“Tender” is a column about all of the beautiful, delicious, and liberating ways that LGBTQ+ people work with food. From production to preparation, local farms to reimaginings of the restaurant, our community is at the forefront of what it means to nourish and be nourished today. Read more from the series here.
The South has always been a cradle of queer liberation.
Today, the region is home to one in three LGBTQ+ adults in the United States, more than any other in the country, but its history as a cornerstone of the queer liberation movement is less well known.
A century before the Stonewall uprising, one of the earliest known drag queens was born into slavery, survived the Civil War, and fought back against police in Washington, D.C. when they raided her dances, formal dinners and queer cakewalks. The gatherings that she organized embodied a precursor to the glittering era of ’80s Southern Black queer nightlife that stretched from the heart of Atlanta, the queer capital of the South, throughout the southeastern corridor.
Over a hundred years later, Taylor Alxndr is continuing that vital work through Southern Fried Queer Pride, a Black trans and queer-centered community arts organization operated out of Atlanta on Muscogee and Cherokee land. Alxndr cofounded the group back in 2014, when they were still a college student performing in Atlanta’s local drag scene. There, the rural Georgia-born artist met a community of working queens who were organizing around HIV/AIDS awareness and housing justice for trans folks. Without reliable venues to host drag shows or fundraisers, Alxndr started hosting events in her friends’ backyards, local cafés, and empty parking lots. It was through this microcosm of scrappy queer ingenuity that SFQP was born.
Many of SFQP’s reoccurring events are categorized using the language that gives soul food a queer bent: Peach Pit, a campy queer pageant, is named after the state fruit of Georgia. Hawt Sauce, a dance party, brings the same spice to the dance floor that the condiment does to the tongue. DJs from Atlanta and across the South pump house, pop, reggaeton and even punk music into the airwaves, creating a vibe that is as diverse as it is electric. Sweet Tea, a variety show, is named after the ubiquitous Southern beverage and creates space for queer and trans people to express themselves through art. “It’s like a refreshing sip of queer talent,” Alxndr remarks in an interview with Them. “There's not a lot of variety shows around here that,” they pause for a beat, “are actually full of variety.” Every batch of Sweet Tea brings out new local talent. Any given show could feature musicians, drag and burlesque performers, comedians, spoken word artists, and even juggling clowns.
Beyond the metaphor, food is essential to SFQP's work in nurturing queer artists and organizers, enacted most deliciously by Let's Eat, a queer community potluck — and a candid call to commune — that brings people together for a shared meal in a welcoming sober environment. Organized by Maya Wiseman, a 28-year-old performance artist, farmer and cook, Let’s Eat takes place quarterly on the grassy lawn of Candler Park in East Atlanta or indoors at nearby Neighborhood Church. “The queer dinners feel like a family gathering to me every time and I love that,” she tells me.
Raised in Lithonia, a small town outside of Atlanta,Wiseman relishes eating with others, especially having grown up in a close-knit family that shared daily meals. Soon after she joined SFQP in 2017, she felt a deep conviction to make space for people who “didn't have the same opportunities to sit down at the dinner table with their family,” she explains. “Maybe that's because their parents had different work schedules, maybe that's because of their identities and they weren't accepted. Or their families never really got along and got to have that communal eating.”
In 2019, Wiseman launched the first Let’s Eat with help from her parents and close friends. Initially intended to be a one-off event, it quickly became a regular series that attracts up to 100 people. “The queers love a picnic. We love to be outside and frolic and have our little blankets and be cute,” she laughs. “But as a facilitator, when we go from the park to the church that has wheelchair accessibility, and we can make the bathrooms gender-neutral, then nobody has to worry about feeling strange or having to pick a gender in the bathroom.”
Wiseman prepares large batches of vegan food for each event, sometimes with meat and dairy offered on the side, to ensure that everyone has enough to eat, whether or not they brought food to share. She determines the menu based on the theme of the gathering and the produce in season. When Wiseman worked in farming and in food manufacturing, it was easy for her to build a menu. Surrounded by agricultural food waste, she would sometimes prepare entire meals with rejected produce that would have been thrown in the trash because it was asymmetrical or blemished. “I have this deep connection with the ugly food — before it was cool!” she exclaims. Working as a farmer, an urban gardening educator, and a food producer has changed her relationship to cooking and with the land, bringing an eco-queer consciousness to the meals she prepares.
