Welcome to my site. Here you’ll find new and resurfaced writing, links to published stories, and news about my book, The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard.

I learned to cook at Greens in San Francisco, a restaurant run by Zen Buddhists, who taught me lessons in mindfulness that have helped me stay focused in these anxious times.

Queers of my generation learned what it meant to be gay in bars. We inherited a culture of resistance from those who started a revolution on the streets outside one, by lesbians and faggots; queens, hustlers, and fairies; street kids and the gender nonconforming—people who knew what it was to be bullied and betrayed.

The story of cookbook author Richard Sax, who died of complications from AIDS in 1995, highlights the fear and stigma that conspired to hide the true toll of a pandemic that devastated the food world in the 1980s and ‘90s.

Sheltering in place against COVID-19, with a daily imperative to cook at home, I have James Beard constantly on my mind. He’s the ghost I can’t seem to banish from my kitchen.

Bangkok before dawn is turgid and murky like canal water, the taxis and scooters churning in place at stoplight eddies beneath the BTS Skytrain, but on this relatively cool morning Uno is buzzing like pink neon in a discharge tube.

Who gets to decide what’s “good” or “bad” food? Who are the arbiters of taste and why do we listen to them?

Why has the stigma of being a queer chef lingered for so long?

In travel, the foods you choose to avoid can stay with you longer than any memory of what you actually ate.

How a queer Jewish community cookbook published in 1987 changed the lives of an LGBTQ faith group in San Francisco.

The new Oakland rises in condo blocks, shiny tanks of brewpubs, and fine-leaved husks of French pâtisserie, but the old Oakland loiters here over coffee and crullers, scuffing latex fields from Lotto scratchers with the smooth edges of nickels.

I was ten in 1970, a shy kid growing up in a scrub-oak suburb south of San Francisco. Our house was pitched on stilts sunk in a steep hillside, looking out onto a little arroyo and into the house of two men I loved like uncles (and more deeply than some of the uncles whose DNA I shared).