Arts & Entertainment
‘Queer Eye’ on D.C.
Gay designer Thom Filicia in region with new line this weekend
Thom Filicia
‘Conversation on Design’
Saturday
11:30 a.m.
Belfort Furniture
22267 Shaw Road
Dulles, VA 20166
703-406-7600
[email protected]
belfortfurniture.com
thomfilicia.com
Reservations recommended
(Photo courtesy Thom Filicia Design)
Thom Filicia says the work he does on TV and with his eponymous design firm is apples and oranges — most people may know him from the small screen but it’s his years of work on the latter that gives him the credibility to do the former.
He says his TV work is usually “fast and furious” and personality-driven incorporating product from retail shops like Crate & Barrel and Pottery Barn, while the work he does for his private design firm — recent clients are Tina Fey and Jennifer Lopez — is “kind of a different breed.”
He rattles off a torrent of adjectives for his product line — authentic, real, substantive, smartly designed, “accessible, but not super accessible,” familiar, comfortable, approachable.
“It’s silhouettes and designs that are familiar … but also fresh and different and unique and authentic,” he says during a break at his Manhattan-based SoHo office where he and a 12-member staff work. “It’s for the way we live now as opposed to trying to reproduce a look and feel from decades prior or trying to make something that feels extremely sleek and modern.”
Filicia says his pieces can temper whatever spaces they’re in.
“The furniture I design can make a loft in the city feel warm and inviting or it can make the Georgetown colonial outside the city feel hip and cool. It’s a really nice bridge of modern and classic and I feel that we do it in a way that feels different.”
Washington-area residents will get to see Filicia’s work up close and personal at Belfort Furniture (three miles north of Dulles Airport in Virginia), which is unveiling his collection “Thom Filicia Home” Saturday at 11:30 a.m. Filicia will be on hand to answer questions and will mingle with guests during a wine reception immediately after. A book signing was planned but his latest tome, “Thom Filicia Style,” is sold out at the moment.
“It’s a good problem to have,” he says with a laugh. “We sold about 15,000 of the first run, so that’s both the good news and the bad news. But sure, if somebody wants me to sign a napkin or something, I’ll be happy to.”
Belfort management says it’s happy to have Filicia’s line in its store.
“We’re very excited to add this distinctive American-chic collection to our lineup,” says Michael Huber, Belfort Furniture CEO. “The Thom Filicia Home Collection offers unexpected design elements for every décor from classic to modern.”
Filicia, of course, is best known from “Queer Eye” (originally called “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”), the groundbreaking 2003-’07 Bravo series on which he was one of the “Fab Five” along with Ted Allen, Kyan Douglas, Carson Kressley and Jai Rodriguez. He also hosted “Dress My Nest” for three years on the Style Network and has more TV and book projects in the works. A new book to be called “American Beauty” is slated for an October release, he did a holiday special for HGTV and has pitches for future shows in discussions with that channel.
“Once ‘Queer Eye’ was over, I knew I always wanted to keep TV as something near and dear and something I would participate in and evolve and grow with hopefully, but my focus has always been on my core business.”
With the new Belfort relationship, the Washington area will join retailers that carry his work in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, Toronto and more. Some of the line at Belfort will be pieces from the last few years that have been popular elsewhere. Others are new.
(Photo courtesy Thom Filicia Design)
“I’m really excited about this new relationship,” Filicia says. “They have really great sensibility and they’ve been really excited about our product so there’s some great synergy. I really love what they’re doing and it’s a great operation they have in Dulles. I’m really excited to have them on board.”
Filicia keeps up with his old “Queer Eye” pals. He’s seen Allen’s current Food Network competition show “Chopped” and says it’s “great.”
“It’s a great hook and it’s fun,” he says. “He’s done a great job with it.”
He sees his old pals “every couple of months. Though Rodriguez and Douglas are based in Los Angeles now (Kressley is in New York and Allen splits his time between New York and Chicago), they’re together enough to have maintained their friendships.
“It usually starts with one of us texting the others and we’ll start joking around and soon we’re all laughing and trying to figure out a time to meet up.”
Filicia and long-time partner Greg Calejo, who does strategic marketing for Kerzer International, are almost at the nine-year mark. He says marriage has been discussed but admits he has an offbeat take on it.
