Queer communities often have well-known and beloved bars and clubs where community members get together and spend a night out. But where are these spaces for LGBTQ+ people who are under 21, folks who are not looking to drink, or elder gays looking for a quieter, yet still social, environment? The New York Times reporter and Cleveland native Erik Piepenburg has the answer: restaurants.
Last Friday, Piepenburg gave a talk on his book, Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America’s Gay Restaurants, to the Oberlin community, alongside Greggor Mattson, professor of Sociology and Gender, Sexuality, and, Feminist Studies. Over the course of his hour-long talk, Piepenburg taught an audience of a couple dozen people what exactly makes a restaurant gay, why these spaces have historically been so important, and why we can anticipate gay restaurants making a comeback in the queer social sphere.
For Piepenburg, a gay restaurant is defined by the patrons who frequent it at any given moment, not by an owner or label. While gay bars and clubs are advertised as spaces for LGBTQ+ people, restaurants do not typically start out as an intentionally queer space. Instead, as local gays visit and feel comfortable in a restaurant, word travels quickly that queer people are openly accepted there. Soon enough, the restaurant “has been taken over” as a gay space.
Piepenburg’s exposure to gay restaurants began as a closeted kid growing up in Cleveland. With his friend group of “weird kids,” Piepenburg would spend his late nights at My Friends Restaurant, a 24-hour diner.
“We’d go to the Phantasy Theater to see a show, and afterward, we’d all go to My Friends,” he said. “I wasn’t out at the time, but I just knew looking around at this dining room. I said, ‘What’s going on here? That guy in the Smiths trench coat and the Morrissey hair, he’s really cute. And what does that mean? What’s happening right now?’ And so all these years later, looking back at that experience, I just think My Friends is a proto-gay restaurant for me.”
When Piepenburg lived in Chicago, he was a regular at the Melrose Diner, one of the city’s most popular gay restaurants. When the Melrose closed, Piepenburg felt an urge to cover the history of gay restaurants through an article for The New York Times. As he was interviewing a few people for the article, Piepenburg realized that there was a much larger story to be told than could fit in just 1,000 words. The people he was talking to had been asked about their experiences at gay bars and clubs, but most had never been asked where they had gone to eat on their first gay date as teens or where they went to cry during the AIDS crisis. Piepenburg quickly shifted gears from writing an article to turning the story into a book. However, that task proved to be daunting — until an editor told him to break the book down into dozens of 1,000-word articles.
“I’ve been writing 1,000-word articles about people for 20 years,” Piepenburg said. “And I think that was really great advice: just treat this book as if you were writing a bunch of articles about all these people … In this case, it was just a matter of treating each one carefully … empathetically, and as truthfully as possible.”
While traveling around the country to conduct research for Dining Out, Piepenburg made it a priority to visit a wide variety of gay restaurants and not focus only on the glamour and spectacle that come with gay restaurants in New York City, where he has lived for the past 20 years.
“I wanted to go into places where you wouldn’t think there would be this queer food or restaurant scene,” Piepenburg explained. “I wanted to talk to people who don’t share my background, across the LGBTQ+ spectrum, but also across economic differences too. Where do the people I grew up with in Cleveland eat?”
While gay bars and clubs are integral parts of today’s 21–35 year-old queer community, gay restaurants are sometimes seen as secondary to bars and clubs, if not disregarded altogether. However, Piepenburg argues that, as LGBTQ+ Americans are finding their identities and existence under attack, they will return to restaurants as places of sanctuary, much like queer people did in the 1980s during the AIDS crisis.
In the ’80s, restaurants were safe spaces for queer people, especially gay men and trans women who were most directly affected by AIDS. In a restaurant, people could openly cry and grieve communally.
“I think we just don’t fully appreciate it so much anymore, the ways that restaurants really did change people’s lives.” Piepenburg said. “It was a place where the waiter would rub your back or where the waitress called Mama would take care of you. Because the nice thing about a restaurant, and sometimes with a bar that’s not busy, is it’s a place where you can go to receive care.”
Gay restaurants functioned not only as spaces of comfort and care, but as bases of resistance. Community leaders could gather and develop game plans for how they were going to best support their friends and peers during the most perilous times of the AIDS crisis.
“I think in a lot of ways what gay restaurants have done in the past is not necessarily advertise that this is a restaurant of resistance, and we’re going to push back against homophobia or transphobia,” he said. “But I think for most of the history of gay restaurants, that resistance has just sort of been baked into the ethos of the restaurant itself.”
Dining Out provides readers with a plethora of examples of gay restaurants, from big-city eateries to small-town diners. For Piepenberg, what lies at the heart of each of these places is their steady presence as a safe space for queer people, no matter their age or background.
“I hope that people understand that whether you’re 20 or 80, whether you’re Gen Alpha or whether you’re a Stonewall elder, gay restaurants are going to continue to be there for you,” Piepenburg said.
