“What are you doing with regular sour cream? Get the gay version.”
It’s taco night and I am learning about my subculture’s very specific way of eating. Lesson one: If there is a lite, low-fat, fat-free, calorie-free, or diet option, always buy that over any other version of a product.
I remember somewhere—probably a History Channel special—learning that the food a culture consumes can tell you a lot about its people. When you think about it, you really can tell a lot about the values and history of a group of people based on their food choices—what they choose to consume and what they omit from their diet. So what does this diet say about my friends and community?
Despite being a theatre major, I didn’t have that many close gay friends when I first came out. I ran with rag tag crew of theatre majors that ranged from low key hipsters to Greek life artists, so we ate pizza from a place around the corner from the fine arts building, pasta with red sauce, whatever was offered up at the dining hall, and splurged on the occasional organic feast from the hot bar at our local food co-op. My freshman and sophomore year food values could be summarized as cheap, convenient, tasty, and comforting. Junior year was my transition to vegetarianism: social and ecological responsibility became a major factor in what I ate. Then over the summer before senior year, I found my gays.
I finally had a strong group of gay guy friends. They were nerdy and liked video games, but loved going out and dancing too. We enjoyed debating politics as much as we did pop culture. For the first time since graduating high school, I was part of a circle of friends that was not founded on working together as theatre majors. And those different circles of friends had different relationships with food. Senior year became more about vodka and calorie free mixers than my beloved craft beers. A whole new factor entered into the way I evaluated my grocery store purchases: calories. I didn’t want to lose weight—if anything I was trying to add some muscle to my frame. But when I knew I would be eating with my new friends, I knew that those things were important. And with at least one night every other weekend becoming a group prepared meal, I found these values creeping into the way I ate.
I am still not sure exactly what this way of eating means. An overreaction to the demand for perfect bodies gay men make of each other is most certainly part of it. But if I had to guess, I would say that 95% of my friends in this network would see very little change if they started eating like I did freshman or junior year. Perhaps it’s some paranoia about our youthful metabolic rates prematurely abandoning us overnight that leads us to our strict adherence to this dietary obsession with all things diet. I know that’s what the voice in my head says that makes me continue to reach for the calorie-free cranberry juice over its calorie-full cousin.
~ Cameron Huppertz, Literary Assistant
