During the hearings for the new US Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts, someone on TV dug up a picture of a mustachioed, tanned man presenting him with a birthday cake. 'Roberts must be gay,' the commentator speculated. 'Straight men don't pose with food.'

Well, they do if they're famous chefs on TV and have their own cooking series, but then they have to make laddish comments and stress hearty fare and scorn fussy details. And they have to wash the whole thing down with a pint of lager or some cheap and plentiful plonk.

Gay men have a special charged relationship to food. When I was young in the Fifties, gay men wanted to be pencil thin and some of the guys I knew were anorexics avant la lettre. Even today I know many gay men who are submitting to liposuction (I did, to no avail) or the stomach-bypass operation. I'm so unusual in being gay and fat that I attract many marginal, closeted men who find my heft reassuring - as if sex is OK if it's with someone resembling the family dentist.

My original writing group, the Violet Quill, which in the early 1980s invented the idea of gay fiction as a movement, was all about desserts. We would meet each week at one another's apartments, read our latest chapters, assure one another it was all 'brilliant' (initially we were going to call our association 'the all-praise club') - and then dive into elaborate desserts we'd spent longer creating than our new pages.

In those days we also took turns hosting dinner parties to watch the episodes of Brideshead Revisited or The Naked Civil Servant, just as, more recently, gay guys watched (and noshed through) Ab Fab or, this season, Desperate Housewives

I first realised in the mid-Sixties that I wouldn't be getting married and that if I hoped to return all the dinner invitations I was accepting I'd better learn to cook. I bought Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which had the virtue of assuming one didn't know how to do anything, not even boil an egg (such a contrast to Elizabeth David's breezy injunctions such as, 'cook a goose in the usual fashion'). Julia Child was for dummies - but hard-working, rich, perfectionist dummies. In Julia's recipes one made a sauce out of various peeled and chopped vegetables - then strained them out and threw them away before replacing them with new crisp vegetables of exactly the same sort.

In Julia's world one baked a pie crust separately (with tin foil lining the inside of the crust and weighted down with white beans), then let it cool before filling it with creme patissière (which went through a tricky lumpish stage before smoothing out) and finally topping it with strawberries that had to be glazed. In Julia's world one pared the turnips to look like big olives before adding them to the duck dish. One stuffed prunes with foie gras before wrapping them in bacon and inserting them into the cavity of a goose. Oh, and one kept pouring boiling water over the cooking goose in order to melt the 'subcutaneous fat'. Two dishes - boeuf à la cuillère and veau Prince Orloff - each took an entire day (or two) to prepare. If a friend prepared the veau we'd notice the dark circles under his eyes and place a consoling hand on his arm.

As gay men and as Americans we were insecure about cooking back then. We wanted to outshine our mothers, our straight married women friends, even the celebrated chefs of our region. Nothing but a triumph was good enough - in this most ephemeral of all arts. We'd have to do the shopping a day in advance (everything but the fish course, which had to be bought at the last minute). Chopping and pestling could be done the night before.

Only after I lived in Paris for so many years did I learn how all this could be simplified. A green salad. A roast chicken and roast potatoes. A cheese course. A store-bought dessert. That was enough. The conversation was all that mattered.

The food should be good but not too flashy. Anyway, Parisians and New Yorkers eat out nearly every meal and are grateful for the comfort and blessed relative calm of a home-cooked meal. Straight men usually have just one or two recipes and they trot them out every time; gay guys have a much larger repertoire and tend to observe the seasons - we cook seasonal vegetables. Straight guys expect lavish praise from women - and often enough sex as a reward. Gay men cook to seduce too, but they prefer to let the lighting and drink do the work and for the food to remain inconspicuous. Straight men are not usually food faddists, whereas gay men (at least on the American seaboard) have so many food taboos that a host should quiz them before working up a menu - no red meat; no gluten; no shrimp; no peanut oil; no garlic.

Unlike other minority groups (if that's what we are), gays don't have a national cuisine unless it's quiche. If we're butch we serve meat loaf and gravy. If we're femme we serve coquilles St Jacques. If we're lesbians we serve whole grains. There's a whole semiotics of food and food presentation that could be worked out. For many gays the arts of the table are more important than the actual nourishment and fortunes are spent on Spode dishes and Waterford crystal, on individual flower arrangements and baffling accoutrements. I remember buying sterling-silver knife rests (though now I think the idea is vulgar). At one point I was writing the whole meal out with a grease pen on standing porcelain menus. I've used gaily painted napkin rings. I've had huge candelabras - and then banned all candles when I decided they hurt the eyes. Virgil Thomson, the composer, taught me to turn on bright lights in the dining room so that people could see what they were eating.

Now gay men are so big and athletic and so pumped full of steroids that they rock back and forth in their chairs and break anything that's antique and fragile. They're so strong and so overactive that they're a real menace in the china shop. In my generation we talked about Callas versus Tebaldi; now they talk about free weights versus exercise machines. In my day we told Tallulah or Bea Lillie jokes; now everything is about sex. Oh, well, whatever the topic the best formula - the true gay formula for a great dinner party - is superb food, a beautiful table and riotous, well-lubricated talk.

Sex or food?

Sex

· To order My Lives by Edmund White, Bloomsbury, for £16.99, free UK p&p, go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870836 0885