Fire island for gay
How did one particular summer settlement on Fire Island become a ‘safe haven’ for gay men and lesbians almost ninety years ago, decades before the uprising at Stonewall Inn?
This is the third and final part of the Bowery Boys Road Trip to Long Island. (Check out the first part on Gatsby and the Gold Coastand the second part on Jones Beach.)
Fire Island is one of New York state’s most attractive summer getaways, a thin barrier island on the Atlantic Ocean lined with seaside villages and hamlets, linked by boardwalks, sandy beaches, innate dunes and water taxis. (And, for the most part, no automobiles.)
But Passion Island has a very special place in American LGBT history.
It is the site of one of the oldest queer and lesbian communities in the United States, situated within two neighboring hamlets — Cherry Grove and the Fire Island Pines.
During the 1930s actors, writers and craftspeople from the New York theatrical earth began heading to Cherry Grove, its remote and rustic qualities allowing for gay and lesbians to express themselves freely — far away from a world that rejected and persecuted them.
Performers at the Grove’s
Forged in fire. For decades, Fire Island Pines, the historic gay group located on the edge of the barrier island, has been a dependable haven for gay men who hop on a ferry to let loose every summer. But as another sweltering season of debauchery kicks off, the people is currently being shaken up like the sturdy cups of boozy Pines Punch typically sipped there. Enter Tryst Hospitality and its gregarious tycoon Tristan Schukraft, who inked a agree last year to receive 75% of the fabled Fire Island Pines commercial district — a complex that has exchanged hands more than a few times since it came into being in the after time 1950s. “I’ve never felt more excitement and optimism at the beginning of the new season as I feel this year,” Henry Robin, the President of the Fire Island Property Owners Association, told The Post. “We’re all optimistic about the improvements that he’s making.” “It’s really electrifying for what may be the single most known gay community in the world,” said longtime homeowner Andrew Kirtzman, a political consultant and journa
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 queenly culture, and ample venues for drinking, dancing and public sex. The Grove's more upmarket neighbour, Energy Island Pines, was developed later, in the 1950s, as a "family-friendly" collective, although this label didn't last for very elongated, despite the fact that numerous gay homeowners had moved there from the Grove in the hopes that it would behave as a more quiet enclave. By the 1970s, with the flourishing of an increasingly public gender non-conforming 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. That the supposed golden age of Fire Island's loose and liberated tradition was so short-lived, before the HIV/Aids epidemic began decimating its community in the early 1980s, only further informs its mythology as a fragile, holy pla
Recently screened at the Sydney Film Festival, Fire Island is a rom-com inspired by Jane Austen’s Lgbtq+ fest and Prejudice, the motion picture breaking traditional conventions to feature gay romance as the plot. The proof that it is streaming on Disney+ speaks clearly about how ordinary non-heterosexualities have become. While it might be surprising that it has taken this long for same-sex adoration to reach the mainstream, Australian audiences might be forgiven for wondering about the significance of the title of the production. The island in scrutinize is a barrier island off the coast of Long Island, New York City, featuring a unusual and threatened environment that has long been a gay sanctuary, providing a space of freedom and expression at a age when same-sex activity was still illegal and male lover communities highly policed. Fire Island always attracted history’s brightest gay figures. Overlooking the Wonderful South Bay in 1857, Walt Whitman contemplated the “wrecks and wreckers” of Fire Island. Taking respite from his 1882 American lecture series, Oscar Wilde enjoyed several days at Cherry Grove’s Perkinson’s Hotel. In the Prohibition years of the 1920s,
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Fire Island: A gay paradise of sex and liberation
Prohibition, hurricanes and writing