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In a swap of former All-Pro defensive backs on Monday, the Pittsburgh Steelers acquired cornerback Jalen Ramsey and tight end Jonnu Smith from the Miami Dolphins for safety Minkah Fitzpatrick and a draft pick swap.

Ramsey posted about the trade, which includes the Steelers’ 2027 fifth-round pick to the Dolphins in exchange for a seventh-round pick, on social media. “Breaking my own news!” he wrote alongside a celebratory announcement video on Instagram.

The deal ended persistent speculation that Ramsey might be traded to the Rams, for whom he played from 2019-22. At the Rams’ mini-camp in Maui two weeks ago, coach Sean McVay downplayed the chance of acquiring the three-time All-Pro, who is due to earn $26.6 million this season. Ramsey’s salary-cap number will increase substantially in the next few seasons, according to Overthecap.com.

“Usually, those are scenarios and situations that you have to have plans in place prior to executing some of the decisions that have occurred,” McVay said, perhaps referencing the contract adjustment that quarterback Matthew Stafford received and the signing of free-agent receiver Davante Adams. “Definitely don’t want to rule anything out … but there would be some obstacles that are real that are in the place of maybe preventing that from occurring.”

Rams cornerbacks include returning starters Darious Williams and Ahkello Witherspoon, with Cobie Durant, Emmanuel Forbes Jr., Josh Wallace and Derion Kendrick competing for playing time.

Smith — who enjoyed a career year in 2024 with 88 catches and eight touchdowns for the Dolphins — will receive a one-year contract extension worth $12 million. He joins returning starter Pat Freiermuth and Darnell Washington at tight end in Pittsburgh.

The Steelers have prioritized improving at cornerback this offseason, signing free agent Darius Slay Jr. in addition to trading for Ramsey, who has 24 career interceptions. Incumbent starter Joey Porter Jr. also returns.

The Steelers had grown disenchanted with Fitzpatrick, who was named All-Pro in 2019, 2020 and 2022 but had only one interception in the last two seasons after moving from free safety to strong safety.

Fitzpatrick was drafted 11th overall in 2018. The Dolphins traded him to the Steelers two games into the 2019 season along with fourth- and seventh-round picks for first-, fifth- and sixth-round picks.

Loughborough Lightning have the chance to go for an unprecedented three-peat after booking their spot to face London Pulse in the Netball Super League Grand Final.

Defending champions Lightning were condemned to the preliminary final after they were beaten last week by Pulse, the regular season leaders.

That meant a repeat of last year’s Grand Final against Manchester Thunder and hosts Lightning came from behind to win 69-57 on Sunday.

Thunder scored 10 unanswered goals en route to a 19-12 lead after the first quarter, but Lightning did not look back after a blistering second.

After going 27-20 down, Jodie Gibson came on at goal defence to give Lightning a boost, while Samantha Wallace-Joseph did the damage at the other end.

The Trinidad and Tobago shooter converted five two-point super shots during the second quarter to help Lightning into a 37-30 lead at half-time.

Thunder called a tactical timeout at 44-33 down, while South Africa shooter Elmere van der Berg was brought off for the first time all season.

But Lightning still led 52-40 heading into the final quarter and stayed clear to book a rematch with Pulse in next Sunday’s Grand Final at London’s O2 Arena.

Actor Rick Hurst, best known as dim-witted Deputy Cletus Hogg on the TV show “The Dukes of Hazzard,” has died unexpectedly in Los Angeles. He was 79.

“It doesn’t seem right that Rick Hurst passed away this afternoon. When something so unexpected happens, it is ‘harder to process,’ as the current expression goes,” actor and politician Ben Jones, who played Cooter Davenport on “Hazzard,” wrote Thursday evening on the Facebook page for Cooter’s Place, a business themed to the show.

“I just this moment heard about the passing of dear Rick Hurst, a.k.a. Cletus Hogg,” co-star John Schneider, who played Bo Duke on “Hazzard,” wrote Thursday night on Facebook. “You were [a] remarkable force for humanity, sanity and comedy my friend. Heaven is a safer and more organized place with you in it. We’ll keep the race going and people laughing until we meet again! Love you.”

