Aug 15, 2008  |  By: AMY CAVANAUGH  | COMMENTS     

Cupcakes are on the comeback trail across the county and lesbians are displaying an especially soft spot for the comforting confections.

When local lesbian night A Different Kind of Ladies Night celebrated its fourth anniversary last March, there were cupcakes. There were also cupcakes at Dyke Night’s third and anniversary parties in 2006 and 2007, when Meaghan O’Malley, writer of the blog Queering Domesticity, baked more than 100 cupcakes and arranged them in the shape of the leather Pride flag.

“I decided that the leather Pride flag would be a really vibrant and impactful layout,” O’Malley, who prefers the term “queer lesbian,” says. “Each cake took me a day full of baking, icing, design and transport. The most satisfying part to the entire ordeal was the black and blue smiles I got to see after people dove into the icing.”

Cupcakes, a children’s birthday party staple, have been making a resurgence. Beginning with the success of Magnolia Bakery in New York City, other cupcakeries began cropping up all over the country and the world. Locally, Georgetown Cupcake opened in the spring and lines stretch down the block on weekends, while Hello Cupcake! is slated to open in Dupont Circle this month.

Rachel Kramer-Bussel started her popular blog, Cupcakes Take the Cake, in December of 2004, and two friends joined her blogging efforts the following February. Kramer-Bussel, who is bisexual, says that although there’s “nothing specifically queer about cupcakes,” she has seen some parallels between lesbians and the little desserts.

“I’ve been seeing them in the queer community at gay marriages, and there are also Gay Pride cupcakes. You can very easily decorate them to match any color or theme, and do things with them that you can’t do with cookies.”

But there’s more to the queer cupcake relationship than decorating them.

“There’s a segment of my blog readership that comes from the indie-craft world, and I see an overlap between people who go to craft fairs, and who are lesbian or bisexual,” she says. “I think that’s coming from the ‘do it yourself’ mentality. We can make our own, and we’re taking back some of those traditionally feminine skills by doing them in a feminist kind of way … It’s kitschy cool. Even though cupcakes are very mainstream, if we make Pride cupcakes and bring them to the parade, then there’s a reclaiming of that as something valid for women without it capitulating that idea that women have to cook.”

Sharlene Rednour, a California-based writer and filmmaker, became a stay-at-home mom after adopting two children through a foster-to-adopt program, and she also started her own cupcake company, Sharlene’s Babycakes. 

“I have always been a foodie and when I became a mom, I couldn’t do creative things by myself,” she says, “Baking cupcakes was something I could do with the kids and I always got a lot of compliments on them.”

Rednour, a lesbian, has been taking orders since last July, and has made cupcakes for both gay and straight weddings. She also makes them for parties, filling one or two orders during the week and a bigger one on the weekend. Rednour got married in San Francisco in 2004, though she does not plan to do so again: “I don’t believe in marriage even for straight people. I’m tired of jumping when the straight people say jump.”

Rednour provides a slight spin on Kramer-Bussel’s idea about a return to domesticity.

“We’ve been living in an expert world since the ’80s,” she says, “Now you hire specialists for everything, like a fitness trainer. Craft in general is coming back, like knitting. I think that’s feminism — I don’t need someone to tell me that I can’t make a cake myself.” 

But if lesbians are making a return to domestic activities, what is fueling it?

“In general, I think that lesbians are drawn to domestic activities in the same manner as any woman-identified person would be drawn to them,” O’Malley says, “My mother, while straight, was a fantastic role model for me in that regard. She was a powerhouse career woman and still made it home in time to teach me how to cross-stitch, sew and bake delicious oatmeal raisin cookies. I think that lesbians are slowly being drawn back into the domestic sphere because we have found that supporting ourselves and our spirits involves both careers and money as well as the soft, nurturing appeal of fresh cookies and homemade curtains.”

Though a traditionally feminine activity, crafting and baking are not limited to femmes in the women’s community. O’Malley says that she ...