Watch out, Mister Softee, that cha-cha you hear coming around the corner just may be your newest competitor muscling in on your turf.
"Let's face it, ice cream trucks are kind of queer, and a middle-aged white man driving one is pretty suspect," Doug Quint, future driver of the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck, told Serious Eats. "That's not to say that I'm a rolling hotbed of perversion. Hardly the case. It's all in the name of silly."
Quint's truck will spend days in the West Village and nights in the East Village and Chelsea, dispensing cool treats flavored with olive oil, sea salt, Nutella and bacon, reports Serious Eats. At this point he is simply awaiting the arrival of his permit, he expects to be on the streets by next week.
Before even hitting the street's the BGICT already has more than 300 followers on Twitter and is doing brisk business selling t-shirts and "husband-beaters" to anxious fans.
Quint, a bassoonist by trade, was first introduced to the idea of trolling the streets for hot, hungry New Yorkers by his friend Andrea Fisher, a hip-hop flutist, who is also one of the few female ice cream men in town.
"You wouldn’t believe it, but the ice cream business is more competitive than the music business," Fisher told The New York Times in 2007. "Being a woman has rescued me from being beat up a bunch of times."
