Who Bun The World?

Pride month is here, bringing with it a deluge of glitter, rainbows, and a lot of angry Reform councillors.

There are lots of stereotypes associated with the LGBTQ+ community, from the negative (bad at maths) to the positive (obsessed with Cher) to the - well, questionable (not being able to sit on a chair correctly / not being able to drive / walking really fast).

And, in recent years, iced coffee.

As a queer, I honestly don’t know when I last bought a hot coffee out*. Sure, cappuccinos are fine, but there’s something about iced coffee that just hits different.

Would I order a glass of milk?

No.

But pour an espresso over the top and add a shot of hazelnut syrup, and yes, I will pay an unreasonable amount of money for it and it will take me approximately four hours to drink.

But when did this association start? Do we just trace it back to Starbucks and its unicorn Frappuccino? Or is there a longer, gayer history of putting ice in a latte?

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The most likely theory is that iced coffee arrived in Italy from the Iberian Peninsula in the 1500s, with the introduction of the café del tiempo. Towards the end of the 17th century, the creation of fake snow using salt or saltpetre led to a boom in sorbetti in Italy. Fruit sorbet is common today, but a visitor to Naples in 1775 noted the popularity of ‘aromatic’ sorbetti, including cinnamon, chocolate, and - you guessed it - coffee.

The Italians keep their sorbetti and granite to themselves for a few years. There is a reference to iced coffee in Godey’s Lady’s Book from 1835, but it’s not a beverage that most of either England or America would be familiar with.

And then, like all good things, this trend really kicks off thanks to immigration.

Italian immigrants start moving to the US from the 1820s, bringing with them all sorts of fun new innovations, like marinara sauce, courgettes, and Subway. Espresso takes off as a popular new drink, and soon coffee syrup is available in soda fountains across the US.

Recipes for making iced coffee at home start appearing in cookbooks, like this one from 1895, this one from 1908, and this one from 1920, and soon everyone is at least aware that putting ice in a latte is normal, even if it’s not your personal preference. The 1920s brings Prohibition, which means that more people are frequenting coffee shops and cafes rather than bars. Suddenly, coffee isn’t just for breakfast - by the 1950s, it’s everywhere.

Starbucks opens in 1971, trademarks the Frappuccino in 1994, and suddenly iced coffee is available as an on-the-go treat.

So far, so straight.

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Cafe culture hasn’t always been for laptop-wielding businessmen and PSL-loving mums. From the molly houses of Georgian England to the kahvehane of the Ottoman Empire, coffeehouses have historically been a place where queer people can meet each other in relative safety.

In more modern history, gay bars have been frequently raided by the police, but cafes were a place where LGBTQ+ communities could meet without the threat of harassment. While we think of Stonewall as being the beginning of the queer civil rights movement in the US, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot actually took place three years earlier, and started not by throwing a brick, but by throwing a cup of coffee.

But what makes iced coffee gay?

Well, sexism.

Drinking an iced coffee has fallen victim to the same stereotype as drinking a cocktail - it’s ‘girly’.

Men (read: straight men) don’t drink fun drinks. Men drink warm, flat ale. Men drink black coffee and neat whisky and anything else that tastes like licking a motorway.

And us queers have a habit of subverting gendernormative behaviour.

‘Gay’ was the insult du jour of the early 2000s. It was a punchline in sitcoms, something teenage boys would yell out of bus windows, a way of describing a minor inconvenience. Coming out of Section 28, to be gay was to be othered. Gay meant effeminate, anti-masculine, and camp.

Gay was girly. And doing girly things like drinking iced coffee? Well, it meant that you had to be - at least a bit - gay.

In 2026, we’ve reclaimed gay as a descriptor, rather than a pejorative. It’s a sexuality. It’s a box on a form. It’s a word that we use on a daily basis that describes a part of who someone is.

It’s someone who loves iced coffee.

This Pride month, stay gay and caffeinated. After all, it’s part of our history.

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*that wasn’t specifically so I could review it as part of an article (man, that was a lot of pumpkin spice).