Benita Bendon Campbell writes:
The dominant grocery chain in Denver – a subset of Kroger Foods – is called King Soopers. Their very popular market branch in the gayest neighborhood of our town is known (affectionately) as Queen Soopers. As you could have guessed.
Lovely. A few notes on Queen Soopers, then a re-play of some notes on queen as used by gay men.
The store, at 1155 E. 9th Ave. in the Capitol Hill gayborhood:
(#1)
The store merits a mention in the Cruising Gays city hookup guide.
Digression on this warning in the store:
(#2)
Never put children in your basket! That’s for your stuff, your junk, and your package.
On to queen. From a 12/19/15 posting “X queen”, about the gay partner-preference snowclonelet (and related snowclonelets):
What gets us to gay snowclonelets like this one is the use of queen for gay men, which I wrote about in a 6/27/14 posting. The connection is through the attribution of femininity to (some or all) gay men. From NOAD2, in its 6th sense for queen:
informal a male homosexual, typically one regarded as ostentatiously effeminate
There’s a slur use here, but also a more neutral one, and even a gay-affirming in-your-face use (“I’m a big ol’ queen who likes to play rugby”). In any case, gay X queen uses have the neutral sense of queen; a rice queen, for example, can be as butch as you want, as unidentifiably gay as you want, so long as he’s in the market for an East Asian man.
The 2014 posting has a wonderful New Yorker cartoon by William Haefeli, with boyfriends testing out a mattress, one saying to the other, “I still say we should get a queen-sized mattress – despite the obvious jokes it will invite among the sales staff.”
