This Fruit-Filled Jello Mold Will Help Make Your Pride Party Sweet & Festive - EatingWell

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There's a reason The Wizard of Oz is full of memes for my community, why Judy Garland remains popular with drag queens, and why the Pride flag, in its many iterations, incorporates a rainbow. It's because, metaphorically speaking, Kansas exists in black and white. And binary thinking—straight is right, gay is wrong; men are men, women are women—has been oppressive, and even dangerous, to those of us who identify as queer. Thirty-two years ago, when I fell in love with a woman and came out as a lesbian, I told people, "I feel like I tapped my ruby slippers and ended up in Oz." My world was so joyously transformed that everything, all of sudden, was as exquisite as Technicolor.

I have been through it, so I can attest, it is a creative and evolutionary act to discover who you are and to embrace yourself. It's not only life-altering; it can change the world. It did for my generation, and has for generations since. I suppose that's why some people are afraid of us. To the tradition-bound, change is terrifying. If they could only bring themselves to understand the good in our honesty, we'd all take a giant step out of the woods.

I came out in 1989. Fueled by the homophobia that engendered government inaction, the AIDS epidemic raged in the gay community. Queer-bashing was common, even in New York City. It had only been two decades since the Stonewall riots, a response to police raids of queer bars that brought on modern gay activism. I stepped from my former life into a crisis and the political and cultural movement that confronted it. Gran Fury plastered "Silence = Death" on the city's walls. The Lesbian Avengers ate fire at demonstrations for women's and queer rights. Queer Action Figures distributed their political comic books. RuPaul and other drag queens were hosting showcases at a legendary dive called the Pyramid Club. My girlfriend Liz and I shared an apartment a few blocks from the bar with Tom, a friend of hers from theater school. Tom played the male parts in the drag shows, donning an 18th-century wig for Heathcliff, for instance, while our pal Ryan vamped around him, lip-syncing Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights."

All of us were members of ACT UP, the activist organization we all joined to push the government to fight AIDS. At the famous hall in Cooper Union where, 130 years prior, Abraham Lincoln delivered the speech that would ensure his presidency, Ryan sometimes launched Monday night meetings with an uproarious puppet show. Some activists hated that. "Talk about AIDS!" they'd scream, enraged in their urgency to find a cure instead of dying.

Others understood that, though the circumstances were desperate, what kept any of us alive was our commitment to each other, fortified by shared language that privileged laughter in the face of deadly adversity. We needed both anger and humor. We'd march through the streets, chanting, "We're here! We're queer! Get used to it!" Then we'd throw parties at our Avenue C apartment, steaming labels off cheap lagers and replacing them with handmade ones: "We're here. We're queer. We're beer."

Liz, Tom and I all worked in restaurants. Food was as much a part of our lives as was our queerness, and we served a lot of dishes at our parties: Tom's bacon-wrapped chicken livers; Liz's chili cheese log. For one party, I pressed roasted vegetables into a terrine that resembled the Pride flag.

In those days, the flag was a simple rainbow. It's morphed over the years into something more complex. The Philly Pride flag (More Color, More Pride), that incorporates black and brown for queers of color; the Two-Spirit flag, with its Native American feathers overlaying the rainbow—there are many varieties of Pride flag now, symbolizing the proliferation of identities that make up an intersectional, eclectic community.

That diversity is our strength. Our community shares misogyny, racism and other inequities with the wider society. But go to any Pride celebration this month, and you'll see that we are also a big, welcoming tent. I believe that if everyone tells the truth about who they are, and we tolerate that, then we can confront our inequities and collaborate on dismantling them.

My current partner and I have raised her son together. A 23-year-old gay man who is 10 years out, he's benefitted from the activism of our generation, and so have his friends, all of whom define themselves in their own way. Transgender, cisgender, nonbinary; asexual, bisexual, pansexual, heterosexual—in a sign of the times, Facebook lists 58 gender categories you can choose from, and there are just as many ways to define your sexuality.

In my mind, that's freedom. Live and let live in all our diversity, and together we experience joy. But there are people for whom traditional categories are so essential that they vehemently disagree with me. Over 400 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in the U.S. in 2023 alone. They're going after gay library books, gender-affirming health care, drag brunch.

In other parts of the world, it's worse. Uganda has made "homosexual conduct" and "promoting" homosexuality punishable by imprisonment. As news outlets have reported, the law is the outcome of anti-gay sentiment spread throughout Africa by American evangelicals. No matter what the missionaries would have good people believe, the punishment is not commensurate. I ask you, how does my queer joy, expressed openly—laughing with friends, throwing my arm around my partner and strolling down the block—really hurt anyone else?

Such is the history of social movements. We think we've done the work, then the gains slip away. It's one step forward, and two steps back into the woods. Sure, it still drives me to march in the streets. But in the face of all this hatred, this Pride Month, I also want to speak about love and joy, and the magic I felt three decades ago when the myriad parts of me—my activism, my love for food and hospitality, my sexual identity—all came together.

The latest iteration of the Pride banner is the 2021 Intersex-Inclusive flag. Rainbow stripes bumping a rainbow triangle and a purple circle, it includes colors for which vegetables do not exist. No worries. Fruit is queerer, anyway. Using raspberries, apricots, bananas, green apples, blueberries, grapes, prunes, dates, strawberries, crushed pineapple and two colors of coconut, all bound together with coconut gelatin brightened by Meyer lemon, I re-created that flag as an outlandish terrine that teeters on just this side of a mess. There's always a berry or coconut chip threatening to venture outside the lines.

So be it. Perfection is not a queer ideal. The point is to make something colorful and outrageous—something very "gay," in the performative sense—and to share it with friends; to remind them, amid struggles, of the importance of having fun. It was so important as a young person to be surrounded by community, to learn from my peers how to be healthy, and very happy, in my difference. So I invite you to tie on an apron and unfurl a rainbow. No matter how it turns out, it's yours. You can be proud of it.

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This Fruit-Filled Jello Mold Will Help Make Your Pride Party Sweet & Festive - EatingWell
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