Soft Serve Is Gay Culture
She's serving softness.
Hello friends, enemies, etc.
Welcome to another edition of This Is Gay Culture!
But Matt, you said this would be a *weekly* newsletter and this is the first one in, like, three weeks.
OK? It was Pride month. Expecting me to do free labor during the one month that being gay is legal is offensive and deeply disrespectful to my sensibilities (being gay and lazy). So why don’t you just enjoy each dribble you get from my brain whenever you get it and keep your mouth SHUT. I really don’t like when you make me yell like this.
Anyway. Let’s talk about ice cream! Or rather, let’s talk about ice cream’s queer cousin, soft serve.
As someone who used to put my face directly below the soft serve machine at Old Country Buffet and swirl a log of chocolate and vanilla straight into my throat, I can say from personal experience that soft serve is deeply gay.
But Matt, just because you sucked off a soft serve machine when you were little doesn’t mean soft serve is gay. It just means you need more therapy.
True. But creamy, billowing whirls of softness basically designed to be toothlessly sucked? It doesn’t get much gayer than that.
Now I know the hard ice cream community is going to come for me, but let’s be honest with ourselves for once, shall we? Unlike hard ice cream, soft serve is an entire experience. Anybody can walk into any Piggly Wiggly and get a tub of hard ice cream whenever they want. But soft serve is an event. Soft serve requires special equipment. A nozzle. A lever. A dairy connoisseur to sensually swirl it into a sugar cone. Scooping hard ice cream from a solid tub? Boring, bland, straight. Swirling soft serve from a puckering anus in the back of some truck? Exotic, intoxicating, queer.
And eating soft serve? You don’t have to wait for soft serve to be the perfect texture. Because guess what bitch? She came prepared. She’s already ready.
Sure, soft-serve commonly exists in the binary of chocolate and vanilla while hard ice cream famously comes in as many as 31 flavors. But for this reason, soft serve can’t just fall back on some quirky flavor profile like “Pineapple Sherbet” or “Butterscotch Ribbon” or whatever the fuck else they’re doing at Baskin Robbins. (Even though I’m not going to malign the good people at BR, because they might want to give me money one day and as a gay person who would like money, my opinion is very much for sale.) Soft serve is a canvas. Soft serve is a stage. Soft serve isn’t forcing an identity down your throat, it’s inviting you to express your own.
Hard ice cream is a finished thing. When you get it, it’s in its final form. You can try squirting chocolate sauce on top of it, you can try sticking a cherry on top, but you’re just making a fool of yourself. You can’t dip a cone of hard ice cream in a chocolate shell. You can’t cover hard ice cream in sprinkles. They would bounce right off and you’d look like a fucking idiot, standing there with your bare ice cream and a floor covered in sprinkles and your pants around your ankles.
But soft serve… Soft serve is an invitation. It is a journey. Soft serve is asking you, how do you imagine me? Might you cover me in nuts? Might you dust me with a cookie crumble?
Now yes, according to the Wikipedia article I read, Margaret Thatcher may have invented soft serve, which is a huge blow to the reputation of the soft serve community. And if you need a moment to reread that sentence, I understand, because I projectile vomited when I first got this news. Apparently, in the 1940s, literal demon Margaret Thatcher was a chemist at a food manufacturer that developed a soft-serve recipe for Mister Softee, which sounds like the beginning of an actual waking nightmare. Some outlets have written this off as a myth with little evidence. But if it is true, at the very least, I hope that Margaret Thatcher turns over in the hole where she’s buried every time my gay lips deep throat a swirled cone.
Regardless, soft serve is an integral part of the gay experience. After all, the number one profession for homosexuals in America remains Dairy Queen barista (followed by Southwest flight attendant and SoulCycle instructor). (For the record, straight people work at Cold Stone because violently beating ice cream into submission is really more their thing.) And, of course, let us not forget the queer icon that is the soft serve McFlurry machine. It only works when it feels like it, which is basically never, and THAT is gay culture.
A final note in this meandering post about frozen treats: One thing I will not abide by, despite its many attempts to queerbait me, is the biblical abomination that is frozen yogurt. One day, if I ever have the energy, I will hunt down the marketing executive who decided to frame fro-yo as the anti-ice-cream and murder his entire family in front of him. And then I will put some chopped kiwi chunks and a sprinkling of crushed cereal over their corpses and see how HE likes it.
Jesus, Matt, it’s just frozen yogurt. Leave the man’s family out of this.
NO. The man who invented fro-yo is a sick fuck and deserves to pay. Just because you give your little yogurt shop a gay ass name like Pinkberry does not mean I will be fooled into eating cultures and pretending like my ice cream cravings are satisfied. Faking pleasure is for straight people and I will not do it.
In other gay news…
I am famously anti-squirrel because I fear they are merely pretending to be erratic idiots in order to fool us into letting our guards down. But I would be lying if I said I did not deeply relate to this photograph of a tragic squirrel threesome.
But why is it tragic, Matt? They look like they’re having fun!
Because the last squirrel in this horny rodent train is clearly the sole gay participant trying desperately to convince the middle squirrel (his straight best friend) to experiment with more gay stuff, and we ALL know how that story ends. Sad Gay Squirrel may have gotten Straight Best Friend Squirrel to participate in this threesome, but the true forbidden wish, the one that all gay rodents have fantasized about at one point or another — that Straight Best Friend Squirrel will have a sudden homo-epiphany and cross over to the Other Side — is always just a fantasy, one that inevitably ends in gay heartbreak. I commend Sad Gay Squirrel for making it this far, but I fear for the emotional journey he has before him.