‘Barbecue Saved My Life’: Meet Waco’s Antifascist Transgender Pitmaster

A TikTok video with more than 100,000 views showed Kaleb Blain, a 35-year old trans man and pitmaster, standing at a folding table gesturing to a plate of freshly prepared chickens, ready for the BBQ smoker. The caption read “politics and cooking don’t mix.”

But then the video cut away to a series of photos of the late Anthony Bourdain, the infamously outspoken, unapologetically progressive celebrity chef. The text then read, “Momma said it was OK,” as Lukas Graham’s “Mama Said” played in the background. 

Beneath the video, Blain wrote, “Mom would burn lots of people with cigarettes rn if he could.” It has more than 28,500 likes since it was posted on Jan. 15.

The video is a fiery missive from Blain’s BBQ, the pitmaster’s small-scale enterprise in the Waco area. Blain is just getting his start slinging meat, but he’s learning from Bourdain’s legacy as a big name in food who embraced its intersection with politics. 

“He just said whatever the fuck he wanted to say,” Blain told The Barbed Wire during a phone interview. 

Blain’s admiration for Bourdain, who shook the culinary world with his memoir “Kitchen Confidential,” is perhaps unsurprising after learning how the native Texan got into cooking — and his dramatic exit from one of Texas’ BBQ institutions.  

Blain started learning the BBQ arts in 2021. After eight years as a 911 dispatcher, he was feeling burnt out.

“I have a lot of respect for people who can answer 911 calls all the time, because it’s an insane experience,” Blain said. During that time, he also began his transition and decided he needed to find a less stressful way to earn a living. 

“I went from the fast pace of 911 to low and slow barbecue and I loved it,” Blain said.  

He started honing his skills at Helburg Barbecue, a small but popular BBQ restaurant near Waco, first as a prep cook and then working his way up to becoming a pitmaster, but his plans got cut short when the restaurant burned down in 2023. 

Then, he heard the legendary Terry Black’s BBQ was opening a location in town. 

“‘Man, I really want that feather in my cap,’” Blain recalled thinking when he learned the news. ”Because at that point, I decided, this is what I want to stick with.”

The Texas chain first started in Lockhart in 2014. The Black family are icons in the barbecue world, with five locations around the state and a sixth opening soon in Nashville. Blain said he had a friend who knew someone in the business’ management, so he got hired to be part of the crew who helped prepare the Waco shop in the lead-up to opening day, before settling into an overnight shift in the pit. 

“Nobody likes the night shift sleep schedule, but when I was a dispatcher I worked nights for years so it didn’t bother me,” Blain said.  

Blain enjoyed the lack of managers or customers at night and the sound of rain on the tin roof of the smokehouse.

Blain was living out his barbeque dreams, but then he faced a breakup in his personal life left him searching for something new. About a year ago, he started making TikTok content as a way to refocus his energy. His videos were about his experience and that of his fellow cooks in the pit during their shifts, mixing meat with messages of solidarity. 

“One day, I was just playing around with editing food videos, and then I had something to say, and it kind of just went together … and then, you know, people responded to it,” Blain said. 

The response made him keep going. He even heard from another trans BBQ worker, who thanked him for being open about his identity.

“Love is love. Gender is in the mind. No one is illegal on stolen land. This account does not support fascism,” one video caption read. In the background, he played the song, “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The video itself showed Blain working the smokers, slathering BBQ sauce on the meat and feeding the pit flames. It was viewed hundreds of thousands of times. 

Then he got a call from human resources at Terry Black’s.

The catch? He’d never gotten the company’s permission. 

When he posted a video mocking FBI Director Kash Patel’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death (Patel said he’d see Kirk again “in Valhalla,” the Norse afterlife), it fell onto the wrong side of the algorithm.

“I remember watching that live, at home, on my day off, and I busted out laughing because I was like, ‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,’” Blain recalled. “I made a video about that where I poked fun at it, and that’s what got me doxxed.”

A message posted to Twitter, which Blain shared with The Barbed Wire via screenshot, identified him as a trangender Terry Black’s employee and misgendered him as “it.” The message eventually led to the phone call with human resources. 

“HR basically gave me a call and was like, ‘hey, … we had to talk with the (Black) family, and we don’t want to be associated with you in any way,’” Blain remembered. 

When reached by phone, Terry Black’s in Waco said they weren’t at liberty to comment on former employees.

Blain said he was part of a wave of doxxings and firings in the wake of the Kirk assassination, which also led to hundreds of complaints against educators and inflamed a dangerous free speech crisis on Texas campuses. Reuters estimated that at least 600 people were targeted nationwide, some of whom merely quoted Kirk in his own words. 

Blain said that Terry Black’s didn’t immediately fire him, but the company forced him to delete some of his videos referencing Terry Black’s brand, and he said they started scheduling him for fewer and fewer shifts. Eventually, Blain said he was let go for smoking on company property. But Blain is convinced he was singled out.

It’s been five months since the doxxing and, to fund what he hopes will be the next stage of his BBQ journey, Blain is now delivering freshly smoked meats throughout the Waco area, posting a rotating menu on his TikTok. Because Blain believes that BBQ should be an accessible, working class food, he’s also focused on cooking affordable meat like pork and chicken. 

“It’s about … using my skills and my knowledge and my creativity as a pitmaster to make cheaper cuts of food to put on the table for the average family, where everybody can come in and eat once a week and have that tradition,” he told The Barbed Wire. “If we’re going to hit a recession, I’m going to cook recession food because that’s what barbecue is: It’s recession food, it’s poor man’s food.”

One of his specialties is his pork loin pinwheel, stuffed with spinach and smoked cream cheese. And while he won’t reveal his secret ingredients, he says his ribs have a unique flavor that keeps his customers coming back for more. 

“I don’t like to cover my ribs, I want that little bit of crust … but then I finish it off with this syrup, and it sticks to the rib… and it’s a perfect sweet, savory, a little bit of spice from the pepper. Things are really well balanced. But it also has this extra toasted taste,” Blain described.

For now, Blain is putting his profits, and the donations from a small GoFundMe, toward buying an extra-large smoker to cook more meat and to use like a mini-food cart to sell at events. He also recently took a part-time job to help pay the rent. 

But has no regrets — and credits his departure from Terry Black’s for forcing him to try something new. 

“Being pushed out, even though it’s scary and uncertain, I feel better than I ever have, because I’m already seeing what can happen if you really, really want to create something,” Blain said.

He dreams of someday starting his own BBQ restaurant, where no one has to worry about being mistreated for their sexuality or gender. 

“They can go through being whoever they are,” he said, “without that anxiety of finding a job somewhere and working in … a cis white male-dominated space.”

Part of the dream is the restaurant could one day help other queer and trans Texans embrace the healing power of BBQ the same way he did.

“Barbecue, it really saved me, it saved my life, and I know that’s dramatic, but finding something that I loved really did save me,” Blain said.