This week, them. is highlighting and celebrating queer people, places, and stories from across an often-overlooked region: the Midwest. Look out for more from our Queer Midwest package throughout the week.
The streets of Minneapolis’s North Loop neighborhood are empty and slick, but even as snow falls on this dark Sunday evening, the primary colors of the graffiti on the walls of Modist Brewing’s back room almost glow. Queer Soup Night is bumping: Coats are piled on high-tops and DJ Beefcakes spins Solange while people chat and politely jostle each other in line for each chef’s soup.
Minneapolis locals Debbie Ryan and Katy Nordhagen, hoist their own mugs in cozy, chic striped sweaters. “We fucking love soup,” says Ryan. “Honestly, I eat soup all summer long.”
The room around Ryan and Nordhagen steadily fills with friends and strangers, and by 6 PM around 50 people have braved the cold for a helping of soup and queer community. Melissa and Kim, a couple raising teenagers who decline to give their last names, found out about the event at the Minneapolis Central Library’s Telling Queer History event. “I could get her out of the house because she likes breweries,” says Kim.
Founded in Brooklyn by chef Liz Alpern in late 2016, Queer Soup Night has 12 national chapters in cities across the country. Leah Korger of Blue Collar Supper Club, a series of intimate dinners served to a members-only club hosted in their living room, organizes the Twin Cities Chapter. “It was just a match made in heaven,” Korger says. “This was another way that we could focus on queer people in the food industry doing good work.”
Queer Soup Night is an expansion of Korger’s interests in nourishing the queer community, literally and figuratively. Each Queer Soup Night donates proceeds to a local nonprofit, but organizers emphasize that all are welcome and that no one will be turned away due to lack of funds.
The event space is donated by Modist Brewing approximately four times per year. People buy beer in the front and sip three different soups in the back, encouraged to bring their own spoons in social media posts. Korger asks a different local LGBTQ+ artist to volunteer their time and design each event flier, which are then distributed by more volunteers around town.
“There’s queer art events, and a million events around dancing and bars and such, but not a lot of queer food events happening,” Korger says of the need for Queer Soup Night in Minneapolis.
For Korger, the event is a public-facing expansion of the more exclusive Blue Collar Supper Club. New members at Korger’s in-home event are accepted only with a reference, making them intimate affairs for LGBTQ+ people. For Korger, thoughtful meals are a place for people to open up to each other and foster community. Through the personal stories they share to accompany each dish, Korger hopes diners will feel encouraged to open up about themselves and listen to each other’s memories and experiences. A few strong Old Fashioneds — a nod to the traditional supper clubs of Wisconsin, where Korger grew up — often help relax newcomers.
“You don’t know who’s going to be sitting around the table,” says Korger. “You don’t know what the meal is going to be. I’ll give teasers, but overall it’s, ‘I wonder what we’re going to eat today? I wonder who’s going to be there?’ It’s an adventure.”
Because the event is members-only, Korger works with diners who have dietary needs or food restrictions in advance. “The meal is not compromised in any way,” Korger explains.
Ryan Bortz, 30, is a close friend of Korger’s and frequent attendee of their food-focused events. Tonight they await chef Franny Bannen’s childhood vegetable soup with chili oil and pesto.
Bortz lived on the East Coast their entire life before moving to Minnesota for graduate school. “I was nervous because I was reading things online that said Minnesota is very insular, that people have known each other since kindergarten and it’s hard to break into friend groups,” Bortz says. “I had the exact opposite experience. I found the queer community here to be very open to new people.”
Chef Nettie Colon of Red Hen Gastrolab is a Nuyorican who’s lived in the Twin Cities for 20 years. Tonight she’s serving maafa, a sweet potato and vegetable soup, rich with peanut and finished with cilantro. She shares her perception of feeling welcome in the Midwest with this metaphor: “People make you wait on the porch for a while,” she says. “So you hang out on the porch for a while. And then after a while…. The Midwest thing is — they’re not quick to embrace you, but once you’re embraced, there’s loyalty and friendship.”
The Twin Cities has hosted many dynamic queer spaces in recent years: the defunct DADDY variety show at Icehouse, featuring live readings, DJs, and burlesque; GRRL Scout dance nights and L-Word trivia at the 19 Bar, renowned for cheap pitchers of lager and pool tables; UpDown’s Gay Mondays, which offers arcade games for LGBTQ+ people; Bondesque and its selection of BDSM gear and inclusive kink events and classes, and even the LGBTQ+ section of Minneapolis’s beloved Once Upon A Crime bookstore.
”People are always seeking out new things to do and making spaces, because there’s not a ton of gay bars here that people really wanna party at,” says Lauren Coleman, 25, who sports a bi-pride colored scarf — on accident, she says. “We go out kind of no matter what.” Around her, people line up for more of Chef Steph Hedrick’s winter squash soup studded with wild rice, a Minnesota staple.
Although Queer Soup Night and other Twin Cities events have made it their mission to bring the queer community here together in new ways, the local LGBTQ+ scene still struggles with diversity. Tonight’s crowd is majority white and skews young, although a few families with children and folks in their forties and fifties have been known to join in, too. It's a problem patrons readily acknowledge, and one that extends far beyond Queer Soup Night itself.
Coleman’s friend Kevin Martin, 26, chats with friends at a table. Nearby, twenty-somethings and toddlers dance off the long-gone donated bread to Robyn and Lizzo. “There’s a lot of love here for each other,” he says. “I feel like I’ve been to a lot of cites and there are queer communities everywhere, but the one here is really good at taking care of each other and showing up.”
Martin’s friend Trevor Berberick, 24, originally hails from Kansas. “In no capacity am I safe to be out in Kansas,” Trevor says. “It’s certainly better here. But I wouldn’t say I always feel safe. Minnesota barely went blue in the last election. We have a lot of conservatism in this state.”
Since the 2016 election, Kevin and Trevor, who are both white, say they feel more on guard, and that their queer and trans friends, especially friends of color, don’t feel safe in the Cities. “It’s becoming more diverse,” he says when describing the queer community. ”But it’s still pretty white. We’re still in Minnesota.”
Racial diversity is a topic Coleman, who is black, notes, too. “It’s pretty white,” she says of the Twin Cities queer scene. “Which … I don’t love, but I know that’s not a Minnesota-exclusive situation.”
"In my opinion the queer spaces in the Twin Cities are overwhelmingly white for sure," says Korger. They are aware of events like the popular Soul Friday, spaces for queer women of color, and have heard positive things from attendees. "I'm always open to hear criticism on my own projects and talk about potential collaborations,” Korger adds.
Nonetheless, queer events around the Twin Cities tend to be pretty welcoming. “We challenge each other, we hold each other accountable, but we’re also full of love and acceptance,” says Chef Hedrick. “We are so progressive because we try to move social and community agendas forward but also try to not leave anyone behind and try to consider everyone that we possibly can. And if you know one person, you know 25 people.”
As the soup runs out and the event comes to a close, Korger announces that over $2000 has been raised for Sisters Camelot, an organization that provides free organic food via bus to food insecure neighborhoods. Volunteers begin to take down tables and chefs turn off their electric burners as the brewery employees clean up. But there are still 20 people filled with soup and not yet ready to head back into the snow. When “All I Want For Christmas Is You” comes on, they let out cheers and scream-sing along with their new friends.
**Get the best of what's queer. **Sign up for our weekly newsletter here.
