It was an annual tradition. Every Thanksgiving, I would fly down to Florida before the rest of the family. My grandfather would pick me up at the airport. We’d talk about politics, my soccer season and changes to Fox News’s prime-time lineup. But this particular trip, I was 14, maybe 15, and in ways I could not yet name, it was becoming apparent that I was not like most of the boys I grew up with. My grandfather pulled off a sun-bleached stretch of highway to take me somewhere new: Hooters.
Our waitress was a tall, brassy blonde — a caricature of the caricature that is a Hooters waitress. She was in her late 20s with a deep yet indistinct Southern accent, and I could tell she clocked me almost immediately. Who knows if it was how I held myself or how my voice quivered or how my eyes slid away from hers. But later in the meal, when my grandfather went to the restroom, she slipped into the booth across from me and leaned in close. “You’re perfect just the way you are, kid,” she said, or something near enough to it, her voice low, kind and certain.
Consider the delicious irony that a chain restaurant famed for its cleavage and chicken wings somehow became a secret sanctuary for young gay men. I was not aware of this side of Hooters until a few weeks ago, when — following Bloomberg’s report that the company is considering bankruptcy — I posted the story of lunch with my grandfather on social media. It led to hundreds of direct messages from other gay men who felt the trajectory of their lives had changed after a single meal at Hooters.
“Conversion therapy with a side of ranch,” speaking loosely, was the wry refrain I saw time and again in my inbox. So many stories began the same way, with fathers or grandfathers, unsure how to connect with the boys they loved, coaxing them into the family sedan in their early to midteens.
It was an act of kindness, at least in theory. Their relatives could see the young men struggling to hide an unspoken it. Or perhaps the boys merely did not care for UFC Fight Night. Either way, only once they were seated at a table, surrounded by the din of ESPN and the stench of spilled lager, did they understand the purpose of the meal. It was a baptism into manhood — one that would backfire beautifully.
Pop culture, from “Saturday Night Live” to “American Dad” to Joe Rogan, presents the Hooters waitress as a vacant-eyed succubus. She’s seen as a not-quite stripper in possession of little more than a push-up bra and a pitcher of Coors. To many, she’s a punchline or a harlot. To the average patron, she’s a pinup consumerist fantasy. In my experience — and in the experiences of many I spoke with — all these perceptions are slanders as lazy as they are persistent.
“I was always a very flamboyant little boy,” Myke Daher told me. He and his father would go to Hooters restaurants around their home in Omaha, and one week, Mr. Daher’s father asked for a picture with two waitresses kissing his son’s cheek. He recalled, “They could both tell I was fairly hesitant about it, and they asked, ‘How about we do bunny ears instead?’”
“As they were walking away, they turned around and winked at me, almost to be like, ‘We had your back, we understood,’” Mr. Daher told me.
It changed how Hooters felt to him. “There were always times about going to Hooters that made me feel a little uncomfortable, but after that, I just felt like it was a safe space,” Mr. Daher told me. From then on, “I looked forward to going there with my dad.”
Another person who messaged me was taken by his family to a Hooters in Atlantic City, aged only about 9. His family was probably already realizing he was gay, he told me. “Our waitress was very pretty, and they kept wanting her to flirt with me, or have me flirt with her,” he said. “‘Wouldn’t you want to date a girl that’s that pretty one day?’”
As the family was leaving, he told me, the waitress stopped him on the way to the bathroom. She asked him if he was OK. When he said yes, she smiled. “I’m 30 now, and I walk by that Hooters any time I’m in Atlantic City, and I think about it,” he said.
A host of Hooters employees echoed these accounts. Lucy Wilkinson, herself a queer woman, said she finds it “heartbreaking” when she watches fathers and grandfathers routinely drag in boys who didn’t fit their idea of masculinity, either because they were gay or simply not quite macho enough. Ms. Wilkinson says she focuses on young boys who might be gay, or simply uncomfortable, going out of her way to welcome the boys in the hopes of letting them feel that they were in on the joke.
What explains the connection between Hooters waitresses and young gay men? Perhaps these women — so often stigmatized as almost sex workers, so accustomed to society’s sidelong glances — see kindred spirits in the boys who aren’t quite “right.” Or maybe it’s simpler: a waitress’s knack for reading a room, turned tender for those who need it most.
Recently, I ventured back to Hooters for the first time since that lunch with my grandfather. Two nights in a row I drove out to Queens for the chain’s sole remaining location in New York City, where I live. From the food, to the music, to the women, everything was just as I remembered. One thing that struck me, however, was the abundance of families. From my seat at the bar, I saw four sets of parents with children, some so young they had to be placated with iPads to stay in their seats.
Natalie Piniero, who has been waitressing for Hooters for about a year, told me this was not an uncommon sight. “Our usual people are older gentlemen,” she said. “They love it here. They find an ear. But we have families and kids too.” When I explained the article I was working on and asked if she’d ever witnessed such a dynamic — a father or grandfather with a queer teenager — Ms. Piniero hesitated. “I’d never assume someone’s sexuality,” she told me, “but we do everything we can to make sure everyone is welcome and everyone is comfortable.”
As I left, I found myself thinking about the irony of the Hooters mascot: that wide-eyed owl. The bird’s name is a juvenile jab, a wink to the mammary fixation that fuels the franchise. Yet, in Greek myth, the owl is a symbol of divine knowledge and reason. How fitting that it should preside over a place where the waitresses, far from being empty vessels of titillation, embody a savvy the oglers and mockers fail to appreciate. The Hooters owl, in its dual role as racy pun and all-knowing observer, mirrors the waitresses themselves. It’s a cosmic joke, really, that the bird should roost where wisdom is the last thing expected, yet often the first thing served.
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