The Forgotten Queer Legacy of Billy West and Zuni Café
The New York Times
The restaurant is a culinary landmark in San Francisco, but its history as a space for gay visibility is little known.
In 2013 Judy Rodgers, the 57-year-old chef of Zuni Café in San Francisco, yielded at last to the rare appendix cancer she’d struggled with for more than a year. The many published tributes to Ms. Rodgers celebrated the urgent beauty in her deceptively simple dishes: the way Zuni’s roast chicken, house-cured anchovies and Caesar salad were woven into memories of perfect meals. Lost to memory — and missing from most obituaries — was the name of Zuni’s founder, Billy West, the man who had coaxed Ms. Rodgers into the kitchen in 1987 after years of trying. Though the cooking still owes a highly visible debt to Ms. Rodgers, Zuni’s pioneering queer activism is Mr. West’s forgotten legacy. Mr. West opened Zuni in 1979 just blocks from City Hall, three months after an ex-cop assassinated the gay San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, in part to shatter a fragile L.G.B.T.Q. coalition’s policy gains. In a decade when queer advocates struggled for inclusion at City Hall, Zuni put queerness on display to San Francisco’s political class, who in the pre-Rodgers years flocked to the restaurant for guacamole, margaritas and swordfish cooked on a Weber grill in the alley out back.
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