Hurst had been scheduled for fan meet-and-greet appearances July 3-7 at the Cooter’s in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., according to the website for the store and restaurant, which has three locations. Cooter’s called off the visit in a Facebook post early Thursday, saying the visit would be rescheduled due to “unforeseen circumstances.”

Born Jan. 1, 1946, in Houston and raised there, Hurst got started in acting quite early. “When I was 5 or 6, acting kind of tapped me on the shoulder — literally,” he said on a COVID-era podcast a few years back with pop culture enthusiast Scott Romine. Hurst said he was at a Houston Public Library location with his mom when a man tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he wanted to be in a commercial for the library system. He did the spot, he said, “and my pay was a chocolate soda.”

After high school in Houston, Hurst studied theater at Tulane University in New Orleans, then got a master’s in fine arts from Temple University in Philadelphia. All of his experience was on stage until he moved to Los Angeles. His first TV credit was for “Sanford and Son” in 1972 and his final credit was for “B My Guest,” a 2016 TV short.

In addition to working on the first five seasons of “The Dukes of Hazzard,” which ran from 1979 to 1985, Hurst appeared on myriad shows including “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “Little House on the Prairie,” “MASH,” “Baretta” and “227” and the miniseries “From Here to Eternity.”

Hurst said on that podcast that he “thanked God all the time” for the success of “The Dukes of Hazzard” and its fandom.

“The stunt guys were the heroes of the show,” he said, “and all of us in the cast knew that the first star on the show was the General Lee,” the orange 1969 Dodge Charger with a Confederate battle flag emblazoned on top, driven by characters Bo and Luke Duke, the latter played by Tom Wopat.

Hurst was married twice, first to acting coach Candace Kaniecki, mother of actor Ryan Hurst, and then to Shelly Weir, mother of Collin Hurst. Ryan Hurst is best known for his roles as Opie on “Sons of Anarchy” and Beta on “The Walking Dead.”

Only seven pages in, John Birdsall offers a conclusion to the question that titles his book, “What Is Queer Food?”

It’s a subject that has consumed him for decades, as a restaurant cook in the Bay Area and then as a journalist and author. In the last dozen or so years — when food media began more honestly grappling with identity and diversity in its subjects, and also with who is given opportunities to tell those stories — Birdsall won national awards for feats like his groundbreaking piece, “America, Your Food Is So Gay.”

The queering of American food

“Still, saying what queer food was on a granular level kept eluding me,” he writes in his new work, published this month. “Lots of us could say that queer food, like desire, exists, but nobody could definitely point through what is was.”

Drag-brunch eggs benedict? Rainbow cookies? Intentional diet choices? Suggestively shaped edible schtick?

“It shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did,” he accedes, “but at last I accepted the obvious truth that queer food is not a commodity. There is no essentialized cuisine of queerness, any more than there’s one simple answer for what it means to be queer.”

Acceptance is a doorway. He is freed to spend the rest of the book coupling meticulous research and gorgeous prose to illuminate lives that, in ways indirect and overt, shaped who we are as a culinary nation.

There’s Harry Baker, a man who flees from a sullied life in Ohio to Los Angeles and who, true to his name, develops a style of cake that becomes the de-facto dessert of young Hollywood; later it well be reworked and homogenized as a signature recipe for General Mills. There’s Esther Eng, an early 20th-century film auteur, her movies now mostly lost, whose fluency with the group dynamics of creating cinema translates to a second act as a New York restaurateur. In her masculine clothes and bluntly cropped hair, she is at once successful and invisible.

John Birdsall, author of “What Is Queer Food?”

(Courtesy of Rachel Marie Photography)

Birdsall notes that Craig Claiborne, then food editor of the New York Times and the father of modern American restaurant criticism, reviewed Eng’s self-named restaurant in the 1960s. Claiborne used his platform to push dining and cooking toward their current cultural status in the United States. Privately he was far more tragic — “haunted,” to use Birdsall’s word, by his difficult Southern childhood and misguided in a mess of a memoir published in 1983, 17 years before his death at 79.

Birdsall does not abide counterfeit joy. He narrates lives shaped by society’s denials, prejudices and punishments, and he lays their suffering bare. Some (among them Alice B. Toklas, James Baldwin and Richard Olney, one of my all-time favorite cookbook authors) know to leave the country to love in greater peace.

