The Gay Cookbook (first edition)

A$275 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

First edition · Limited edition

/ by Lou Rand Hogan. Campy cartoons by David Costain. Los Angeles : Sherbourne Press, 1965. First edition, first impression. Large octavo, lettered paper boards (bumped at corners, spine sunned, lightly marked, stain to fore edge), pp. viii; 280, line illustrations; internally clean. A good copy of the true first edition, issued in much larger format to the second impression, co-published by Bell later in the same year. The first cookbook aimed exclusively at a gay audience. On Wednesday, December 1, 1965, the New York Times ran an advertisement for The Gay Cookbook by Chef Lou Rand Hogan, whether “for that very special man in your life or for the jaded hostess whose soufflés no longer stand on their own.” The ad, sponsored by Doubleday Book Shops, filled a quarter of the page and featured an image of a slender man wearing a flowery apron, his hand limply holding a steak over a grill. It did not go unnoticed. In January 1966 Time magazine printed a twenty-five-hundred- word essay, “The Homosexual in America,” its longest article yet on the lives of gay men and lesbians. In the introduction, the author named several signs that homosexuality was “more in evidence” than ever before: the addition of “beefcake” magazines to newsstands, explicit jokes in the most recent Rock Hudson movie, and Doubleday’s “smirking ads” for The Gay Cookbook. The publication of a “gay cookbook” four years before the Stonewall riots, typically acknowledged as the start of gay liberation, undoubtedly s

• Printing: first
• Binding: Hardcover

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