section of the New York Times in[an] article about what's up with gay restaurants. It restaurants out there's a lot that's happening with gay restaurants. The article I wrote for the Times came out four years ago.

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Then fast forward, and here we are with a book inspired by that article that takes a much broader, years look at where gay people have been eating. Laura: What did your journalism focus on before writing that New York Times article? I still do. I write a lot about horror movies specifically.

That's a guilty pleasure of mine, but I've always been fascinated by gay placemaking, places like bars and, in this case, restaurants; other places where gay people have met one another for friendship, for romance, for entertainment, for all kinds of purposes. Even though people who look at my bylines in the Times will see recently a lot about horror movies, there's actually a lot of interest in LGBT topics as well.

Laura: How do you define a gay restaurant? Did you go into this book having a definition of an idea or did that idea evolve as you were doing your research? Erik: If you ask me and other Gen Xers like me, "What is a gay restaurant? It's a restaurant where you walk in and there's mostly gay people.