THE GAY COOKBOOK by Hogan, Chef Lou Rand - 1965

Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, 1965. Very good plus.. First edition of this groundbreaking cookbook, written four years before Stonewall, for and about gay men. Before turning to writing, Rand (born Louis Randall) made the most of his "blond and lissome" youth in '20s San Francisco: performing as a chorus girl under the drag name "Sonia Pavlijev", delivering bootleg gin under Prohibition, getting arrested for doing the "low Kooch" in see-through silver gauze trousers, and finally taking to the sea, where he learned to cook on passenger-freight liners and cruise ships. As Lou Rand, he would publish the pulp novel THE GAY DETECTIVE, as groundbreaking in its own genre as his COOKBOOK.

Reveling in innuendo for innuendo's sake, THE GAY COOKBOOK's camp sensibility and vocabulary would soon seem dated and outmoded in the activist '70s, which had no time for puns about the "Swish Alps," and the "literally hundreds of lovely sausages" in the world. But Rand, who wrote openly and fearlessly in the years before Stonewall, was himself nostalgic for the bygone "Golden Age of Queens," when the (heavily romanticized) risk and thrill of dodging the vice squad and learning the secret codes of a pre-war sexual underground could all seem like a great adventure. "It's all no longer genteel," he lamented in a later memoir; "the old mystique is no more."

His COOKBOOK is thus both a nostalgic throwback to the glamorous, gracious days of pre-war entertaining and a forward-thinking challenge to then-current stereotypes of guilty isolation: an assertion of social connection and community, and a snapshot view of a culture with a rich past as well as a liberated future.

A landmark work. 7'' x 10''. Original pictorial boards. No jacket, as issued. (viii), 280 pages. Mild toning to boards. Some touches of soil. shelfwear. Overall, clean and sound.