Conservatives are threatening boycotts of Cracker Barrel after the company swapped its rustic logo for a cleaner design, accusing the chain of betraying its “middle-American values.” But LGBTQ+ historians say the uproar ignores a deeper irony: Just three decades ago, the Tennessee-founded restaurant was notorious for firing queer employees and became the target of one of the country’s longest-running equality battles.

The chain, famous for its biscuits, rocking chairs, and Southern nostalgia, introduced a new logo last week, retiring the mustached man leaning against a barrel in favor of a simplified yellow-outlined wordmark. The update was part of a $700 million rebrand meant to freshen stores and attract younger diners. Instead, it triggered a stock dip and a wave of backlash from conservatives who claim the company has abandoned its roots.

Far-right activist Robby Starbuck, who has had success targeting brands he deems too “woke” by calling for boycotts, described the redesign as proof of cultural betrayal. Over the weekend, Starbuck said on his web series that Cracker Barrel had shifted from “old American nostalgia to cold, dead, lifeless, and modern.” He mocked the change, adding that a friend asked what remained after removing “the cracker and the barrel,” and he answered, “nothingness, the same nothingness that the left wants you to stomach in every other facet of your life.” Starbuck then argued that Cracker Barrel was “infested with left-wing activists who are more interested in safe spaces, pronouns, and virtue signaling than they are in their customers.”

He pointed to the company’s rainbow-colored rocking chairs, its sponsorship of Nashville Pride and River City Pride in Evansville, Indiana, and its engagement with the Human Rights Campaign and Out & Equal as evidence of what he calls a betrayal of the brand’s so-called middle-American values. He concluded, “A conservative can’t give their money to Cracker Barrel. A Christian cannot give their money to Cracker Barrel, and so we won’t.”

A forgotten past

For many LGBTQ+ people, the outrage is heavy with irony. In January 1991, Cracker Barrel adopted a written policy stating that employees “whose sexual preferences fail to demonstrate normal heterosexual values” would be terminated. At least 11 workers lost their jobs, including Georgia cook Cheryl Summerville, who was handed a dismissal slip that read, “The employee is being terminated for being gay.”

Summerville’s firing made national news, landing her on Oprah and 20/20 and turning her into a reluctant face of the fight for workplace equality. Protests quickly followed, and in August 1991, about 150 demonstrators occupied nearly every table at Cracker Barrel’s flagship location in Lebanon, Tennessee, effectively shutting down Sunday brunch. Activists also took the fight to Wall Street.

But the movement soon expanded beyond protests. That December, Carl R. Owens, a member of Queer Nation Atlanta, published a letter in Southern Voiceunder the headline “Buy Cracker Barrel.” He noted that the company had fired “at least 17 people on the basis of their sexual orientation” and praised Queer Nation activists who had “formed picket lines, experienced arrest, taunts and threats of physical violence.” Owens urged individual lesbians and gays across the United States to “purchase a (one) share of Cracker Barrel Inc. stock.”

The goal, Owens wrote, was “to have thousands, hundreds of thousands of single share owners of Cracker Barrel stock“ — adding, “This will create some serious problems for the company.“ He argued that a nationwide “Buy One” campaign would send “a strong message that gays and lesbians are not going to tolerate continued discrimination,” calling it “a remarkable empowerment for our community” and “a vivid example of our presence and power.” He also suggested that once the campaign succeeded, participants could donate their shares to groups such as the Lambda Legal Defense Fund. 

The proposal, though ambitious for the pre-Internet era, caught on. Along the way, it gained unexpected allies like the New York City Employees’ Retirement System and the Sisters of Mercy, a Catholic order that managed hospital endowments. And by 1993, Cracker Barrel’s shareholder base had more than doubled.

After a decade of shareholder battles, Cracker Barrel’s board amended its nondiscrimination policy in 2002 to include sexual orientation.

Amanda W. Timpson and Yesterqueers

That history has reemerged thanks to Amanda W. Timpson, a public historian and the creator of the viral project “Yesterqueers.” In a video that circulated widely on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube after Timpson posted it on Saturday, she explained that “Cracker Barrel’s decade-long journey from blatant homophobia to being the ‘front porch of Pride’ was driven by queer activists using brunch and the stock market as their weapons.”

In a Monday interview with The Advocate, Timpson said she had first researched the Cracker Barrel controversy years ago and returned to it because it connected current headlines with overlooked queer history. “One of the things that’s happening right now is people are feeling hopeless and beaten down, and the problems feel so big — especially for younger queer people who do not have the in-person community that a lot of us had growing up,” she said. ”So I think the thing that was so engaging about this video is that it was a very long fight, and it was a very unconventional fight.”

She pointed to Owens’s shareholder strategy as precisely the kind of creative activism people find compelling. “It was this one guy who looked at the problem and was, like, I think there’s another way to do this,” she said. “And one of the things I learned the first time I was researching this video is that there are a lot of funds, especially retirement and pension funds, that use their investing as a way to change the world. So the fact that the New York City ERS and the Sisters of Mercy were the first two to come on board is actually not all that surprising.”

Timpson emphasized that the fight also exposed how few protections queer workers had at the time. “Cheryl Summerville didn’t know it was legal for her to be fired for being gay until she was fired for being gay,” Timpson said. “She just assumed that was not legal — which is a reasonable assumption — but it was totally legal everywhere except Wisconsin. And we only recently got those federal protections in 2020 with [the U.S. Supreme Court case] Bostock.”

In response to some commenters accusing her of being a “Cracker Barrel apologist,” Timpson pushed back. “They’re still a mostly terrible company. They never crossed 80 on the HRC rating, and then they dropped out of being rated,” she said before turning back to why the story is still a compelling one. “But a bunch of queer activists worked together with allied activists, and they did it for a decade, and then they saw real, tangible change.”

Manufactured outrage

Regarding Starbuck’s comments on the company’s recent move, Timpson said the far-right commentator is using a familiar playbook. “I sure do wish he’d use his powers for good,” she said. “Unfortunately, he has tapped into something that works really well. He basically followed the [Focus on the Family founder James] Dobson and [televangelist Jerry] Falwell models of ‘let’s get people really riled up so that they are operating from a place of emotion and not a place of logic and reason.’ He is dangerous. He causes demonstrable, measurable harm with the things that he does.”

For Timpson, the antidote is education. “My goal with Yesterqueers is to celebrate the broadest possible expanse of queer history and to bring queer history out of the shadows,” she said. “History is humanity. You cannot be a human successfully without a sense of connection to whatever your history is.”

The Human Rights Campaign, which Starbuck repeatedly attacked in his video, dismissed the controversy. Eric Bloem, the HRC’s vice president of workplace equality, through a spokesperson, told The Advocate, “Like most things Robby Starbuck is concerned about, this is a manufactured non-issue.”