New Books on Queer Food (Virtual Event)

Free, Virtual Event

Everyone who signs up via eventbrite will also be emailed the zoom link 3 days before the event, again 1 day before the event, and 15 minutes before the event. You need to register on eventbrite for the zoom link.

This event will consist of a roundtable discussion about queer food, publishing, and the speakers' recently released books! This discussion will be followed by a period of audience Q and A.

Description: Over the past year, there have been 5 new books published/ soon to be published on queer food. Historian Rachel Hope Cleves’ Lustful Appetites (2025) historicizes queer food across centuries. Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot (2024) uses the lenses of fermentation, intoxification, gelatinousness, and putrefaction to theorize how the modern state seeks to manage “deviant populations.” John Birdsall’s What is Queer Food (2025) examines how modern queer identity is shaped by food cultures and Erik Piepenburg’s Dining Out (2025) shares the history of gay restaurants. With 38 contributors, Alex D. Ketchum and Megan J. Elias co-edited the anthology, Queers at the Table (coming out in October 2025) on queer food that brings together scholars, journalists, cartoonists, recipe developers, chefs, farmers, and cooks discussing queer food within the themes of ecology, farming, health, care, community, and history. These books join the release of the independent press, Combo Press's, small print runs of three anthology volumes of Queer, Earth, Food (2022, 2023, 2024), another anthology Playing in the Dirt: A Gathering of Stories, Arts, and Writing by Queer Midwestern Farmers (2024), and the queer food memoir Squelch (2024).

Join us as Birdsall, Cleves, Piepenburg, and Tompkins participate in a roundtable discussion facilitated by Ketchum and Elias.

This event is part of a series of events celebrating the topic of queer food, the release of Queers at the Table, and the upcoming second Queer Food Conference (www.queerfoodconference.com) from May 1-3, 2026. To learn about more upcoming events, see: https://www.queerfoodconference.com/p/additional-events.html

This event is cosponsored by McGill's Queer History Month.