Let’s Eat events are for all ages and function like a chosen-family reunion. But like most family meals, they are not without hiccups. At one gathering, a seemingly cis straight family arrived, causing some of her friends’ eyebrows to raise, Wiseman tells me. The mom eventually pulled Wiseman aside to explain that their child just came out to them as trans. “They heard about the event, and brought their child there to hang out and to be around other queer people,” she recalls. “I grabbed those same friends and told them, ‘We assume so many things about people from their outward appearance until we get in.”
Wiseman is thrilled every time a new person attends, sits down at a table, and makes a friend over heaping plates of food. In 2020, nearly all of the meals were canceled due to the pandemic, but for the last two years, she has modified the safety protocols she takes in cooking and serving the food to meet people’s needs, packing to-go containers for folks who are immunocompromised or are not feeling sociable, and sending trays of leftovers with others to feed their families. “Food is fuel for so many things that we do,” says Wiseman. “Whether that's so that they can continue their work day or talk about projects that they're doing, or go to a rally.”
Like the crispy golden layers of deep fried batter, there are overlapping expressions of pride in queerness, Blackness, and Southerness to SFQP’s approach. As a metaphor, food provides a sense of place, rootedness, and expectation. As a literal meal, food sustains action. Southern queers battle resurgent waves of old oppressions: violent laws that force gender conformity, uphold white supremacist colonialism, and restrict people’s access to healthcare, housing, public education and fair wages.
The dismal statistics of inequity perpetuated by Southern policymaking are a painful reality, “but that's not our full truth,” Alxndr clarifies. “This idea that the entire region is terrible and uninhabitable for queer and trans people is not only harmful, but it's also just incorrect. We wanted to have a space to uplift our narrative, our experiences, our local community, our art and whatnot.”
“We've had our own uprisings, we have our own icons, and we have our own culture,” says Alxndr. “We are deeply intentional with making sure that we always say that we are proud of being queer and trans and from the South in the same sentence.”
Over the last eight years, SFQP has carved out space for Atlanta’s queer communities to flourish even as bars, clubs, art galleries, and sober venues shutter due to rising rents and other factors. Economic conditions have been made worse by a pandemic that has disproportionately effected trans and nonbinary Southerners. “We're constantly being gentrified out of our own neighborhoods,” says Alxndr.
The labor of queering space is taxing. SFQP hosts 40 to 60 annual events despite not having their own venue space. In 2018, the group solidified as a nonprofit and learned how to apply for grant funding which has enabled them to pay volunteers for organizing events, reimburse food expenses, and continue to compensate talent, a practice they have prioritized since the beginning. SFQP affirms the value of queer and trans labor through basic practices like discussing rates upfront and promptly paying performers, Alxndr notes. “For queer, trans Black and brown folks, we're so often used for our labor and for entertainment, but without getting compensated in ways that help us live.”
In 2022, SFQP’s dream to open a location of their own, Clutch Community Center, is beginning to unfold, with plans to provide studios for artists, performance venues, community meeting rooms, and an outdoor area to plant a community garden, ensuring green space for queer and trans community. “I just imagine a garden full of queers who are planting flowers and sharing food,” Alxndr says wistfully. With the largest urban tree canopy in the country, she continues, Atlanta queers live in “literally a city built in the forest among vegetation and wildlife. In being proud of being from the South and being proud of being queer in Atlanta, we have to honor nature and our involvement in it.”
Clutch would be one of two queer community centers in Atlanta currently, since the Rush Center closed in 2020. And it would serve as possibly the city’s only drop-in center for unhoused queer and trans youth as well as adults. SFQP has partnered with Trans Housing Coalition, a trans-led organization in Atlanta, to dedicate part of the building for people to eat a hot meal, take a shower, and connect to housing resources.
Southern Fried Queer Pride is a labor of love that holds out hope for and lifts up queer and trans Southerners navigating an uncertain future. “It makes me feel alive,” says Alxndr of this work. “And there's a beautiful young queer community of people here in Atlanta who can take those reins and move into the next decade of whatever it will become.”
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