Inside Fire Island's Complicated Past, Present, and Future
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Journey four miles into the Atlantic off the coast of New York and you’ll find a sandspit, only half a mile wide, that is paradise: an unattainable fantasy. It’s welcomed such stars as Marlon Brando, James Dean, and, legend has it, Judy Garland. It’s the cheeky backdrop of Joel Kim Booster’s gay retelling of Pride and Prejudice, out this month with Hulu. And—Happy Pride!—it’s obviously Fire Island.
Fire Island: A Century in the Life of an American Paradise takes a 30,000-foot view, helmed by one of the island’s greatest gifts: literature. Through an investigation of the queer writers who took up residence in Cherry Grove and the Pines (the island’s queer communities), Jack Parlett assembles a literary history that embraces complexity. Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, Frank O’Hara, and many more writers we read today vacationed and dreamed here. In the 1970s, Andrew Holleran penned his classic, Dancer from the Dance, a romantic tale of gay love and loss in the Pines. Maurice Sendak began writing Where the Wild Things Are during a stay, betraying some familiarity with the beach’s delights. While Fire Island has fostered such rich works of art, for many, the island is synonymous with an enclave for cis gay white men, a playground for party drugs and cruising in the famous Meatrack. There’s a performance to whose parties you get invited to, at which lavish, modernist home. Scan Instagram in the summer and it can feel like everybody is partying in the Pines without you, taking commemorative photos in front of rainbow walls. Check Twitter and people offer up critiques of how the island might become more inclusive.
A multihyphenate scholar and poet, Dr. Parlett is currently a research fellow at University College, Oxford, where he studies American literature and queer writing. He’s the author of the poetry chapbook, Same Blue, Different You, and an academic text, The Poetics of Cruising: Queer Visual Culture from Whitman to Grindr, also out this year. Just back from the U.K. to kick off his book’s U.S. release in New York, Parlett spoke with Esquire about Fire Island, making room for nuance, and building better queer spaces. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Esquire: How did writers become your entrée to the island’s history? How does this rich literary tradition exist amidst the island’s hedonism today?
Jack Parlett: A big part of how I found out about Fire Island was through Frank O’Hara. Going there for the very first time was as much a literary pilgrimage as it was me searching for other aspects of life there, like the hedonistic side. I’m interested in the figure of the writer on Fire Island, who in many cases is somebody participating but observing from slightly afar. This is true in Auden’s case and even for Edward White, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and the big gay novelists of that era. There’s something about the way they frame their work that figures the writer as this kind of borderline figure. That’s how I found my own interest was piqued: by going and feeling like I was observing something as opposed to part of it.
ESQ: You’ve previously said that Fire Island speaks to a desire for utopia and called it a deeply “ambivalent place” that can represent freedom or the opposite. How has your research helped you reconcile that desire with its realities?
JP: That’s a really good question. To some extent, investigating a place like Fire Island is to observe the gap between fantasy and reality, as with any space that is spoken about in utopian ways. I think we have something to learn about who we are as a community by the fact that we still desire those places. Someone said to me at a party, “But you know, gays can get married now. Why do we still need a place like Fire Island? Have queer spaces become moot at this point?” I remember it made me so angry because, for one, it misunderstood the political scenario. Looking at everything going on in the U.S. with Don’t Say Gay and the attacks upon the lives of trans people, we’re so far away from whatever vision of progress is being imagined. But also, assimilation is not its own end. Assimilation is not a utopia. Fire Island and other places offer a way out of that.
I think any liberation movement thinks in those terms about how things might be otherwise. The fact that Fire Island has at various points failed to realize those liberationist aims is also something that we can learn from. It’s incredibly unlikely to find a place that does all the things you need it to do, but that doesn’t exempt it from thinking about what it’s failing to do or not doing. I suppose in some ways it’s less about reconciling them, and more thinking about the tension as productive—blueprints for other places we might imagine.
ESQ: Do you think there is an ideal queer space? Can such a space exist?
JP: I don’t know that there is an ideal queer space. Part of what is ideal is a live and changing thing. Right now, an ideal queer space is queer in an intersectional way, is inclusive across the social, racial spectrum, and is explicitly trans-inclusive. Idealities are always contingent upon the present situation and what is urgent, and queer spaces are only useful as they remain alive to that question.
ESQ: Thinking about Fire Island, it can be easy to fall back on a singular image—oasis or elite enclave. What helps you write towards nuance?
JP: I actually found not being on Twitter while I was writing was the most helpful thing. I knew that even this choice of subject matter was potentially divisive, so slightly removing myself from that discourse while trying to engage with it in a scholarly way felt like a way to maintain a sense of nuance. If I genuinely believed that Fire Island was only its worst aspects, I wouldn’t be interested in writing a book about it. Fire Island is quite easy fodder for some oppositional takes. Those takes are totally valid, and it’s not that I didn’t engage with them, but it would be possible to become too immersed in that world. There’s a different book that could be written that engages with social media, but I felt less like that was my job with this particular project.
ESQ: I’m interested in these stereotypes of the Fire Island Gay, a definite type in the culture. How can we look to past moral panics and respectability politics to decode political noise around queer issues today?
JP: Frequently, anxieties around different moral panics are interwoven with something. The ways in which Fire Island has been a locus for those concerns does have a lot to tell us. Midge Decter’s piece “The Boys on the Beach” rails against how Fire Island became this sexed-up place post-liberation, and how for her, as a conservative family woman, the Pines in the 60s was inoffensive because all the gays did was mince along the beach and have nice hair. I think of that as a really instructive example: hedonism and expression have been politicized. Fire Island presents a riposte to certain kinds of conservative movements because it is a place where sexual expression is centered.
