Notes on camp cuisine.

"You can pick out fags in a diner because they always order BLTs."

My friend Joe told me this when I was 10 years old. He had only just explained what "fags" were. Now he was telling me what they ate. "Of course fags will eat cheeseburgers, omelettes, pancakes," said Joe. "But if they have a choice, they'll always order BLTs."

I remember feeling alarmed because I loved BLTs. Joe was nearly a year older than me and infinitely more sophisticated in worldly manners. Although I didn't quite believe that foods could signal sexual preference, I had to agree that the BLT was a dubious invention: not quite a sandwich, not quite a salad, and showing suspicious shifts of register. As if to draw attention to its flamboyant self, the BLT was usually cut on the diagonal and skewered on toothpicks with curly plastic bits of frill. The more I thought about it, the more I believed Joe was right. The BLT was definitely queer.

Did my family know about BLTs? Perhaps they already suspected odd tendencies in my psychosexual makeup. I stopped ordering BLTs. They became an occult pleasure, something I made for myself. I took the BLT with me into the closet.

Baked Alaska is the archetypal queer food. Baked Alaska is ice cream and sponge cake, spread with a coat of whipped egg whites, broiled at 500 degrees for several minutes. The meringue insulates the ice cream, so there is no melting.

Why is Baked Alaska queer? Because it breezily mocks the threat of damnation, goes to hell and back, and lives to tell the story. Baked Alaska's very identity, in fact, depends on having suffered an accusation of weakness, on surviving a trial by fire. It even gets a tan. What could be queerer than that?

I'm not suggesting that gay people invented foods like Baked Alaska, or that they eat such foods more often than straights. Yet there is such a thing as a queer mode of appreciation. Most of us will agree that, while gays and lesbians did not invent good or bad taste, they have always held the monopoly on the judicious mixing of the two.

In that spirit, here are nine principles of queer food:

1. Few raw ingredients are queer in and of themselves. The basic components of the American kitchen—meats, vegetables, fruits, sugar, flour, spices, and so on—should all be assumed to be "straight." Queerness comes only after an effort has been applied, the food combined with other foods, or after the food is processed or transformed into something else.

Steak is the prototypical straight food. Its complete lack of artifice, its clear place in the food chain, keeps it straight. Even the most unkitchenly of eaters understands how steak is made. The same might be said for the baked potato. The baked potato is the rounded, feminine complement to the steak's dominant male presence. Steak and baked potato walk hand-in-hand, a straight couple.