Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America's Gay Restaurants (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780306832161)

As gay restaurants--rare spaces of safety and celebration for the LGBTQ+ community-- evolve and chart new futures, New York Times journalist Erik Piepenburg takes readers to Progressive Era Automats, lesbian separatist eateries, Wisconsin sports bars, pioneering drag brunches, and his own beloved diners. It's a culinary tour full of joy, sex, sorrow, activism and nostalgia.

Dining Out explores how gay people came of age, came out, and fought for their rights not just in gay bars or the streets, but in restaurants, from cruisy urban cafeterias of the 1920s to mom-and-pop diners that fed the Stonewall generation to the intersectional hotspots of the early 21st century. Using archival material, original reporting and interviews, and first-person accounts, Erik Piepenburg explores how LGBTQ restaurants shaped, and continue to shape, generations of gay Americans.

Through the eyes of a reporter and the stomach of a hungry gay man, Dining Out examines the rise, impact and legacies of the nation's gay restaurants past, present, and future, connecting meals with memories. Hamburger Mary's, Florent, a suburban Denny's queered by kids: Piepenburg explores how these and many other gay restaurants, coffee shops, diners and unconventional eateries have charted queer placemaking and changed the modern LGBTQ civil rights movement for the better.


Author: Erik Piepenburg
ISBN-10: 030683216X
ISBN-13: 9780306832161
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Language: English
Published: 06/03/2025
Pages: 352
Format: Hardcover
Size: 9.25h x 6.25w x 1.13d