Why Cheese Is Inherently Queer

When I was little, I loved to group things. Categorizing helped me make sense of the world — I would feel exhilarated by the vastness of what was out there, and relieved the moment I could figure out where it all belonged. An errand run to the specialty food store was a thrill ride. Scanning the cheese case, I’d confirm: The orange- and pink-hued washed rinds (“the smelly ones,” to eight-year-old me) go here. Blue cheeses, crumbly or creamy, all the way over there. Cheddars sit with cheddars. And so on. I leaned on this propensity to categorize for a while. But it became a problem when I grew increasingly aware of the fact that I myself did not fit neatly into one box.

Confusion around my gender identity was the little alarm that would go off every once in a while just to be snoozed again and again, over and over, for nearly two and a half decades. I only finally decided to do something about it when I started working with cheese. Turns out, I wasn’t the only one.

For as long as it’s been around, hospitality has stood on the shoulders of the queer community. The kitchen, as a flexible yet reliable source of income, carries a fierce sense of comradery: This, along with the myriad entry-level opportunities it holds, makes hospitality work a major refuge for queer youth. But after a brief stint working in a restaurant kitchen in my late teens, I loathed the gender disparities and lack of boundaries I witnessed. Perhaps due to its heavily matrilineal roots in this country, the cheese industry has remained more sheltered from the brutal work environments and misogynistic behavior for which commercial kitchens are now known. Cheese is weird, and therefore, really only attracts people that see that weird as wonderful. These often aren’t the same people that choose to live life as exclusionists.

“Cheese as a product is so unpredictable, and so uncontrollable,” notes Kyra James, educator, activist, and former buyer for several different cheese shops. “It’s hard work, the fulfillment doesn’t come from the paycheck, and you have to really love it to get into it, you know? Someone who is discriminatory, who isn’t open or accepting of what’s different and what’s unknown, I’ve found that’s not the kind of person that’s going to end up in cheese.”

The people I met working in the cheese industry — individuals unabashed in their approach to being themselves, unwaveringly passionate about the things that interest them, and united by one of life’s most visceral gustatory pleasures — understood me immediately. In my job leading brand design and photography at Murray’s Cheese in New York City, any given day at work might have found me running into the diehard Jim Henson fan with multiple doctorates, the marathon-running ex-music industry mogul, or the tantric therapist-turned-accountant. Meeting more and more self-proclaimed “curd nerds” motivated me to think differently about everything. It didn’t take me long to realize that while working in cheese, you can be whoever you are or want to be, as long as you wear a pair of gloves at the counter and a hairnet in the caves.

A lot of people in cheese identify as queer. But that’s only one piece of the puzzle. Most of the people I worked with had dabbled in other fields or climbed the corporate ladder before pursuing mission-driven, passion-fueled careers in cheese, proving that transformation is not only possible but life-enriching, if you let it be. They were part of a long history: Many of the women credited with igniting the American artisan cheese movement back in the ’70s did something else first. Judy Schad was pursuing a doctorate in English before she founded Capriole Goat Cheese. Sue Conley and Peggy Smith, wives and co-founders of Cowgirl Creamery, worked the back-of-house circuit all over the Bay before making cheese. Years later, partners Sheila Flanagan and Lorraine Lambaise left legal careers to found Nettle Meadow Farm. And in 2009, husbands Anthony Yurgaitis and George Malkemus (who has since passed away) bought Arethusa Farm Dairy, overseeing the production of award-winning cheeses after successful careers as execs at Manolo Blahnik.

For some of us though, a life transformation looks a bit more literal. Before I made the leap, I watched with veneration as multiple colleagues and industry friends began hormone replacement therapy, changed their email signatures, and pinned pronoun buttons to their customer-facing uniforms. By the time my second year at Murray’s rolled around, it was my turn. It was a brief water cooler conversation that prompted me, finally, to listen to that little alarm. A colleague — cisgender, for what it’s worth — asked me: “By the way, what pronouns do you prefer?” While the ambiguity in my presentation certainly warranted the question, I was completely caught off guard. No one had asked me that before, and she asked as if it were the most run-of-the-mill thing to do, which I hope someday it can be. At the time though, it was a loaded question for me, but also the kick in the ass I needed. From there, I made incremental steps with my colleagues at my side. They met my struggle around pronoun choice with patience, and helped make the long list of little things — from compiling name change documentation to navigating insurance networks — seem less infinite. After all, these folks know a bit about shepherding something towards what it’s meant to become.

“When I came out as a man, it was entirely mine,” says Lee Hennessy. “I came to that on my own terms.” Hennessy spent eight fast-paced years working the Los Angeles entertainment circuit before making the decision to move back east, immersing himself in learning the ins and outs of managing a goat dairy with the goal of eventually making cheese. Hennessy opened Moxie Ridge Farm in 2017. A year later, he came out as trans. “My identity as a cheesemaker — that, I came to on my own terms, too.”

Carving out his own space in cheesemaking, as any other cheesemaker at any point in time has had to do, influenced how Hennessy thought about his gender identity. “Cheesemaking is a very established art form,” he says. “With all the amazing cheesemakers out there, I’d think: Who am I to be doing this? That’s when it’s important to look at our own identities and what we’re most passionate about and realize that those are things we can bring to the table.” Hennessy’s love of farmstead cheeses — those made on the same land where the animals producing their milk graze — guided his journey of self-discovery. “My identity as a cheesemaker was really difficult for me to find. I knew that terroir was incredibly important. And terroir, if you think about it, is really just an identity.”

