Most people who follow the food world are probably aware of the James Beard Award honoring chefs, restaurants, and writers for their culinary contributions. But fewer people these days are familiar with Beard himself: known as the “Dean of American cookery,” he was one of the most influential voices in mid-century kitchens.
Beard’s public story was the result of serious effort on his part, but he hid much of his personal life from his readers—including the fact that he was gay. In the new book, The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard, author John Birdsall explores the stories and relationships that Beard tried to keep hidden for decades. WNYC host Sean Carlson recently spoke with Birdsall about what it means to reexamine the iconic cook’s life through a queer lens.
You say in your book how deeply Beard's career was intertwined with New York City's gay community from the first time he came here in the 1930s. What was the role that food played for Beard and his community at that time?
Well, you know, James Beard basically was able to cobble together a living partly by throwing cocktail parties for friends. He found that he had a talent for cooking and he was very charming and charismatic. So he was, in a way, the perfect cocktail party host. You know, he was living in Hell's Kitchen in a building that was jammed with largely gay men who worked on Broadway. And Beard got good at throwing really creative, fun cocktail parties. So his food education, as it were, was partly in a world that was filled with gay and lesbian people in New York City.
Julia Child and James Beard
He's just as much a celebrity as Julia Child. He was one of the first cooks to have his own TV show. So given that context, what would coming out or being outed, for that matter, have meant for his career? And how far did he go to conceal that despite it being an open secret among people in the culinary world?
Yeah, oof. I mean, a large part of researching the book for me was understanding all of the sort of coded language and coded behavior around being gay at a time when it was really brutal environment for LGBTQ Americans. So privately, in his circle in Greenwich Village, James could be, you know, fairly open. But in every other aspect of his life, he had to pretend to be someone who was so focused on his work that he had no time for personal relationships. And of course, that wasn't true.
The West Village building that Beard lived in for years was on 10th Street, and it's hard not to acknowledge that that's just a stone's throw away from the Stonewall Inn. And you write that Beard could probably hear everything during the uprising that happened there in June of 1969. Could you talk briefly about what his relationship was with the gay rights movement?
Yeah, it was a very complicated relationship. This would have been upsetting for James Beard to witness. Over 30 years in Greenwich Village, he and other men like him had carved out a comfortable existence where they could express their queerness privately within the sort of confines of the neighborhood. And of course, Beard was 66 years old when Stonewall happened. And these were kids, you know, these were trans women, these were people of color who didn't necessarily live in the neighborhood. This was extremely challenging for men and women of Beard's generation. You know, later in the 1970s, as the gay civil rights movement progressed, he made little attempts to come out of the closet, to kind of express his queerness in certain ways, to, to telegraph it. And Beard found all of this very exciting and at the same time made him extremely fearful.
So why is this the moment to dig into those parts of his life?
Well, in many ways, he learned to express his sexuality through food. You know, he learned to cook for a close circle, sort of, you know, what we'd call adopted family in a certain way. And he urged Americans more broadly to sort of adopt this way of eating and entertaining and thinking about food as an expression of enjoyment in who you were able to invite around the table with you. These have become really commonplace ideas in American food. But when Beard started working, these were challenging ideas. So I felt it was definitely time to sort of do a kind of archeology to find the clues of his sexuality and his private life that he had tried to hide and really focus on those as a way of understanding not just his life, but how his sexuality really did influence a broader American food movement.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
