Alex Koones

“I wish I could say there was some deeper political reason,” says Alex Koones on the origins of her pop-up queer supper club Babetown. The truth was that she saw herself as a little misunderstood, and when she cooked and showed people a good time, she liked that they understood her better. By 2016, her college dinner parties had expanded into a ticketed queer pop-up dinner series. By then, she had grown increasingly concerned about how social media and the gentrification of queerness were separating people, how badly people needed one another, and how important it was to create spaces where they could truly connect and have meaningful conversations. “What better place to do that than over a meal? Babetown became more about those things to me,” she says. When Koones started, cooking was not a welcoming space for women. “They definitely weren’t trying to teach us to cook the way they taught young men coming up in the industry. And especially as a queer person…men in kitchens just really didn’t know what to do with me.” From the beginning, Babetown was a space for queer women, trans, and nonbinary people only. “Today, this is very popular,” she says, “but at the time, it was a lot less common… I was very proud of my party as kind of this homespun, guerrilla event.” On the bucket list: a brick-and-mortar space that houses the elements of the dinner party spirit. –MH