baking while queer
on acceptance, getting older, my first love and fucking things up in the kitchen
“No way on God’s hot earth are you turning on the oven in this heat wave,” my Mom shouted over the droning AC.
“Well then what are we supposed to do with all this brownie batter?” I asked. A bubble of trapped air burbled from the chocolate batter like the deflating sigh of someone realizing that this isn’t the world where they’ll be allowed to reach their fullest potential.
“I don’t know, eat it straight from the bowl for all I care,” my mom said. “It’s a hundred and sixteen degrees outside! The AC can hardly keep up as it is. No oven.”
“Um, can’t you get salmonella from eating raw batter? I think people literally die that way,” Nathan said, even though he had just eaten two heaping spoonfuls of the batter to, according to him, examine the flavor profile.
“OK drama llama, nobody dies like that. Bodybuilders slam raw eggs all the time and they’re fine,” I said.
“What’s your lanky ass know about body building?” he retorted. In truth, not much. My fifteen year old hormonal body was busy building and changing all by itself.
Nathan and I had this fight with my mom many times before we arrived at the idea of baking our desserts in a toaster oven we set up out on the back patio, next to my dad’s grill. Side by side with my dad, Nathan and I tended to our pies while my dad tended to his steaks. My attempts to reach towards adult masculinity often felt like this: trying to go through the same motions, ignoring the fact I was using a completely different appliance.
And so during those long hot Arizona summers, the back patio became my and Nathan’s pastry kitchen. Doing odd things in regular places, or doing regular things in odd places, suited us. When we baked, we liked to make recipes odd, too. We would substitute Coca-Cola for the vegetable oil in brownie recipes, and substitute rainbow sprinkles for sugar in cupcake recipes.
Perhaps these baking experiments were an early way to explore breaking tradition and convention, to see how far we could go in making our own rules. They served as prelude and preparation for subverting other rules and expectations, like all the recipes for domestic bliss that called for a healthy dash of heterosexuality. If everything turned out fine with our brownies when we put applesauce into our batter, we reasoned, then surely everything would also turn out fine with our lives when we decided to put other men in our beds.
And so our going off script extended from the kitchen into the bedroom, and the boiling Arizona summer cooled into a warm Arizona winter.
One holiday season, both of us home for a long winter break, we mostly laid around listlessly, playing Pokemon and baking peppermint desserts. My father asked us to do something useful for a change, like retrieving the dusty boxes of Christmas lights from the attic. So we climbed up into the attic, which was not really a proper attic at all. It was really more of a crawlspace of unfinished wood beams and loose cloudy puffs of fiberglass insulation. Maybe it was the privacy and seclusion up there, or the holiday spirit, the way a teenage boy’s mind can turn the mouth of a wreath and the curved erectness of a candy cane into sexually suggestive symbols, but one thing led to another up there. It was where, that winter, I had my first toothsome, fumbling blowjob. Afterward, we laid on top of boxes of knotted Christmas lights, our stringy teenage bodies becoming just as tangled.
We both appreciated the safety of the attic and the protection it provided. The flipside of this privacy, though, was darkness. Around the time those attic fumblings began, our relationship started to disintegrate. By the time a year had passed, we were no longer talking. There were no fights or scenes, just minor increments of increasing distance until one day the other was so far away as to be imperceptible in the shimmer of the Arizona heat. We haven’t spoken in thirteen years.
At the time, I was heartbroken and ashamed, and I believed I deserved that shame. I had learned from my family’s Christmases, full of wineglasses etched with holly leaves hurled across the kitchen, that bad things happen when things are excavated from attics. Some part of me felt like that queerness and that relationship should be locked away forever up there, in the dust and dark of the attic.
Now I rent a tiny studio apartment in San Francisco, where I don’t have a bedroom, let alone an attic. There’s no spare space in this cramped city, which makes it hard to compartmentalize anything. What the city offers in lieu of ample real estate and spare rooms is permission to let everything hang out. Like: who needs an attic when you can just give the blowjob behind some bush in Golden Gate Park?
Another peculiar gift from the city, so distinct from Arizona, is that it is nearly always sixty degrees and foggy. In this town, turning on the oven is a welcome source of heat. There’s no need for me to do my baking anywhere strange anymore. But still, every time I pre-heat my oven, I think of that back patio, of shimmering heat, of Nathan. I like to believe he has a strong indoor oven now, and an even stronger AC unit, and that he’s putting both of them to good strange use.