Can Host
someone has to sit on a stool though
Morning, bb!
The sun is shining! The buds on trees are poppin’! I turned in my massive writing project just two days after I said I would! (Did I panic and lose sleep over it and lock myself in our bedroom for the final few days before the deadline, snarling at anyone who so much as entered the room to bring me something? Of course I did!!!)
Not only that, but my sister spent approximately 11,612 hours on the phone, arguing in favor of my dad being admitted to a short-term medical rehabilitation facility, and he is now there!
What a difference a little sunshine, a little break, and a met deadline makes. I feel like a new person. On Saturday, Rae and I slept in, went to the dog park, got iced coffees, and then drove 30 minutes to the nearest Ulta, blasting Ariana Grande at top volume and yelling about Korean sunscreen brands to each other. It’s what my soul needed.
On Sunday, to celebrate the return of being able to do enjoyable things again, Davin and Rae and I hosted a little dinner party. And it was so fun and cute and laid-back that I vowed to remember how we did it, and remember that I like hosting dinner parties.
Because I always forget that I like to host dinner parties. Always. The second there’s one on our calendar, I begin to preemptively resent it. In my head, a dinner party is this big stressful event requiring tons of prep and energy.
And that is… never true? It never is. We’re just having people over! And none of them care about anything except getting together! No one gives a shit about the food (as long as it’s edible), or the kind of wine we have, or the fact that the dogs patently need to brushed. And as long as the house is a baseline level of cleanish, no one ever notices the things that I notice about my house, like “there is dust on a bookshelf in a room that no guest would typically go in” or “there are too many sticks in the yard.”
No one cares! Everyone just wants to hang out and share a meal!
Ffs. Hosting a casual event with people does not have to feel like yet another chore. It’s supposed to be fun! And it is fun! I know it is, because even though I get stressed out before we have a dinner party, I always say yes to doing another one!
OK. In case I forget again (spoiler: I will) that dinner parties do not have to be demanding social events, here is my formal
Recipe for a Chill & Fun Dinner Party According to Exactly One Homosexual Who Can Be Extroverted for 2.5 Hours Max
Ingredients:
3-7 guests
Cold beverages + ice + playlist
A home environment you will allow others to perceive
Snacks
Dinner
Sweet Treat
Preparation Nap
Step 1
Think about your guests. Who are they? How many are coming? What are your hopes and dreams for your dinner party? Also why do you want to invite these people into your home for the evening, when you could instead be sitting alone in a soft chair wearing a stained zip-up onesie sweatsuit and rereading What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by candlelight?
All great questions.
You’ve probably invited people you like to your home to “have fun.” Fun is an interesting thing, however. A week before the fun is supposed to happen, hosting a dinner party sounds breezy and doable. Very fun. But when you wake up on the morning of your scheduled dinner party, having people over that night might not sound fun anymore. In fact, it might feel like a series of items you have to cross off a to-do list. An outrage!!!
But let’s break this down. OK, the guests: I personally like 5-6 people total for a dinner party, because more than that starts to get complicated for whole-table discussions. Any more than six people, and it’s likely that two people are gonna be doing little side conversations, probably because they’re too far away from everyone else. Also who has more than six chairs? with THESE tariffs???
Alright alright: Eight people total can work, with an acceptance of a bit more chaos.
I also think it’s usually more fun if at least half your guests know each other fairly well, and the other half are guest stars. That way, when the new people feel shy at first, the people who know each other already feel at ease. They’ll carry the conversation in the beginning, and the new people can gradually start feeling more comfortable.
But wait: Why bother having guest stars at all? Why not just have good friends over?
You can do that! Do whatever you want! But also, in our case, we are hosting the dinner party to have fun with our old friends and to make new friends. If you like someone and suspect you could be friends with them, invite ‘em to a dinner party! It’s like jumping 10 spaces ahead on a casual friendship!
Where else besides a dinner party can you learn, in under three hours, that someone is in an open relationship, has an ancient pug, grew up so Catholic that seeing your Virgin Mary collection makes them shudder, and once accidentally made a homemade bomb using a common household toilet-cleaning product? This is the kind of stuff I want to hear about!!
