Listen, my favorite ice cream flavor has always been birthday cake. I’m talking rich vanilla, bits of soft sheet cake, blue frosting swirls, and a scandal of rainbow sprinkles on a waffle cone. Ice cream cones have always had that double energy: sweet, innocent, and a little bit dirty, endearing in one lick and unmistakably sensual in the next.

Maybe that’s why queer folks, especially Black and Brown ones, have always found something deeper in a scoop. Ice cream has never just been dessert — it’s comfort when the world goes cold and survival when it burns hot, our joy as unapologetic as Kelis’ “Milkshake.”

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Historically, ice cream has carried the language of love and power. Ancient Persian courts poured snow flavored with rosewater and honey as private treats for lovers, creating early frozen desserts like faloodeh as far back as 400 BCE. Chinese emperors in the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) froze milk, rice, and camphor into the first recorded iced confections served at imperial banquets. In Europe, royal courts later offered flavored ices as gestures of desire.

To serve something cold, rare, and melting was to flaunt both wealth and mastery over nature—a luxury reserved for those who could command ice in summer. It was a display of decadence and control, yet also of longing: a fleeting pleasure that, like queer love, was both rare and defiant, a sweetness never meant to last but always savored.

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Ice cream was once a luxury of the powerful—a symbol of who was allowed to feel pleasure. Queer people transformed it into something shared and defiant.

From Fire Island to the Castro, ice cream became a language of protest and care. When bars were raided, daylight spaces like diners and soda fountains offered quiet refuge, and ice cream became the perfect disguise. A cone or a sundae gave cover to gathering—an innocent indulgence that drew no suspicion.

In the 1940s–60s, when “cross-dressing” laws endangered lives, pastel-lit ice cream parlors became sanctuaries where queerness could melt quietly into the background. Behind the clink of spoons and the hum of freezers, the community survived one scoop at a time. As historian Erik Piepenburg writes in Reel Places, these venues weren’t openly queer but sustained networks where discretion meant survival.

On mid-century Fire Island, small parlors like Sweet Licks became seasonal social outposts where coded glances and soft laughter slipped under the radar. Sweet Licks appears in local directories as a summer dessert shop serving Hershey’s ice cream—a stop between beach afternoons and tea dances. Scoops Ice Cream became a beloved fixture for locals and visitors alike. Though its founding date is unclear, its enduring place in community listings shows how queer joy found a home in shared rituals of sweetness and sun.

In San Francisco’s Castro, Double Rainbow Ice Cream opened in 1976; the founders signed their first lease beneath a double rainbow that gave the shop its name. The shop served cones beside campaign flyers and community posters in Harvey Milk’s district. Double Rainbow shared the streets with bars, bookstores, and the Castro Theatre, where drag shows and political rallies turned daily life into activism.

In a city marked by policing and displacement, to gather over ice cream was to practice tenderness as resistance.

Then came the AIDS crisis. By the mid-1980s, hospitals overflowed with queer men wasting away while governments looked away. The San Francisco AIDS Foundation Nutrition Guide (1988) listed ice cream as one of the few foods patients could stomach—cold, soft, and mercifully sweet. Partners carried pints into hospital rooms. Friends blended milkshakes when nothing else would go down—small acts of love in kitchens, hospice wards, and apartments.

As writer Paul Monette remembered in Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988), “We fed each other because there was nothing else to do—it was the last language of love we had left.” 

In the 21st century, queer-founded brands like Big Gay Ice Cream and Coolhaus carried that legacy forward—turning ice cream from coded refuge to bold celebration. In New York, Doug Quint and Bryan Petroff made cones camp with flavors like “Salty Pimp” and “Bea Arthur,” transforming indulgence into a rainbow-draped act of joy. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Natasha Case and Freya Estreller, a queer couple, built Coolhaus as “architecture you can eat,” blending design, feminism, and pride into every sandwich.

It’s fitting that the old song goes, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.” For queer people, that’s always been true—our pleasure and our noise have long been one and the same.

Queer history isn’t only riots and stages—it’s sprinkles and spoons, tenderness and resistance. From royal courts to seaside parlors to hospital beds, ice cream has always spoken of who gets to live and who gets to love. 

As Cazwell raps in “Ice Cream Truck,” “Meet me at the ice cream truck”—because joy, like birthday-cake ice cream, is how we keep surviving.

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