Full Fridge Club: May 2024
Gay the May away...
Welcome to the club!
Editor’s note: In order to share all of our musings and photos, this newsletter will be clipped by most email providers. To read our entire newsletter, click on the link that says “view entire message” or you can read in full on the Substack app.
Happy Pride Month!
“But wait!” the patient subscriber thinks, “This newsletter is always a month behind!”
That’s right! While we’ll give a taste of our June 2024 goings-on this month, let us first swallow our Pride for just a minute— since we can forget about May!
This month, we were invited by our friends at Queer Kingston to do a pop-up at a local uptown bar called Salt Box.
Starting back in April of 2022, Queer Kingston coordinates queer hangouts all over town. This led to their weekly queer nights at Salt Box back in March of 2023: the C U Next Tuesday party! Seasonally, QK invites local food vendors as pop-ups, which we did this year on Tuesday, May 14th.
The event was so. much. FUN. The food was so. damn. GOOD. We all chatted and imbibed, while the projector screening of “But I'm a Cheerleader” turned into “Bound” turned into some kind of sports programming signaling the end of the night!
You should follow us on Instagram (if you don’t already!), since we’ll be hosting events on our patio this Summer as well! Maybe even… a Pride event…
“She said we’d be talking about May,” the impatient subscriber thinks.
Okay, okay! Let’s Dish. It. Out!
May Menus
These are our previous month’s menus, along with photos and insights from one of our chefs…
Monday, May 6th
Stephen: When you’re tasked with making as many unique menus as we are for Full Fridge Club, looking to other chefs recipes for inspiration can be very helpful. This week we adapted a recipe from Chef Andy Baraghani as the inspiration behind the Coconut Braised Carrots. Thanks Andy!
Monday, May 13th
Stephen: Years ago I worked for a chef who was adamant that fusion food, especially Asian fusion, will always be worse than any dish from a monocultural cuisine. As a product of Korean-American fusion myself, I must (politely) disagree! To me, this menu is proof positive that fusion food can be just as delicious as the traditional dishes that comprise its parts.
Monday, May 20th
Stephen: I’d reckon we do a barbecue menu once every three months or so. The reason why? It is so damn good every time! What stands out for me on this one was all of the glazing I spent the day doing. Between the Sticky Tofu and the Country Style Ribs, it was about a cumulative hour of just painting on glazes, and it paid off deliciously.
Monday, May 27th
Stephen: (Ignoring the maximalism of Okonomiyaki) I think this menu really shows off the clean simplicity behind much of Japanese cooking. Every other dish on this menu comprised of simple ingredients that were well prepared and neatly dressed. On any other menu if you presented me steamed squash I’d probably say ‘ew’, but the Steamed Kabocha with Tamari and Scallion Vinaigrette was one of my favorite vegetable preparations that we did last month.
*Intrusive Queer Thought*
This is where one of us of the Common Table crew let our little queer minds run amok!
“Facts don’t care about your feelings.” -Bisexual Icon Mara Wilson’s idiot cousin
May is a rough month for me.
A week before the COVID-19 shutdown, I had been hired at the Town of Esopus Library. It was obvious that our boss was volatile but— after a mental health battle in 2019 that led me to be unemployed for nearly a year— I needed the work.
Working from home was a challenge. I attended many webinars, including “Creating LGBTQ+ Inclusive Libraries”: where we were encouraged to share our pronouns in the workplace to foster a safe space for LGBTQ+ people. One of my coworkers was open about using they/them pronouns (which my boss willfully and cruelly ignored) and I had been a loud, proud member of the queer community since 2013: using any/all pronouns for years. I sent an email to my coworkers, sharing my pronouns, and asked them to do the same, only if they felt comfortable.
The next week, I was let go.
I was told that there “wasn’t work for me” even though I protested that I was the only staff member currently visiting and maintaining the building of the library itself.
No one else was let go.
It was May 2020. I was unemployed. And it had been almost a year since my family began to fall apart.
