SMRT-TV: Out-Takes

March 27, 2006

A column tackling gay issues, gay themes, and just general gayness in television.

Out-takes
Golden Brown and Delicious
The quite bearable straightness of A.B.
by Whitney Cox

I am an unlikely candidate for the cooking show fan because, well, I don't cook. Not that I'm necessarily adverse to the idea or the profession, but cooking just is not a passion of mine, and therefore, it's not something I generally relish watching TV about. In the past, the shows I've seen have bored me to tears — mixing measurements I don't understand to make dishes I'm not interested in and would never replicate? Not my idea of a good time.

I have described Alton Brown to those who have not seen the show
as the magical love child of Mr. Wizard and Bill Nye the Science Guy
given a cooking show.

And then, Good Eats happened to me. The first episode I watched with a certain reluctance; the next hundred I have watched with great glee. I have described Alton Brown to those who have not seen the show as the magical love child of Mr. Wizard and Bill Nye the Science Guy given a cooking show. It's practical science gone TV — a great way to educate myself on subjects like bubbles and fermenting by putting them in contexts of things I understand. I watch Good Eats with my stepfather, a geologist and scientist-of-all-trades, and we have a great time learning about things.

But forget all all that educational stuff — I like A.B. Scratch that, I've fallen greatly in love with him (enough to bother creating my funny Valentine in his honour), and therefore I have to stop and poke at his performed gender until my examinations cough up something exciting. If you read this column often enough, you know it's a problem I have.

What I'm repeatedly struck by, however, is how straight he is. He is one great big kinda medium-sized manly man. He can dress up in clever outfits and put on large styrofoam food costumes, saying the occasional slightly swishy thing and being rather metrosexual about his grooming, and yet even I, who sees the world through lavender-coloured glasses, never even thinks to question such a thing.

Now, before watching Good Eats, I would not have guessed such a thing. As a non-practitioner and mere consumer of the art, I have tended to think of cooking as traditionally a 'female' job, connected to the domestic realm of the kitchen; consequentially, I associate the art of food preparation much more strongly with women (who always did such things in my family as I was growing up) than I do with men. And the few cooking shows I'd seen previously — mostly with women in the drivers' seats — seemed geared toward family-like meals and semi-reasonable fare, more of the construct-and-decorate sort than the type to teach how to do actual gourmet fixins.

I am told by those more cooking-savvy than I, however, that not only is there nothing non-manful about the world of professional culinary arts, but that the chef field is one overwhelmingly male. There is a difference between fixing up a nice chicken dish for one's family and getting into the kind of cooking that requires special instruments and spices, and that difference tends to split along gender lines. And really, when I stop to think about it, I realise my image of the fine chef is a man with a stupidly tall hat flipping flaming things in a large specialised pan, not June Cleaver pulling a pot roast from the oven. It may be the traditional lady of the house's job to make sure dinner is ready when everyone gets home, but the hard-core cooking world is already biased towards its secret ingredient: testosterone.

The man truly is a twelve-year-old boy given a budget, a bunch of cameras, all the food he can cook, and all the gadgetry he needs to cook it with — and, if that weren't enough, a whole bunch of science! Instead of blowing things up in his chemistry set, he makes them edible.

Well, with his legion of bizarre multi-tasking contraptions, shop equipment turned into kitchen organisers, and cooking arrays often assembled entirely from things one could purchase at one's local hardware store, Alton Brown is hardly the poster child for effiminacy. He brags frequently about how his gender actually increases his proclivity toward the creation of things like creme brulee, which requires the judicious application of a blowtorch. The man truly is a twelve-year-old boy given a budget, a bunch of cameras, all the food he can cook, and all the gadgetry he needs to cook it with — and, if that weren't enough, a whole bunch of science! Instead of blowing things up in his chemistry set, he makes them edible.

Yet, as my great love for him will attest, he's a delicate, artistic soul. He plays dress-up every chance he gets, embracing the theatrical aspects of his show with delight. He gets chummy with the (sometimes cross-dressing) men who are his frequent guest friends, letting them sidle up and drop the occasional innuendo without ever blinking. I don't think I've ever seen him in a skirt, but don't doubt that if the dish called for it, he'd don one without thinking twice.

A.B. doesn't just cook, barbeque, and make man-meals like haggis. Oh, no. The man bakes. He does all sorts of fancy things with cake and cookies and icing, wearing aprons and oven mitts, making all the sweet and/or bready goodness there is to be made just like your grandma used to (or may still) make it. This alone, I thought upon my initial viewing of the show, should be more than enough to cast a whole pantryload of aspersions on the man's sexuality.

And yet, it is not so (except for the part where I'm still amazingly attracted to him, but that's because I'm nerdsexual). While I don't think cooking is an automatic Get Out Of Suspicion Free card, I do believe it is the one of the Domestic Arts a man can adopt as his chosen creative outlet that doesn't automatically trip the homo-sensors. He's got a lot of leeway in his performance because his chosen avenue of expression is a male-associated version of a 'female' job, to the point where a little bit of swish is not only acceptable but almost expected — making it so the genderplay in Good Eats does not even approach the queer, but seems to be just what's expected when the boys (and their chemistry sets and hardware belts) conduct a very manly takeover of the kitchen. Alton Brown may indeed be the next Martha Stewart — but not in a gay way.

NEXT TIME, ON OUT-TAKES: Captain Jack, Doctor Who, and Mr. Right; or, Butt Pirates in the Fifty-First-and-a-Halfth Century!

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