Coming Out Fast With Fast Food
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Panera Bread
The first time I came out to a member of my family, it was to my sister over lunch at a Panera Bread three minutes from work.
I remember my order: a You Pick Two, mac and cheese, and a kale Caesar salad. My nephew chomped on apple slices in his booster seat while racquet club moms split almond-flecked bowls of leaves and office guys slurped broccoli cheddar soup. I was in a booth holding a plastic fork, telling my sister that I had known I was queer for most of a decade. She listened, thanked me earnestly for sharing this part of myself with her, and then finished wrestling a napkin out of my nephew’s mouth.
It felt surreal at the time to break the glass of heterosexuality inside this perfect pocket of suburban straightness, but now it seems exactly right. I know so many queer and trans people who have come out to loved ones at the straightest American chain restaurants you can imagine: Olive Garden, Chili’s, and a Sonic drive-in.
You step into these spaces and something wraps around you and holds you close. The steady, slightly stale comfort of a meal you’ve had a million times, a hundred memories of bottomless chips or endless breadsticks or complimentary biscuits. There never seem to be limited in places like this, even when every line of the menu is laminated and predictable. You know how every ingredient will taste, which is a reassuring foundation for introducing one gigantic variable to the experience of dinner with someone you love. You’re not home—you don’t know if you want the home to forever be the place where this happened—but you’re at home.
If you’ve never done it, I invite you to picture it. Imagine yourself as a person at a table under a wall of copy-and-paste corporate-mandated tchotchkes…
For your 18th birthday, your dad takes you to the Hooters by his office because he thinks that’s the kind of thing you do for an 18-year-old boy. The waitress is named Krystal, and she’s got brown lip liner on her front tooth and body glitter that shimmers under the Miller Lite sign, and you’re pretty sure she’s the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen. Your dad winks when he catches you staring at her, but you’re just picturing what you might look like in her tiny shorts and slouchy socks, and chunky sneakers. When your dad leaves to take a call, she seems to know, somehow, in all her divine feminine silicone wisdom, to drop off your hot wings while you’re alone. She smiles when you tell her you to wish you looked like her. She’s the first person you’ve ever told.
Your best friend Cody loves Arby’s, which is the worst thing about him. Every third Thursday after swim practice, he picks up two sandwiches and you sit on his tailgate under the glow of the big red hat and eat roast beef with cheddar. You’re looking at him one evening, the pool still sticking to your arms, and you tell him you think you might like guys. Cody laughs and points at the sign. The neon flashes to life the second you look: WE HAVE THE MEATS. You groan and throw your sandwich at him. Relief rushes in like chlorinated water.
Recreating your meats without taste at Arby's
Three exits before your younger brother’s wedding venue, your older brother pulls off to a Cracker Barrel. You remember it from your childhood: the place your family never actually planned to go, but always the only table service restaurant off the highway between home in Kansas City and Lake of the Ozarks. Shockingly good fried apples, though. In the gift shop your brother chases you around a rack of oven mitts with a petrified alligator head until your table is called. You order the fried apples and set up the little game on the table, the one with the golf tees and a wood triangle full of holes. In the second round, your brother asks you why you don’t have your usual wedding date with you—your best friend, Annabeth. It’s easier to say it than you expected: She’s actually your girlfriend; you’re on a break; you’re hoping things will work out. Your brother’s brow softens and a winning move presents itself on the wood block between you. You move your tee and take the game.
In Free Enterprise-class freshman year, Ms. Norwood taught Ruth’s Chris Steak House as a lesson on starting a successful franchise in a God-honoring way. Now you sit there, in the very same booth where you sat with your high school boyfriend before the homecoming dance, but tonight it’s your mom on the other side of the table, eating a God-honoring wedge salad. It’s the seventh time you’ve tried to tell her. The first three times she pretended not to hear, and the last three she tried to talk you out of it. You saw through your filet and say, firmly, “Mom, I’m a lesbian.” Ruth herself, and her own personal Chris, could burst through the kitchen doors with a God-honoring heterosexual seafood tower and it wouldn’t change the fact that you’re gay. Your mom says, “Well, fine.” Progress.
You don’t have to come out at Waffle House. Every part of you is instantly illuminated by the fluorescents when you walk through the door at three in the morning. Waffle House knows you’re queer before you do, the way it knows before you even order whether or not your coffee will taste like gasoline. There was a plan for you, formed while you were still in your mother’s arms, that you would order a waffle from a tired line cook and it would be perfectly singed on the edges and you would smother it in four packets of butter, and the griddle and the sticky 1994 tiles and the out-of-order jukebox in the corner would all look at you and know: gay.
It’s different every time, but it’s kind of the same. You tell the story. You say the sentence. Everything changes, but you do what you’ve always done: You order another basket of onion rings.
Food is Queer
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