Step 2
Prepare the small things that always get overlooked at the last minute. When you have 12 hours or less before your dinner party:
Do yourself and everyone else a favor and make a shit-ton of ice. You don’t think you’ll need ice? LOLOLOLOL GO MAKE SOME MORE ICE.
Chill your gay water. (Sparkling water.)
Chill your wine/beer/beverages.
Charge your speaker.
Choose your playlist. If you don’t have a playlist you already know you want to use, may I suggest not thinking too hard about it and typing something like “vintage european dinner party” into spotify? Or use this one, which is perfect for so many occasions.
Step 3
While your bevvies are chilling and your ice is firming, consider cleaning up anything making your place look obviously unloved. Like wadded-up socks in corners, or a lot of old dishes in the sink, or overflowing trash bins, or gusts of dog hair billowing across the floor with every step. This cleanup does not have to be intense; no one will notice if your house isn’t perfect. Think about it: Have you ever been over to someone else’s house and thought “jesus there’s dust on the top of this picture frame!! THESE ANIMALS” ? Of course you haven’t!
This is where I get an F, by the way. I clean way too much before we have dinner parties, certain that it’s important to have my place looking like no one has ever lived in it. It’s stressful and I want to be different and I’m working on it! I hate that I am this video!!!
Step 4
Make the snacks. Dinner parties aren’t like other parties—people are gonna arrive pretty much when you told them to, and since they are coming to a dinner party, they are going to arrive hungry, expecting dinner reasonably soon. LMAO dinner will not be coming reasonably soon, we collectively have about 90 minutes of gay gossip to catch up on and dinner always takes longer than you think it will, and people with empty stomachs are going to get swiftly drunk on their Aperol spritzes and turn into people who are starving.
You need snacks!! Snacks for this exact moment! Interactive snacks, like a large cheese board that also includes other things, like crackers and olives and chips and teensy cornichons and little bowls full of nuts.
You know what goes great alongside a large cheese board? A fancy crystal glass filled to the brim with single-serving packets of Lactaid.
Step 5
Consider the least important (according to me, a person who cannot and does not really cook) part of a dinner party: the real food.
Literally who cares? Order pizza and serve it on cute plates! Prep a taco bar! Make a lot of dips and have dips and things you put in dips for dinner! Order so much Thai food it makes people gasp to see it all open on your counter!
At our house, Davin usually cooks when we have dinner parties, and he cooks delicious food, but whenever he wants to just hang out with people and not do anything strenuous, I go pick up a lot of fried chicken, stop at the co-op, and then we serve everything to people with an enormous salad.
Why do I stop at the co-op? Because 1) salad greens and 2) I have to get a vegan/GF/DF entrée option, because at no point in my adult life have I ever hosted a dinner party for more than three other queers without needing this. Being gay in 2025 means having encyclopedic knowledge of which plant-based meat substitutes contain dairy!!!
Step 6
Secure the sweet treat you’ll be serving after the meal. You hear me? SECURE THE SWEET TREAT. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a sweet tooth; at least half your guests do, and for them, this is the most exciting part of the meal, because it is a surprise. See this puppy? This puppy is vibrating with the hope that there is a sweet treat waiting for them in the kitchen after dinner.
The treat can be almost anything: a tub of ice cream, some fresh cut-up fruit served in a special dish, little cookies, three good chocolate bars pre-broken up into pieces and piled onto a small plate, whatever. It doesn’t matter what it is; it matters that it’s there.
Step 7
Go take a nap. People are about to be talking to you, in your own home (!!!), for hours, and that shit is tiring!!
Step 8
Enjoy yourself! Your friends, old and new, are in your home, eating food you got specially for them and drinking out of every single glass in your house! You are about to find out how someone’s Feeld date went! (Bad.) You are about to hear the story of how someone got their worst tattoo, and it is going to be so funny that your gay water is going to go down the wrong pipe and you’ll have to get pounded on the back while choking and still laughing, tears streaming down your face!
You will have such a good time, in fact, that you will say, “Hey, let’s do this again!” at the end of the night, and you will probably even mean it!!!
thinking about that sweet treat now
I knew it was going to be that Chris Fleming video and I love you for it.