Ho(e) Ho(e) Ho(e) Everyone!
This here is your last edition of “The Gays Did What Now?” for 2023, and have I got a wild (flower) ride in store. By the end of this post, you’ll be equipped to make the most Sapphic holiday gift you’ve ever seen and stuffed full of lesbian feminist food facts that will finally explain why your one weird aunt who never married always brings that rather unappetizing bean salad to every family picnic. But first, we need to talk about broccoli.
The fourth episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, season 9 “Good Morning Bitches” aired on April 14, 2017. The main challenge had the queens competing on rival morning talk show segments. Hilarity ensued. During their team’s segment, Shea Couleé and Sasha Velour, dressed as 80s lesbians, simultaneously ate from the same stalk of chocolate covered broccoli in a sexually charged manner.
On July 13, 2017, tumblr blog, The Sappho Project, reblogged the following post from the now deleted blog “lesbianbroccoli”:
Upon further (prescription substance fueled) investigation, I was able to view snippets of “lesbianbroccoli’s” post history. From what I can gather, this blog was active during the spring and summer of 2017 and exclusively posted and reposted Sasha Velour and Shea Couleé romantic fan content (colloquially known as the “Sashea” ship). This included the above gif of the two queens eating broccoli and multiple direct references to them both as lesbians. This meme has been popular three times. It was shared 80,000+ times in 2017, made the rounds again in the first few months of 2020, resurfaced once more in 2022, and has been floating around various social media sites ever since. Reddit threads are dedicated to it. There is fan art about the idea of Sapphic love and broccoli. Despite this popularity, and the extensive perception among tumblr and reddit users that this association is verified fact, there is only one poorly written and relatively homophobic Ancient Greek history blog that pops up when you go googling for information.
I wanted it to be real. I was willing to squint and pretend. I wanted to gift the ladies with broccoli and call it a historically informed gesture of care. But nope. It’s absolutely fake. As astute tumblr user Caeciliusinhorto pointed out in a response to a July 2017 post, there is no mention of broccoli in Sappho’s work. The text of the post was actually a photoshopped crop of the wikipedia article on LGBT horticultural symbolism, specifically the bit about violets.
For those of us who aren’t on the up and up about our friend Sappho, she was an ancient Greek poet doing her thing from around 630-570 BCE on the island of Lesbos. Her lady loving words and, uh, habits were so enduring that she is fully why we call ourselves lesbians. Much of her work is lost to the ages with her surviving poems and their snippets referred to by fragment numbers. In fragment 94, ostensibly the gayest of them all, lines 11 to 16 read as follows:
Many crowns of violets,
roses, and crocuses together
. . . you put on by my side
and many scented wreaths
woven from blossoms
around your delicate throat.
—Trans. Diane Rayor (2014)
There are also references to garlands in fragments 81, 92, 98a and 125. Plants, and flowers in particular, figure prominently throughout Sappho’s work. She is indeed the origin of the queer association with violets and lavender (the plants and the colours). The original plant gay, if you will.
What’s interesting right here and right now is the question of Sapphic food. While I am willing to bet money and at least two of my overpriced graduate degrees on the fact that the Sapphic broccoli association was absolutely started as a joke on tumblr, the idea of food being a queer coded or queer cultural thing is absolutely normal. Queer and feminist foodway scholar Alex Ketchum’s 2022 book Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses details the constellation of political, ethical, and cultural practices that frame over 230 feminist and queer food businesses in the United States. To rip off her meticulous scholarship for our particular purposes, what makes a meal a lesbian feminist meal is not just the food but the ethos of its consumption and production. These are foods that have opinions expressed before, during and after ingestion; a sort of political literalism à la cramming it down one’s throat.
Pleasure in the eating is not the main goal. I have been to enough lesbian run potluck dinners to know this. Lesbian feminists have never been accused of their dedication to pleasing textures or enjoyable flavour profiles. These dishes aren’t for dinner parties with the boys you met at a circuit party ten years ago. These are foods that fuel a revolution, feed the masses on a dime, and strut firmly away from anything that does too much emotionally femme labour. This is bean territory, people; packed with protein, fiber and a nice coating of flatulence. Over and undercooked, dry and soggy all at once. The gustatory reflection of the full Sapphic spectrum. A lesbian feminist meal gets you up and back at the rally with a shot of instant coffee with powdered whitener followed by enough firm tofu to firmly underscore why white people haven’t historically had great success with the stuff. To say it’s a utilitarian Sapphic utopia is a bit of an understatement—a bit further afield from the land of flowers and sensual indulgence that Sappho was always after.
This is where we’re going to bring it back to edible Sapphic selections. Sapphic women absolutely did not gift each other broccoli. Not on the island of Lesbos. Not in Ancient Greece. Not from the 1910s to the 1950s. There is no Sapphic subtext to a crown of broccoli. You won’t pick up a hot chick with a bowl of broccoli cheddar soup. You can’t cruise at your local gay bar’s dyke night with a stalk in each hand. But don’t despair, there’s still something you can do to honour the memory of our patron saint of Sapphistry and impress the local plant gays with a tasty snack that’s ripe for the IG feed this Holiday Season. I humbly present vanilla lavender sugar.
Vanilla Lavender Sugar
| PREP TIME | COOK TIME | TOTAL TIME | SERVES |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 MINS | 0 MINS | 15 MINS | 20 |
A moreish medley of real dried lavender, pestled into delicate sugar with a gentle note of vanilla. A simple, subtle, and significantly less farty way to get that girl (or girl adjacent person) to look at you with a mix of shock and/or awe. Pair a small jar of it with a fragment of a Sappho poem and you’ve got yourself the best gift on the holiday block. Tie a purple ribbon around everything and stick a spring of lightly burnt lavender in the bow and I can practically guarantee you’ll be included in a vertical file at The Lesbian Herstory Archives subtitled “Best Gay of 2023”. Here’s how to make em.
Ingredients
2 tablespoons edible lavender (twigs removed)
500g (2 tablespoons removed) white, granulated sugar
1-2 drops pure vanilla extract
Directions
Step 1
Grab a bouquet or bag of food grade edible lavender from a trusted source and toss two tablespoons of the blooms (no twigs!) into a mortar and pestle or clean and dry herb grinder of choice (wink wink). Grind them down for a minute.
Step 2
Add two tablespoons of white granulated sugar. Grind for a minute more.
Step 3
Add in one to two drops of pure vanilla extract and mix.
Step 4
Toss the contents of your pestle into a bowl with 500g more white sugar and rub everything together with your hands until fragrant and delightful.
Step 5
Gently spoon (or funnel if ya nasty) your lavender sugar into an aesthetically pleasing jar and close tightly. It should stay good at room temperature for about a month. Decorate the jar with ribbons, stickers and labels as you see fit. Use the sugar wherever you’d use white sugar for that sweet, sweet Sapphic hit that keeps on giving
Happy Holi-Gays!
Atticus Hawk (they/he) is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His research looks at the role of Leatherdykes in the creation of medical knowledge and harm-reduction practices for fat, trans and disabled bodies in kink.