Culture

How the Queer Potluck Became an Essential Tool for Community Building


   

For food writer and photographer Nik Sharma, potlucks served as both queer initation and American culinary education. In the early 2000s, the former pharmaceutical researcher was attending medical school at the University of Cincinnati when he was thinking about coming out to his family back in India. For guidance, he reached out to his openly gay immunology professor, who in turn invented Sharma to the med school’s monthly “secret gay potluck,” which became a haven for him within the heternormative field of science.

Though potlucks, at their most basic, are just a spread of communal dishes, Sharma tells me in an email that those gatherings “[were] never about the food.” Instead, the covert potlucks served as ways for queer folks at his med school to convene safely — as opposed to meeting in a public space at the university or at a restaurant. “At the time, gay marriage wasn’t legal and [Don’t Ask Don’t Tell] was still the law of the land,” he writes. “Many of our professors had experienced discrimination based on their sexuality and helped create a safe space for the next generation of students… It made us feel safe to realize there were other queer students and professionals in research and medicine just like us.”

The university’s potluck falls in a long history of queer potluck gatherings as a way for community members to congregate in private, a lineage that’s being updated and reclaimed today. Potlucks, as Americans know them today, are believed to have originated in the 1860s, when Lutheran and Scandinavian settlers in the Minnesota prairies would gather to exchange different seeds and crops. During the Great Depression, potlucking became a cheap and easy way for religious and community groups to host large gatherings where guests could connect through the act of partaking in dishes made by others and sharing conversation over the banquet. Before long, potlucks became a powerful tool for queer people to carve out their own spaces, build community, and create solidarity with one another.

Starting in the 1950s, lesbians began to adopt the American tradition for their political gatherings, as Reina Gattsuo writes in Atlas Obscura’s “How Lesbian Potlucks Nourished the LGBTQ Movement.” In the 1950s, lesbians in San Francisco couldn’t take advantage of public queer spaces like bars or clubs, because were at more risk of homophobic violence and made less money than their gay male counterparts. Instead, they created queer spaces in their own homes, eventually realizing that these gatherings facilitated not only the sharing of food, but the sharing of information and resources. According to Gattsuo, potlucks helped “American lesbians realize their collective strength.”

Potlucks also appealed to gay men who didn’t live in urban areas and didn’t have access to bustling nightclubs. According to a 2001 study about the lifestyles of men who live on the “suburban-rural fringe” of Massachusetts, many gay men who lived in the state’s Connecticut River Valley area during the ‘90s were “committed to a domestic life that was close to the ‘American dream,’ centered on the home,” as Kenneth Kirkey and Ann Forsyth write. In order to socialize, many partook in neighborhood potlucks. Respondents said that these intimate gatherings had a “community focus” and “lack of anonymity,” which was the antithesis of gay social settings available in large city centers.

Nowadays, there are more public queer spaces than ever, but the potluck prevails among LGBTQ+ groups because of its enduring inclusivity. Southern Fried Queer Pride, an Atlanta-based queer arts advocacy organization, regularly hosts queer-specific potlucks as a sober alternative to mainstream queer spaces and as a nuturing place for queer folks who are looking for family. “We have created a space where people could come regardless of age, orientation or whether they drink or not,” SFQP organizer Maya Wiseman tells me. “Southern Food to me is about chosen family & sharing; it’s about having good food, great company, and even better conversation.”



READ NEWS SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.