'Top Chef' Winner Melissa King Finds Creative Ways to Support the Queer Community

这个故事的一部分“酷儿Food,"a series that explores the role of food in LGBTQ+ communities.

作为厨师，我在生活中的目标总是让人感到包括在内。这就是为什么我喜欢举办晚宴。我喜欢在餐厅工作，因为它是一个培养的环境，这是一个安全的空间。食物真的亚搏电竞是让每个人在一起的一件事。亚搏电竞食物是连接器，它一直是。无论你说同一种语言还是没有，你都可以理解它。你可以吃它，品尝它，了解那个人的感受。当我做饭时，我总是用一个向我服务的意图做饭，并在盘子上给你我的爱。我希望每个人都欢迎在那个空间中，无论你拥有什么颜色或你的性欲是什么;亚搏电竞食物没有界限。

I feel very passionate about who I am as an individual and I happen to be this sort of triple minority. I'm an Asian American, I'm a woman, and I'm gay. I try my best, as a chef that happens to be fortunate enough to have a platform, to use my voice to speak up for people that may not have that opportunity. And so if I can do that through my food, I will. It is an opportunity to be able to leverage that platform for other things that are very important to me beyond just cooking.

I try to do what I can for our community and, especially now during quarantine, I've been hosting a lot of these virtual cooking classes and virtual experiences. And being that it's Pride Month, I'm trying to find ways to support the queer community through these events. And I want my audience to be other LGBTQ+ members that want to learn how to cook better.

So I've tied in a lot of charitable components. I'm right now organizing a wonton event—like a wonton webinar—for this Saturday. And part of the proceeds will go towards an Asian American, Pacific Islander, LGBTQ+ specific group organization. I invited a lot of the members and gave them access to several free tickets because I know that the queer community sometimes doesn't have the money to be able to take a cooking class or be a part of these experiences. In that way, through using my platform and as ways to tie it together, it's evolved to become queer food for me. To build that community and build up the community.

I havemerch on my websitefor Pride. $5 of each purchase will go towards theTrevor Projectto support LGBTQ+ youth. I'm always thinking, "How can I tie this back to the people that I care about?" And then there was this other project that I did that actually was literally queer food. I did a partnership with Sidecar Doughnuts last year for Pride. Every month they do a chef doughnut. They did one with Brooke Williamson and Richard Blais, and everybody took a month. And then it got to me and they're like, "Which month do you want?" And I'm like, ‘I want June, of course. I want Pride month. And let's make a Pride doughnut and let's just make it super gay. It's going to look a rainbow and it's just going to be as gay as we can get it. And it's going to have sprinkles.’

So I developed and curated this very gay doughnut. And it's very challenging to make a rainbow doughnut, I'm not going to lie. We had so few prototypes to figure out how to make it? How do we incorporate all these colors, but still have it taste good? And all the proceeds of the sales went towardsBrave Trails，这有助于支持LGBTQ青少年成员去夏令营，为他们创造空间和环境。所以我为这个项目感到自豪，因为对我来说，它感觉就像是同性恋的缩影。

正如玛丽 - 弗朗西尔士般的，采访编辑并为清晰而凝结。