Cosmo: The Perfect Pride Cocktail
A friend at a local watering hole asked me recently if there was a particular cocktail for celebrating Pride. “You’re drinking it,” I responded. “Vodka, ice, and very little, if any, sugar.”
Despite my snarky reply, I was intrigued by the question. A google search turned up dozens of LGBTQ+ Pride-inspired cocktails. You can go the colorful route with a Rainbow Margarita, a Rainbow Mojito, or a Rainbow Mule. You can Bend over Johnny or try a Ménage à Trois, a Hot Lesbian, or a Sugar Daddy. On the more serious side, you can celebrate with Love Wins, Out and Proud, an Equality Martini, or, of course, a Rainbow Martini.
Unimaginative names aside, the drink recipes seemed trite and overly sweet. The Sugar Daddy, for example, calls for vodka, grapefruit juice, simple syrup, Cointreau, lime juice, and muddled raspberries served in a chilled martini glass rimmed with pink sugar. Seriously? If that’s your idea of what a sugar daddy drinks, well then you can forget that Cartier tank watch you’ve had your eye on.
None of these gimmicky drinks were what I had in mind for a Pride cocktail. No sir. I was in search of a drink that tasted good, looked festive, and had a real gay pastiche. A cocktail like…the Cosmo!
The origin stories of cocktails are usually shrouded in rumor and notoriously difficult to prove. The Cosmopolitan is no different. From what I can tell, bartenders have been serving cocktails made with rail vodka, triple sec, Rose’s lime juice and sometimes cranberry juice since the 1930s. These were riffs on the Kamikaze cocktail and not always served in a stemmed glass and not always called a Cosmopolitan. I can find references to these early Cosmo-type cocktails in gay bars in Provincetown and San Francisco, but it was in New York in a Tribeca restaurant called Odeon where the drink we think of as the modern-day Cosmo was created and took root.
Odeon in the 1980s was the hippest hangout in Manhattan for writers, artists, gallery owners, filmmakers, and celebrities. It was the place to see and be seen and notables like Madonna, Sandra Bernhardt, Andy Warhol, John Belushi, Tom Wolfe, and Warren Beatty noshed and table hopped at the establishment. Odeon featured heavily in Jay McInerny’s classic novel Bright Lights Big City—and even on the cover. You get the picture.
A bartender at Odeon in the late 80s by the name of Tony Cecchini is credited with refining the Cosmopolitan, a drink he heard about from a girl who learned about it from a gay bartender at another place. One night he mixed Absolut Citron (which was brand new), fresh lime juice, Cointreau, and a splash of cranberry juice to give it a demure blush. He shook the mixture long and hard, so it became opaque and frothy. He poured it into a chilled martini glass and garnished it with a lemon twist for color and flourish. To his surprise it was an immediate hit with Odeon regulars and subsequently at bars all over Manhattan, including G Lounge, the city’s first gay bar to seriously embrace contemporary style and design, where it quickly became the most popular drink served.
It’s about this time that writer Candace Bushnell discovered the Cosmo. Candace was writing her weekly “Sex in the City” column for the New York Post under the nom de plume Carrie Bradshaw and the Cosmo soon became Carrie’s signature cocktail. After her book of columns came out in 1996, Candace introduced the Cosmo to her gay friend Darren Star, who went gaga for the cocktail. Darren had created Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place with Aaron Spelling and he would turn Candace’s book into the Sex in the City series.
The Cosmo, of course, played a significant role in the series, representing sophistication, fun, and independence, and serving as a symbol of the characters living—and celebrating—their nontraditional lives. Someone did the math and the drink appeared in 27 of the 94 episodes. And we all know what happened after that: the Cosmo went on to become one of the world’s most popular cocktails.
Some mixologists claim the Cosmopolitan is the last great cocktail of the 20th century. Others call it passé, although the bartenders at Aqua will dispute that assertion. I say it’s the perfect Pride celebration cocktail. It tastes good and packs a punch. It has an interesting backstory. And don’t you think the pink cocktail looks rather subversively sexy in the hands of a man with great arms?
Happy Pride! ▼
Rich Barnett is the author of The Discreet Charms of a Bourgeois Beach Town, and Fun with Dick and James.