Howdy, readers! Anna Brones of Foodie Underground and Comestible interviewed me about gender, sexuality, food, and identity in The Corners of Their Mouth:

What inspired you to make The Corners of Their Mouth?

…We’ve both also spent a significant amount of time in relationships that were straight-appearing and in which our respective partners had their fragile masculinities threatened by various aspects of our queerness, so when we started dating it was really like throwing out almost all of the social framework of relationship models, including the butch/femme expectations for queer couples, from both the cisheterosexist society we live in as well as from the monosexist “gay and lesbian” community that actively erases the contributions of multi-gender-attracted folks, particularly bisexual, pansexual, and queer people. Food—from home cooking and grocery shopping as chore to commercial food production and labor— is so tied to gender, and I feel like the zine is one part of our manifesto on disrupting gender itself as well as exploring the connection between gender and food.

What do you think is the queerest food?

My personal pick for the queerest fruit is pomegranate, because I’m secretly a Classics nerd, and I love the symbolism of Persephone and Hades (though I imagine Hades more like the character in The Dark Wife by S.E. Diemer and not a kidnapping angsty dudebro). I love pomegranate for the symbolism of taking a gift that changes your life, for the metaphor of spending time in the closet versus out in the open, and because pomegranates are this really striking fruit that feels very decadent but is actually really good for you. Queer opulence on a budget!

Read the full interview on Foodie Underground. You can buy The Corners of Their Mouth on Etsy.

If you like my work, you can also buy me a coffee on my new Ko-fi. Donations go toward paying my domain costs, ingredients, con attendance, and my femme emotional labor.