Where delight comes easy is in Birdsall’s prose. He took the narrative lessons he learned from his 2020 biography of James Beard, “The Man Who Ate Too Much,” to tighten the intricate threads of this opus. Characters that appear early in the book return for lightbulb impact. No strand dangles. Even when the reader feels his own rage — as when he veers into a personal story about making quiche for a Sunday open house in the storm-center of the AIDS crisis — his eloquence carries us through the bitterest aftertastes.

The past and present of gay restaurants

Birdsall centers his elucidation of queer culinary culture on people, and by extension the worlds around them. In “Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights and Last Call Disco Fries at America’s Gay Restaurants,” also published this month, Erik Piepenburg shifts the focus to place.

His catalyst for his book: the accelerated disappearance of spaces by and for LGBTQ populations across America.

He opens with a requiem for a 24-hour diner in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood where he was a regular in the 1990s. “The Melrose was a gay restaurant because gay people made it one,” he begins. He watched older men share their meals and drag queens scarf bacon-and-cheese potato skins post performance, and took solace in blueberry silver dollar pancakes when chemistry fizzled with the guy across the table. The Melrose closed in 2017 after 56 years in business.

“When gay restaurants close, gay reliquaries empty of memory and meaning,” he writes. “Gone are favorite waitresses and go-to-meals, safe spaces and party places in the night’s last hours. For me and other gay people who love to eat out, losing a gay restaurant is a kind of dispossession.”

Erik Peipenburg, author of “Dining Out”

(Peter Larson)

Piepenburg traveled across the country throughout 2023, interviewing owners and customers of establishments still present and long gone. Chapters graft careful reporting with his own running commentary, at turns cheeky and poignant and angered by the tenuous state of gay rights and acceptance.

Some salute institutions like Annie’s Paramount Steak House in Washington D.C.; lesbian-feminist restaurant Bloodroot in Bridgeport, Conn.; and trans safe havens like Napalese Lounge and Grille in Green Bay, Wis. Others seek to debunk myths, including the supposed queer riot in 1959 at a downtown Los Angeles location of Cooper Do-nuts whose occurrence Piepenburg could find little hard evidence to support. To consider the future of gay dining, he considers two recently opened restaurants in Southern California: the Ruby Fruit in Silver Lake and Alice B. in Palm Springs.

Mara Herbkersman and Emily Bielagus, photographed in 2023, are owners of the Ruby Fruit, one of the restaurants mentioned in Erik Piepenburg’s book “Dining Out.”

(Brittany Brooks / For The Times)

Piepenburg has been writing for the New York Times for nearly 20 years, concentrating mostly on film (especially horror), television and theater. He is, in the most wonderful sense, not a food writer. He self-identifies as a “diner gay.” This is a work about history and, above all, community, not exalted poetry on the art of gastronomy.

What strikes me most about Piepenburg’s frame of reference is how explicitly and organically he twins the subjects of dining and sex. We rarely acknowledge the existence of sex in Food Writing. First, it’s the hardest subject to not be cringe about, and food and sex analogies usually land as ick. But also, most of us who cover restaurants are keenly aware of ugly power dynamics that went unspoken in male-dominated kitchens for decades, and the industry as a whole is in a slow but sustained corrective era.

The approach in “Dining Out” succeeds in its matter-of-factness. Lonely people congregate over holiday buffets in bathhouses. Men frequented — still frequent — certain gayborhood restaurants to cruise, to pose, to be themselves.

A bit of melancholy also winds through the book, as Piepenburg laments the “golden age” of gay restaurants that halted at the turn of the millennium, if not before, and also his own aging. Here is where I mention: I met the author 35 years ago, in my early college years before either of us was out, so I relate to his feelings on the passage of time. When in the book he references his ‘90s-era club kid days, sporting “shaggy wigs and carrying lunchboxes” at the Limelight in New York … I remember.

Of course, the release of Birdsall’s and Piepenburg’s books was planned for visibility during Pride month. Their merits, individual and collective, make for absorbing, enlightening reading far beyond 30 days of designated LBGTQ recognition.

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