Culture

The LA LGBT Center's New Intergenerational Queer Culinary School Teaches More Than Cooking


 

Visit a soup kitchen on LA’s Skid Row and you can expect, at the very least, a day-old Starbucks sandwich for lunch.

But at the LGBT Center’s $40 million Anita May Rosenstein Campus in Hollywood, which caters to unhoused LGBTQ+ youth and low-income seniors, a sample menu lists quiche lorraine and tarte de pomme, as well as a slice of beef roulade (also known as a meat log).

Here, a team of queer student chefs, ranging in age from their mid-20s to late 70s, cook each day’s offerings from scratch. Over the past few weeks, the cohort has already learned how to emulsify sauces, poach eggs, and assemble pâte à choux; on the morning I visited, in early July, I caught them slicing apples to array, accordion-style, atop handmade tarte shells.

Justin Gilbert

Of course, there are other culinary programs across the country that cater to low-income and homeless people, but this is one of only a few meant to bridge the divide between LGBTQ+ youth and seniors.

As their chef instructor Janet Crandall mixes the apple compote, Carl Moebus, a sprightly white-haired actor by training, is playfully bickering with his cooking partner, Michael Moten, a cosmetologist. He looks down at his tarte, then declares, “Julia Child would put a little booze in it!”

Moebus, who is 78, isn’t sure he wants to become a chef, but he’d like to host a cooking show, or at least a massive dinner party. “I’m an actor, but you never know,” he says. He could tap dance while making a pot roast, he says.

Moton, who doesn’t want anyone to know his age (“as Talulah Bankhead used to say, it’s somewhere between forty and death”), has more humble ambitions: he says he’d love to continue cooking for the LGBTQ+ clientele who drop in for lunch.

“No waves,” he admonishes Moebus, who is making little indentations in his dough. “Making waves can be a good thing, but not with dough.”

Moebus was homeless three times: for one stretch, he slept in a car; for another, he retreated to New York’s subway tunnels every night (unless he was able to book an overnight film shoot). After moving to L.A. nearly two decades ago, he discovered PATH, a local homeless services organization, and he says they housed him for three months. He’s now lived in the same rent-controlled West Hollywood apartment for the past 17 years.



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