To distract myself, I needed a purpose.
Earlier that year, our local LGBTQ Center was facing a major wave of backlash. Our community was calling out the Center for seemingly endless cases of harm, both systemic and individual: racism, misogyny, transphobia, ableism, etc.
It was a mess. A beautiful, wonderful mess.
The Center dodged. Then, those most responsible, got the hell out of Dodge.
I did my best to be supportive to my friends, though I had never been on the receiving end of these harms. Hell, nearly a year before in May of 2019, I had even volunteered to organize their community library and, in just three weeks, I had restructured the entire room and catalogued all of the Fred Mayo Library’s items— volunteering tirelessly nearly every day. Until I couldn’t.
One criticism kept sticking with me during the accountability journey with the Center: many, myself included, argued that the Center— named “The Hudson Valley LGBQT Center”— should be renamed, since it barely served (serves) Ulster County itself, let alone the ten or so counties within the greater Hudson Valley. Who came up with that? I needed to know.
I interviewed my friends: the queer oaky smokey locals who could get me connected to the queer oakier smokier locals.
I spoke with my dear friend Jacinta Bunnell, who taught me about community organizer Jane Elven and the LGBTQ+ prom they created together: Circles. Jacinta filled me in on the history of local coded lesbian groups, like WOMBATS (“Women On Mountain Bike and Tea Society”) and Sojourner’s Womyn’s Coffeehouse and Gathering Place. She told me about the late, great lesbian activist Gale McGovern, who adopted a section of Rte. 32 in Rosendale near a homophobic politician’s driveway and renamed it "The Lesbian Visibility Project".
I spoke to another dear friend, fellow historian and activist, Jay Blotcher. Jay and his husband Brooke were married along with 24 other gay couples on February 27, 2004 by New Paltz Mayor Jason West in Peace Park— over seven years before gay marriage was legal in New York State. By that evening, 350 couples had added their names to the waiting list on the village’s web site. By the next afternoon, there were more than 500 couples on the list.
Once the Mayor was criminally charged for solemnizing the marriages and ordered to stop, Unitarian Universalist Ministers Dawn Sangrey and Kay A. Greenleaf took over illegally solemnizing the gay weddings. I spoke with Pat Sullivan who, with her wife the late Minister Greenleaf, were the first couple married on March 6, 2004 under a tent in Blueberry Fields in New Paltz. I scoured the Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection at the Elting Memorial Library. Throughout 2004, Ministers Sangrey and Greenleaf were joined by many ministers of other denominations, as well as Deputy Mayor Rebecca Rotler and Trustee Julia Walsh, to perform a total of 283 illegal gay marriages by October of that year.
The queer community came to Ulster County in droves and, in June of 2005, the Hudson Valley had its first Pride event: involving Denise Jelley, Jay Blotcher, Mayor West, Ginny Apuzzo, and Gilbert Baker (the creator of the rainbow flag).
The Center was founded in July in 2005, born out of these community-led events. But this was not about the Center anymore.
It was about all of what came before me and the context I had been lacking. Did I think I just fell out of a coconut tree?
Places like The Maverick, Alternative Video (both locations!), Primetime, Women’s Studio Workshop, The Congress, the Unitarian Fellowship; the Mid-Hudson Valley Transgender Association and Cornell University’s records of the group; local queer periodicals like “In the Life” and “Inside Out”... And all of the beautiful, wonderful, messy community members whose shadows I’d been tracing on the sidewalks of my life.
I interviewed dozens of people. Most of whom were completely surprised (some even borderline offended) at their lives and experiences being considered as a part of local queer history.
I also learned about history itself. The fallacy of objectivity in storytelling: be it weak memories, biases, skewed perspectives, and the game of telephone amongst oral communications.
Facts may or may not care about your feelings, but feelings definitely don’t care about your facts: the truths we tell ourselves in order to survive and connect; the narratives we provide to give meaning to anything, fueled by desire and fear and shame and hunger; the monsters we create, the heroes who slay them— all forms of our own personal propaganda.