“I kind of feel you have to earn marriage,” he says. “I almost feel like it should be done backwards. Like you see if it works out, then it should be a reward for having made it 10 or 15 years. So we’ll see.”
And Filicia has gracious words for other famous gay designers, whether they’re out or not.
Of Nate Berkus, the Oprah designer who just wrapped his own talk show, Filicia says he possesses a “really interesting concept” and has a “sweet personality.”
“I’ve only seen his show once; I was sad to hear it’s been canceled, but he adds another layer to the world of designers. My style, of course, is different, both in design and in our personalities. I think I’m a little more quick witted. I like to have fun when I’m designing and I tend to be a bit more self deprecating. I think his work is perhaps a bit drier. I think mine is a little more intoxicated and his is more sober.”
Mitchell Gold (Mitchell Gold+Bob Williams)?
“I’ve known Mitchell a long time,” Filicia says. “They do really smart things with a basic furniture collection. I see them as kind of a Gap of the furniture world — doing something really great with really smart basics.”
Filicia chuckles when Christopher Lowell’s (“Interior Motives,” “It’s Christopher Lowell!”) name is mentioned.
“I hate to stereotype, but yeah, I think he’s gayer than a handbag,” Filicia says. “He’s kind of like the Corky St. Clair character in ‘Waiting for Guffman,’ always talking about his wife. I think Christopher Lowell is a really genius business man and a genius at marketing but what he does is so very different, it’s not something I’ve really connected with aesthetically, but I’m certainly a big fan of him as a businessman and designer. It’s the same reason there are millions of restaurants. Everybody wants something different so he fills a niche that’s greatly needed and it’s wonderful that he’s doing great things with the people who connect with what he does.”
And just for fun, what was it like being in the audience when Madonna kissed Britney and Christina at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards? The Fab Five — white hot at the time — were in the audience and their riotous reaction shots are part of the legendary clip’s charm.
“It felt really staged. It probably looked a lot more organic on TV than it felt in person,” he says. “Being there seeing it live, it definitely felt like something that had been in the works for weeks and that there were layers and layers of planning to. … I enjoy Madonna’s music, but I’m not really a fan. I don’t feel she’s really done anything to give back the way Lady Gaga has. You look at all Lady Gaga has done for social awareness and I’ve always been a little disappointed that Madonna doesn’t seem to have that in her persona.”
Just as humans have always had meals, queer humans, too, have enjoyed meals. Yet what is it that makes “queer food” distinct?
At the beginning of May in Montreal, the Queer Food Conference 2026 sought not to answer that question, but to further interrogate it. The conference united scholars, activists, artists, journalists, farmers, chefs, and other food industry professionals for three days of panels, workshops, discussions, and, yes, meals, in an inclusive, thoughtful, contemplative-yet-whimsical environment, taking a comprehensive view of the landscape of queer food.
The two organizers – Professor Alex Ketchum, at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies of McGill University in Montreal, and Professor Megan Elias, Director of Food Studies & Gastronomy at Boston University – met in 2022 when Elias acted as a peer reviewer for Ketchum’s second book, “Ingredients for a Revolution,” a wide-ranging history of more than 230 feminist and lesbian-feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses from 1972 to the present in the US.
Elias, taken by the book and its exploration, invited Ketchum to speak at one of Elias’s courses, at which pastries were served and feminist bread making was baked into conversation. Elias floated the idea of co-organizing a queer food conference – and a hot 24 hours later, Ketchum said yes, with plans sketched out, from grants to topics to speakers. In parallel, the duo started to conceptualize “Queers at the Table,” a book based on their work (published last year).
The conference, the book, the research: their work is, in part, grounded in the question: What is queer food? True to queer theory, each has her own nuanced response as drivers of their research, challenging the traditional and looking beyond norms of food studies. Ketchum’s view is that it is grounded on food by and for the queer community, in specific histories, and especially in the labor behind the food. Elias posits that queer food is at the intersection of queerness and culinary studies, beyond gender norms and binaries, back to the societal basics of queer food as part of queer humans always having meals. “Queer food destabilizes assumptions about food, gender and sexuality, making space for a wider range of relationships to food,” she says.
