Visit to Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu is located in the Andes Mountains in southern Peru, and was built in the mid-1400s, during the height of the Inca Empire under Pachacuti, the ninth Inca ruler.

Peruvian culture started somewhere around 5000 BC in the north of Lima, but the Incas only appear in history around the 1300s.

Out In The City members “visited” Machu Picchu with the help of Virtual Reality. Our journey to the Lost City was at Transmission House on Tib Street in Manchester. We broke up into teams of four and were fitted with Virtual Reality headsets.

At one stage we were joined by Larry, the virtual reality llama. A fun fact is that llamas are not native to the area but were brought to Machu Picchu to enhance the site’s beauty and trim the grass.

The Incas used their main and widely spoken language, “Quechua,” to refer to any place or town. The compound Quechua word “Machu” means old or great, and “Picchu” means mountain, which can be interpreted as “Old Mountain”.

Commentary was provided by a flying robot – it was an amazing spectacular experience.

“The Gay Cookbook” Was of and Ahead of Its Time

During the mid-twentieth century, homosexuality was criminalised, stigmatised, pathologised and reviled. LGBT people were forced to hide their sexuality and push gayness into the closet.

Or was that necessarily the case? Published years before Stonewall, The Gay Cookbook belies that narrative and sets up a powerful alternative to the era’s heteronormative domestic traditions.

Chef Lou Rand Hogan whipped up well-seasoned wit and served a gay take on home life during the early-1960s craze for camp.

As courts struck down obscenity laws in the early 1960s, books and magazines about and targeted at gay men proliferated as never before – and could be produced and purchased with far less fear of legal sanction. A good thing, too, because according to the latest research of the time, one in six American men was gay, and Hogan produced a guide for that 16.6 per cent of the male population.

In 1965, The Gay Cookbook was published. Provocative, campy and proud of it, the book featured recipes for everything from fruit salad to “swish steak.” It was written by a chef and gay man who challenged the era’s prevailing notion of gayness as deviant and dangerous.

Hogan penned a tongue-in-cheek cookbook with a crossover audience due to a larger cultural fascination with camp. In 1964, Susan Sontag published a popular essay called “Notes on ‘Camp’” that attempted to define campiness. Sontag observed that gay men were especially good at it: “the vanguard – and the most articulate audience – of camp.” Suddenly, it was (sort of) chic to be gay. “Camp” was seen as a hip, new trend to publishers. The Gay Cookbook was advertised as “a wild wacky book” and came with jaunty illustrations of gay men cooking and entertaining. But by creating intentional camp aimed at gay men and sold as palatable and trendy to straight people, Hogan helped expose the very normalcy of gayness – after all, everyone needed to eat.

The front cover featured a drawing of a fashionably dressed young man wearing a chef’s hat and a floral apron, wrists limp and hips aswivel, preparing to drop a bloody steak onto a grill. The back showed partygoers enjoying drinks, one in a cocktail dress and heels with a visible five o’clock shadow. Forget blending in: This was a book that fully embraced the campy side of gayness and went on to sell a respectable 10,000 copies.

The Gay Cookbook was not completely out. This was still three and a half years before Stonewall, four and a half years before the first Pride parade. The name “Chef Lou Rand Hogan” was a pseudonym. He was actually Louis Randall, a Californian, born in Bakersfield in 1910. In his younger years, he had aspired to be an actor, but found his way into the kitchen instead. He spent the ’30s working on cruise ships, which turned out to be a congenial environment for a young white gay man: of the 500 stewards, Hogan wrote in a memoir, “probably 486 were actively gay!”

Hogan kept writing about gay domesticity as “Aunty Lou” in a food column that ran in the Los Angeles Advocate through the 1970s – tongue-in-cheek and chatty to the last.

LGBT+ people could and did find domestic happiness in the mid-twentieth century, and Hogan helped normalise their lives and showcase the potential for domestic joy. By daring to attach that joy to his public portrayal of gayness, Hogan challenged the status quo – one recipe at a time.

Saturday, 14 February – 1.30pm to 3.30pm – LGBTQ+ History Month Film Screening: “Of Time and the City” – Free

World Museum Liverpool, William Brown Street, Liverpool L3 8EN (5 minute walk from Liverpool Lime Street Station). The film screening is hosted by LGBT Foundation’s Pride in Ageing Programme.

“Of Time and the City” is a 2008 documentary film directed, written and narrated by gay Liverpool-born director Terence Davies recalling the Liverpool of his youth in the 1950s and 60s. The film uses news reel archive footage of Liverpool, contemporary shots, poetry and prose to tell the story of Liverpool from the close of the Second World War as Terence Davies personally remembers it. The film explores, like many of his other works, what it means to be Liverpudlian as well as touching on what it means to be Catholic and to be gay.

The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won Best Documentary in the Australian Film Critics Association awards in 2009. Since Davies’ death aged 77 in 2023 the film has been shown as part of full retrospectives of his work at the BFI Southbank in London and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.

“Of Time and the City” is rated 12A and contains infrequent strong language and discrimination. Doors open at 1.30pm with the screening starting at 1.40pm. The main feature lasts 75 minutes and will be preceded by a short film about LGBT Foundation’s Pride in Ageing programme in Manchester and Liverpool in 2005.

Get free ticket here.

Birthdays

Smoking Cessation Campaign

Your Health Oldham and OUTpatients, the UK’s LGBTIQ+ cancer charity, are working together to produce a targeted smoking cessation campaign to increase awareness of smoking in LGBTIQ+ communities and the benefits of quitting.

To understand how to make the campaign most effective, they are recruiting 6 – 8 people to take part in two workshops. As a thank you for their input, participants will receive a UK shopping voucher. 

Who can take part in the workshop?

To be eligible, participants must meet all of the following criteria:

• Member of the LGBTIQ+ community
• Currently Smoke
• Aged 18+
• Living in Greater Manchester.

When and where are the workshops taking place?

The first focus group will take place over MS-Teams at 5.30pm on 26 or 27 January 2026, with the final dates and times dependent on availability of participants.

The follow up focus group will take place after the development of resources in  mid-March.

Interested in taking part?

If you would like to register your interest, please sign up to this link

For further information, please contact raktim@outpatients.org.uk

Out On The Radio

This new monthly radio show – Out On The Radio – aimed at older members of the LGBT+ communities went live on Tuesday, 2 December 2025.

Don’t worry if you missed it, as it has been uploaded to Mixcloud so you can listen at your leisure.

Next month’s show is on Tuesday, 3 February 2026 from 2.00pm to 3.00pm on ALL FM 96.9 with special guests Lizzie and Sarah from Out In The City Women’s Group.

Listen to Show 1 here.

Listen to Show 2 here.