Queer history is full of this mythologizing. Did Marsha P. Johnson throw a shot glass or a brick at Stonewall? Was she even there? Did the Stonewall riots start because of the funeral of Judy Garland? Were they riots at all? Or, instead, an uprising? A rebellion? Was Harvey Milk the first out gay politician? Was he actually dishonorably discharged from the Navy for being gay? Was the Roman Emperor Elagabalus trans?
Some of these have clear, evidential answers. Most are up to interpretation.
Even local queer history has these muddy areas. Like how the knowledge of the secret gay speakeasy in Rosendale in the early 90’s called the “Cement Factory” evolved into— oh wait actually— a 2002 restaurant named “The Rosendale Cement Company” that was just owned by a gay couple. Or how in 2005, “the Hudson Valley had its first ever Pride event”— when a newspaper article from February 2000 clearly states “The Village of New Paltz approves Gay Pride festival to be held at Hasbrouck Park”— not to harp again over the conflation of Ulster County representing the entirety of the Hudson Valley.
Obviously, there are many who would love to argue over objectivity: how history is a science and a study, utilizing systematic methods and logical analyses of data and evidence. Yes, sure, yes, that is good and right and very important. And all of that rigorous procedure still, inevitably, leads to humans interpreting humans interpreting humans.
A go-to, catch-all quote often used to describe this lack of fact from marginalized histories is: “history is written by the victors”. And, though I don’t technically disagree with the sentiment, I prefer to believe that history is written by writers. We craft the stories; we hold the parts critical to us sacred; we convince the audience that this is worth knowing.
Remember this. This is exactly how it happened. I need you to care because I care.
On May 22, 2019, my dad died. The beautiful man who gave me his name and his smile. The man who brought water bottles to the drag performers at my shows and drove my truck in the New Paltz Pride Parade yearly. The butcher whose Instagram page consists solely of Sunday breakfasts, dead animals, and me in glam.
On May 31, 2021, my sister stopped talking to me. My critical, sarcastic battle buddy. I’m sure there was a reason. I may never know it.
On May 12, 2024, it was Mother’s Day. I haven’t spoken to my mother since last December. At least I gave her a reason. It was the right decision. I think.
History cannot be objective; it is too personal. It matters too much. Its echoes ripple through our every present choice. The myths, the legends, the victors, the villains— all shift within the next sunset.
Reliably, we are our own unreliable narrators.
May 2014 was when I first started drag. I was twenty years old and my friends and I had been obsessed with Hedwig and the Angry Inch for years. We saw the Broadway revival multiple times, making sure to see every actor who played Hedwig. We even got the chance to meet Michael C. Hall, who was wearing an {outdated} café t-shirt— a popular uptown Kingston coffee shop (R.I.P.)— which my friends and I only noticed in hindsight. I cosplayed as Hedwig privately with my best friend at the time and we got all dolled up for a home-viewing of the 2014 Tonys that year, where Hedwig won four awards.
May 13th is my spouse’s birthday. They turned thirty this year and nothing has brought me more joy in my life than watching their journey into the incredible person they are and being privileged enough to accompany them on that journey.
May is a rough month for me.
And, even as a primary source, I may just need a better interpreter.
[Editor’s note: don’t quote me on this. Any of this.]
-Timmy Bruck
And that was our May!
Below, for paid subscribers, you’ll find our Side Dish, where Timmy has crafted some queer word games based on the NYT sensation Connections. You will also find two recipes from our May FFC Menus, scaled down and tested by Julia Turshen: Galbi Jjim Meatloaf and Macaroni Salad (loosely based on a recipe from her upcoming cookbook What Goes With What).
If you’d like to help our work with keeping our local free fridges full, but you don’t live locally to order a Full Fridge Club service, you can always sponsor meals here!
And, if you are local and interested in learning more about Full Fridge Club, check out our website!
Thank you all for joining the club and we’ll see you next month!
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