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.
