There’s a running joke online that gay people just make better coffee. It usually boils down to someone crossing their fingers that their barista has they/them pronouns, so their cold brew is actually drinkable. “I’ve definitely heard the joke and there’s a lot of truth to it,” says Kent Collins, owner of the Flying M Coffeehouse in Boise, Idaho. “Queer people are a huge part of coffeehouse culture—they always have been.”

At the intersection of Halsey Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, passersby are greeted by a hot pink sign welcoming them into Soft Butch, a trans-owned café. Antæus Mathieu, a co-owner, says that “ on the surface, it’s a funny, cute meme about how all your baristas are gay,” but there’s more to be said about job accessibility within the coffee industry. “It’s one of those skilled jobs that are both accessible to queer people and people who are [otherwise] marginalized because you can start on so many different levels.”

Whether or not you buy into the playful stereotype, what’s certainly true is that the LGBTQ2S+ community has long-standing ties to the coffee industry. Coffee and tea have long been a way of creating community at a low-cost buy-in, according to Dr. Alex Ketchum, an associate professor at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University in Montreal who’s also the author of Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses—which, she says, were primarily run by lesbians and queer women. She points to the “women’s music musicians”—a code word for lesbian artists at the time—who would work at Brick Hut Cafe, which was a lesbian-feminist establishment founded in the seventies in Berkeley, California, during off time between touring or recording. “ Not that all queer people are creative—I don’t want to generalize us—but there is this kind of tie [between the] artist community and cafés,” Ketchum explains.