One of the more worrying things is when aspects of that conservatism turn up in gay circles with the idea that Fire Island dumbs the community down for its focus on these things. Maybe what we can learn from previous moral panics is not to replicate those within our own community. An assimilationist camp could very easily take Fire Island as indicative of some malaise in the gay community. It’s one thing to critique irresponsibility or risk or hedonism, but it’s impossible for those not to be loaded critiques. The history of the AIDS epidemic also factors into it. I think great care must be taken. Normally liberal voices could start to sound conservative very easily.
ESQ: You bring so many prescient voices from the past into contemporary discussions around sexuality, community, and resistance. Are there particular voices you hope readers or visitors to the island remember?
JP: There are so many literary heavyweights who have been to Fire Island, and I knew that would be part of the book because that makes it so illustrious. Jack Nichols in the 1970s and George Whitmore in the 1980s were people whose work I didn’t know before researching; for me, the idea of readers going away and looking up those figures if they weren’t familiar is a great pleasure. George Whitmore died before we could know exactly what he would go on to produce. His writing on Fire Island is some of the most interesting writing that there is about intergenerational divides and the particular community dynamics of the place. I hope that readers might use the book as a starting point to read other writers who are less canonized outside of the genre of gay literature.
ESQ: Your book tracks Fire Island through the past century and concludes in the present, considering the climate crisis. You also discuss residencies that support queer artists of color. This moment, though tempered and qualified, seems a bit more hopeful. What hopes do you have for the island’s future and the art it inspires?
JP: I would hope it continues going in the direction that it has been, and I say that as somebody who has learned about what’s going on from a distance—I haven’t been there for the last three years because of the pandemic. It seems to me that community initiatives like BaBEC (The Black and Brown Equality Coalition) in Cherry Grove as well as the artist residencies are changing and diversifying its culture. It’s not news to people within Fire Island that questions of diversity and inclusion have long been a problem, and it seems that those are being addressed now. That might be a slow process, but I hope that it continues down that path.
Also, there’s such pride in both communities. Both have historical preservation societies with incredible archives, so I absolutely hope that in being future-oriented, they remain proud and attached to the past. Just as Fire Island itself can feel like a fragile thing—this quite precarious sandbar on the fringes of the Atlantic that’s very vulnerable to erosion—queer history can be similarly precarious. There are so many sources that have been lost, so I hope that remains a part of its future too—that it’s an alive and evolving thing.
ESQ: Considering how queer history has involved coded interactions, discretion, and evading detection, were there unique challenges to assembling this history?
JP: There were. One that I write about methodologically is the question of whether Oscar Wilde ever visited Fire Island. This is something that’s very much debated and explored by local historians. There were gaps and holes in this history, partly related to pre-70s and pre-Stonewall writers not wanting to necessarily advertise being on Fire Island. At a certain point, writing or speaking publicly about going to Cherry Grove was a way of outing yourself. There were moments where I wished that the evidence would play ball, like, “Dammit, where’s Patricia Highsmith’s novel set on Fire Island?” There are these phantom imagined works that we don’t have because they don’t exist. To wonder why is to speculate, but I felt myself brushing against those gaps sometimes.
ESQ: You mentioned the pandemic as another constraining factor. How did your writing transform as you were unable to access these physical spaces?
JP: The summer before the pandemic was my primary research period when I was looking in authors’ archives and thinking about the voices that would lead us through certain historical eras. I found myself in this bizarre position in 2020, ready to write and then suddenly in lockdown. The week before, I’d booked flights thinking it was okay to spend more time on Fire Island and do a lot of the writing there. I do wonder how that would have changed the book.
I decided in the end that the constraint to imagine and live vicariously was a part of this story. So many people know what Fire Island is but may never go. It remains a kind of horizon for loads of queer people. I wanted to sit with that a little bit, and that bizarrely became part of the narrative for me.
ESQ: I really enjoyed watching that imagination replicate the fantasies. Similarly, you write about moving to New York “in search of that elusive thing called ‘gay life.’” How do you locate yourself in history?
JP: I had imagined being in New York for such a long time. It had been this place that occupied me: New York was its own island, a fantasy island. I wanted to write about that because I wanted to be implicated in that narrative. There’s a different version of the book, which is a disembodied literary history that says, “Here is what’s been written, and here’s what we can learn about it,” but I felt as soon as I arrived on Fire Island that there was no way I could write that wasn’t colored by my own experience. Fire Island became related to various things that I felt and still experience as a gay man. Perhaps in many ways, I had felt ambivalent about community and what that means and what that looks like, so there was something personal at stake with this book. Confronting this place, I was also confronting things about myself.
I found something really powerful to reading about Auden’s anxieties about one’s body in a gay context—not being historically confined to Grindr or 70s body culture, but to think of it as something human across time with very specific cultural manifestations. There’s something quite powerful about looking to figures from the past to illuminate how I’m feeling. That’s what representation is, and what engaging with a queer past can do.
My position as an outsider was something I wanted to theorize in the book. I’m not trying to stake a claim to Fire Island with this as the only history. I hope that the book might be generative for other things to be written about it. The anthropologist Esther Newton’s book on Cherry Grove is fantastic for being rooted in oral histories and Newton framing her own relationship to the community. I see my work as being very indebted to hers and building upon it, hoping that it can be something other people can respond to, as well.
ESQ: Finally, I have to ask—have you seen the new Fire Island movie? What’s your review?
JP: I really enjoyed it. I thought it was funny. I thought it was sexy and really poignant, and it does a good job of capturing Fire Island in its ambivalence. It captures what is compelling and pleasurable about a place as well as what is complicated. I really engaged with it as a portrait of life there.
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