The academics’ professed enthusiasm, however, rarely reached beyond small circles.
“I regularly attended big food studies conferences, but almost never saw presentations about gender identity beyond women’s roles,” says Elias about her prior work, and when her students would ask for additional literature about sexuality and food, results had been sparse. Ketchum echoed this gap: When she was in graduate studies, she received hesitation from leadership about her chosen field of study. By 2024, however, queer food as an area of study and practice had grown, whether in popular culture or well as in publishing, setting the stage for the first Queer Food Conference in 2024 in Boston. Their aim at that even was to launch the subfield of queer food studies into the mainstream, so that fellow academics, students, and those interested in the space could convene, “creating space for others to build,” says Ketchum. “People were enthusiastic.”
Once Ketchum and Elias published “Queers at the Table” in 2025 (notably, gay author John Birdsall also published a book examining queer identity through food last year, “What Is Queer Food?”), they laid the foundation for the 2026 conference in Montreal. This edition was an “embodied” conference, inclusive of various ontologies in queer food studies: theory, labor, art, taste, an interdisciplinary, expansive grounding.
Topics ranged from cookbooks and influencers to farming and land movements, bars and cafes, brewing and baking, history and sociology, writing and printmaking, healthcare and community, and centering marginalized – especially trans – voices.
Naturally, food was centered. The conference’s keynotes were not academics, but the chefs themselves who created the food with their own hands that attendees ate over the three days. “Not to disregard a pure academic space,” says Ketchum, “but to not have food in a room when we talk about food would be wild.”
Jackson Tucker, a Distinguished Graduate Fellow at the University of Delaware, said that “What I found [at the conference] was a genuinely diverse gathering: scholars who did grounded social research but also practitioners, organizers, and people who had never thought about an academic conference in their lives and didn’t need to. That mix is the soul of this whole project for me. Without the people who are out in the world doing queer food, the conference wouldn’t exist.”
Ketchum – her home being Montreal – also worked to fold in community-driven events so that attendees could get a taste of queer food in the city outside of classroom walls; for example, attendees participated in a collaborative evening pizza-making class at a queer-owned pizzeria.
The interdisciplinary nature of the conference led to sharing of research, thoughts, activities, and planning. There was a “value of bringing people together of different backgrounds, which leads to richer discussion,” she says.
Elias picked up on this theme: “I saw people bonding and connecting and believing in Queer Food Studies,” – one of the central goals that Ketchum noted, further legitimizing a nascent field. As both professors continue their research and leadership, they envision a continued layering of centering the queer experience and community through the shared value and study of food.
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Gay Men’s Chorus celebrates 45 years at annual gala
‘Sapphire & Sparkle’ Spring Affair held at the Ritz Carlton
The Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington held the annual Spring Affair gala at the Ritz Carlton Washington, D.C. on Saturday. The theme for this year’s fete was “Sapphire & Sparkle.” The chorus celebrated 45 years in D.C. with musical performances, food, entertainment, and an awards ceremony.
Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington Executive Director Justin Fyala and Artistic Director Thea Kano gave welcoming speeches. Opening remarks were delivered by Spring Affair co-chairs Tracy Barlow and Tomeika Bowden. Uproariously funny comedian Murray Hill performed a stand-up set and served as the emcee.
There were performances by Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington groups Potomac Fever, 17th Street Dance, the Rock Creek Singers, Seasons of Love, and the GenOUT Youth Chorus.
Anjali Murthy, a member of the chorus and a graduate of the GenOUT Youth Chorus, addressed the attendees of the gala.
“The LGBTQ+ community isn’t bound by blood ties: we are brought together by shared experience,” Murthy said. “Being Gen Z, I grew up with Ellen [DeGeneres] telling me through the TV screen that it gets better: that one day, it’ll all be okay. The sentiment isn’t wrong, but it’s passive. What I’ve learned from GMCW is that our future is something we practice together. It exists because people like you continue to show up for it, to believe in the possibilities of what we’re still becoming”
The event concluded with the presentation of the annual Harmony Awards. This year’s awardees included local drag artist and activist Tara Hoot, the human rights organization Rainbow Railroad as well as Rocky Mountain Arts Association Executive Director, Dr. Chipper Dean.
(Washington Blade photos and videos by Michael Key)
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