A new book traces the LGBTQ+ dining history that shaped this country—and it starts right here.
Author, Erik Piepenburg. Photo by Peter Larson.
Long before the Gayborhood had its rainbow crosswalks, before drag brunch became a Sunday institution, Philadelphia’s gay community was doing what queer people have always done: finding each other over a meal.
That history is at the heart of Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America’s Gay Restaurants, a sweeping new book by journalist Erik Piepenburg that traces 100 years of LGBTQ+ restaurants across America. Philly readers should know this city plays a starring role.
Take Dewey’s. In April 1965, four years before Stonewall, some 150 protesters staged a sit-in at the Center City diner after management instructed employees to deny service to “homosexuals and persons wearing nonconformist clothing.” After continued pressure, Dewey’s dropped its policy within days. Piepenburg frames it as one of the most significant pre-Stonewall uprisings in the country—a reminder that Philadelphia was never just a bystander to the broader movement for gay civil rights.
But Dining Out isn’t only about resistance. It’s also a love letter to the pleasures of gay dining, and few pleasures are more Philadelphian than brunch. Piepenburg traces gay brunch culture to cities like ours, where venues like the Nugget Saloon and the nightclub Equus were serving eggs and Bloody Marys to gay men who had nowhere else to be on a Sunday afternoon. When Philadelphia Gay News ran a brunch roundup in 1981, writer Lee Robbins credited gay Philadelphians with practically inventing the meal as a social institution.
Then came AIDS, and the restaurants that held the community together. In 1990, ActionAIDS launched Dining Out for Life here in Philadelphia. The first event raised $1,500. Today the program partners with more than 2,400 restaurants across North America.
One longtime ActionAIDS staffer captures the book’s quiet urgency best: “I worry sometimes that with the loss of gay restaurants, we are losing little bits of our culture.” Philadelphia knows that feeling well.
DINING OUT: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America’s Gay Restaurants (Grand Central Publishing)
EDITOR’S NOTE: Dining Out for Life returns to Philadelphia on Thursday, April 23, 2026, for its 36th year. Dine at a participating restaurant and a percentage of your bill goes directly to Action Wellness, which funds life-sustaining programs for people living with or at high risk of HIV. Find participating restaurants and more information at actionwellness.org.
