Granted, we’re talking about America 50 years ago, so everyone was a homophobe. But it’s still a fun exercise to imagine Julia Child’s warbling voice speaking this stuff out loud. Her exhaustion with gay people was examined in a Boston Mag article that Joe.My.God pointed us toward today. Apparently Julia got over some of her malice when she formed a close friendship with a gay man who later died of AIDS, but before that happened:

She often used the term pedal or pedalo—French slang for a homosexual—draping it with condescension, pity, and disapproval. “I had my hair permanented at E. Arden’s, using the same pedalo I had before (I wish all the men in OUR profession in the USA were not pedals!),” she wrote to Simca. Fashion designers were “that little bunch of Pansies,” a cooking school was “a nest of homovipers,” a Boston dinner party was “peopled by 3 fags in an expensive house…. We felt hopelessly square and left when decently possible,” and San Francisco was beautiful but full of pedals—“It appears that SF is their favorite city! I’m tired of them, talented though they are.”

In her defense, she is known to have loved the sketch below.

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Julia Child, Homophobe (JoeMyGod)