Cheesemaking is time-consuming and temperamental, and aside from scrupulous observation and endless documentation, it requires a willingness to take risks. It’s a series of discoveries that afford diversity to something as simple as the sum of milk, cultures, salt, and rennet — starting with the choice to make a specific style of cheese. From there, decision-making might look like choosing to let the curd sit slightly longer after it’s been separated and salted, or choosing to age a young cheese in bark, smoke it, or mist it in liquor. Hennessy found his lane making lactic cheeses: an ancient technique that relies on the bacteria naturally found in the milk rather than the addition of a coagulant like rennet. “It’s a lot of trial and error,” he says, “and requires a ton of nuanced knowledge that I had to learn so that I could create the right environment for the cultures to do their thing.”

Navigating queer existence is a lot of trial and error, too. Any journey of self-discovery is. For us, that may look like choosing to dress a certain way because it feels right, or further, deciding to medically transition and pursue gender-affirming care. Maybe it’s the decision to intentionally seek out a community with like-minded values, speak up and have healthy discourse around differing perspectives, or safely explore one’s sexuality in tandem with a journey of gender identity. If we’re up to it, these decisions are here for the making, and often lead to a more profound sense of self. Like with cheese, we try something, see how it feels, document that — perhaps verbally, or in writing — and move forward, letting that experience inform what we decide to do next.

But part of the experience, too, is the fact that there will always be twists in the road (call it nature, or fate) that are out of one’s hands. These are just as valuable for deepening one’s understanding, if not more. “In a way, cheese does whatever it wants. It’s really up to the cheesemaker to see it through to the end,” says James. Being queer — especially living a gender-nonconforming life or navigating the awkward beauty of an identity transition — requires a similar persistence along with a trust of the process. No amount of preparation or reflection will mitigate the fact that existing in certain parts of this country, entering public bathrooms, or even going to the beach can present hurdles for queer people in ways they simply don’t for others.

“If you’ve ever lived with or through a struggle where you’ve had to confront the unexpected and stay determined and trust the process,” James says, “I think that there’s some resonance there.”

Though the cheese industry has historically welcomed and embraced queerness, there’s still room to broaden that accessibility and open the door wider. “We do see quite a bit of queer and gender-diverse representation in cheese, but there’s still a clear indication that folks are much more accepting of someone who’s masc-presenting — be that cisgender or otherwise — than someone who presents as female,” notes Eris Schack, a former buyer who came out as transfemme after winning the 14th annual Cheesemonger Invitational in 2018. Schack is one of many looking to more frequently hold the industry accountable, discussing topics like this one in the networking and resource-sharing group LGBrieTQ, which was founded on Facebook over a decade ago to further inclusivity in the industry. Intersectionality has also been an area of struggle. The Cheese Culture Coalition, of which James sits on the board, is actively establishing systems of accountability with the goal of unlocking more access and equity for BIPOC individuals in cheese.

Benefits would be a great place to start. Employer-funded healthcare is understandably rare in an industry reliant on such a time-consuming product where profit margins are slim. But as universal family planning benefits and subsidized coverage for gender-affirming care are becoming more common within companies as large as Kroger, of which Murray’s is a subsidiary, it would be encouraging to see that accessibility match how verbally inclusive the cheese community already is.

Around the same time I began my transition, I started to feel my steadfast adherence to categorization loosening its grip. Now, when I look at the cheese case, I see its contents as a beautiful expanse full of individuals, like the Seven Sisters cheese from the Farm at Doe Run. Not quite an Alpine-style cheese and not quite a Gouda, Seven Sisters is one-of-a-kind, marrying the herbaceous, cooked milk qualities from one source of inspiration with the deep caramelization and toffee-like flavors from the other. Vermont’s Jasper Hill Farm took the centuries-old Loire Valley tradition of ash-ripening goat’s milk cheeses and applied it to Sherry Gray, a luscious medallion made instead with cow’s milk. And Philly’s Perrystead Dairy is one of very few cheesemakers daring not to stay in one lane, using both animal rennet and its vegetal counterpart — extracted from cardoon thistle — to coagulate its delicious creation, Moonrise.

So many cheesemakers are uniquely attuned to the litany of variables present in cheesemaking, and have learned to harness them to color outside the lines. That said, sometimes, converging factors are entirely accidental and lead to unique discoveries. It’s a beautiful thing to be able to ask the question of ourselves: What happens if we try something else? It suggests that we’re all still learning.

When I think about these happy accidents, blue-veined cheddars come to mind first. These cheeses occur when air finds its way into the micro-crevices that often form in the rinds of well-aged clothbound cheddar truckles. Oxygen then activates mold within — the same strain that’s inoculated into any blue cheese, but also one that’s commonly found on surfaces all over the place, including your kitchen. As they age, these tangy, crystalline-studded cheddars grow delicious striations of peppery blue. Many cheesemongers find their customers have a hard time accepting this blue veining; while perfectly natural and safe to eat, they may see it as grotesque — a flaw that renders the entire product undesirable. I guess they, like me once upon a time, still see the cheese case as a place for stark categorizations. Their loss.

Bug Robbins is a queer illustrator inspired by mid century design, printmaking, and folklore.