Is fire island gay

Fire Island is a skinny barrier island off the southern coast of Long Island, New York. Both The Pines and Cherry Grove comprise the gay area of Fire Island, where the LGBT community stays.

fire island population

To help you decide where to stay in Fire Island Pines, I’ll first explain what each neighborhood is like, and then show you how to book a rental or hotel. Fire Island is referenced a lot in popular culture, for example the Fire Island TV series and a new gay Pride and Prejudice adaptation set on Fire Island. There are plenty of beaches, parties and other events to explore on the island. But Fire Island has a very special place in American LGBT history.

It is the site of one of the oldest gay and lesbian communities in the United States, situated within two neighboring hamlets — Cherry Grove and the Fire Island Pines. As portrayed by the hit Hulu rom-com, this iconic destination near New York is the ultimate queer party island. But there's more to it than sand, sea and sex, writes Jack Parlett.

Fire Island, just off the hamlet Sayville on New York’s Long Island, has long been considered a gay paradise. As anyone who’s ever been will tell you, it’s no easy feat to get there, especially with the Lady Gaga-esque “bus, club, another club, another club” of it all as visitors maneuver from train to shuttle to ferry and back again.

As portrayed by the hit Hulu rom-com, this iconic destination near New York is the ultimate queer party island. But there's more to it than sand, sea and sex, writes Jack Parlett. In the new rom-com Fire Island, written by comedian Joel Kim Booster and now streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu, the eponymous island is shown in all its summer glory. Located just a train and ferry ride away from New York City, this barrier island off the Long Island coast has been an iconic destination for the queer community since the early 20th Century.

More like this:. Expect thrills, spills and plenty of parties, followed by excursions to the beach to watch the sun rise above the Atlantic. Loosely modelled on Pride and Prejudice, Kim Booster's film shows Fire Island as a place of contradictions; a space where you can be your authentic self, and let it all hang out among friends, but also an intensely theatrical space, where roles are performed, looks judgmental, flirtatious are exchanged, and six-packs are honed.

In this vein, the film joins a long tradition of artworks about the simultaneously loose and restrictive mores of Fire Island, a world associated with both sexual freedoms and social hierarchies. Edmund White, who wrote about a fictionalised version of Fire Island in his debut novel Forgetting Elena, notes in his memoir City Boy how the rituals of gay social life there "rhymed in my imagination with the rituals of medieval Japan or Versailles".

Still, it is not hard to see why Fire Island's allure has endured across time, and why queer people have ventured there in search of freedom and pleasure. A thin spit of land running approximately 32 miles long and half a mile wide, the island's landscape is visually and ecologically particular, marked with lush vegetation and protected from erosion by sand dunes. Around the same time, queer and artsy folk from the city were first discovering holiday rentals in the small, rustic community of Cherry Grove, catalysing a process that would come to create what anthropologist Esther Newton calls "America's first gay and lesbian town".

After a hurricane destroyed many of the houses in Cherry Grove, Newton observes in her history of the community, gay men and lesbians bought up much of the lots, then going cheap, from the Long Island families who previously owned them. Going into the post-war period, Cherry Grove became increasingly well-known as an eccentric, outrageous spot, its small-town atmosphere enriched with a vibrant theatrical and drag culture, and ample venues for drinking, dancing and public sex.

The Grove's more upmarket neighbour, Fire Island Pines, was developed later, in the s, as a "family-friendly" community, although this label didn't last for very long, despite the fact that numerous gay homeowners had moved there from the Grove in the hopes that it would act as a more discreet enclave. By the s, with the flourishing of an increasingly public queer culture in the years following the Stonewall riots, Cherry Grove and the Pines were both highly desirable locations, frequented by writers and, including Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Patricia Highsmith, Carson McCullers, as well as numerous stars of stage and screen.

A place of "death and desire".

Because here's the other thing about Fire Island; it is a haunted place. As much as a summer on Fire Island is about immersion in the present moment this weekend or the near future this season , the past is never far away. Scratch beneath the glamorous, hedonistic sheen of its popular image and a rich cultural lineage comes into view, along with the ghosts of the various figures who have graced its shores.

Before I began research on my book Fire Island: Love, Loss and Liberation in An American Paradise, which examines the queer cultural history of Cherry Grove and the Pines, while interweaving aspects of personal memoir, I went there in the spirit of pilgrimage, seeking to retrace the footsteps of poet Frank O'Hara, who was killed on the beach near the Pines in a dune buggy accident in the summer of Standing by the ocean in the early hours of the morning, incanting lines from one of O'Hara's poems, the deathliness of the place became vividly apparent; the sense that it is teeming with the life or lives of its past.

As the narrator of Andrew Holleran's classic novel Dancer from the Dance notes, this is a place of "death and desire". The photographer Matthew Leifheit's series To Die Alive recently published by Damiani Books , named after a lyric from Ariana Grande's song Break Free, attests to this curious quality in the island's atmosphere.

Leifheit captures not only the death site of O'Hara see image , and of Margaret Fuller, the 19th-Century writer and advocate, whose ship crashed and sunk off the island's shore in , but also the more populated settings of the island's erotic culture. If the island's artistic and literary history paints a complicated picture of the place, at once romantic and real, today it remains a contested and continually evolving space.

The emergence, over the last 10 years, of artist residency programmes in Cherry Grove and the Pines has helped to revive the island's creative culture and include a more diverse array of queer artists, in an effort to resist its reputation as a majority white space. Recent initiatives have been established in both Cherry Grove and the Pines to address structural inequities in both communities. The release of Kim Booster's film, which is seen by many as a landmark in representation, with a central plot revolving around the romantic lives of two queer Asian American characters, further revises the island's dominant narrative.

Fire Island's freedoms have been hard-won, just as its restrictions and stratifications have been embedded over time, reproducing some of the hierarchies of the mainland world that it seeks to offer an escape from. Because it was never just about the sand, or the sea, or the sex, but about finding — and fighting for — a place of our own. Love film and TV?

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