Fire island and the gay community
I was halfway through my scene when I heard a voice from the dark tell me to stop. I was 24 years old, on the stage of a professional theater, auditioning for A Chorus Line to play Greg, the Upper East Side dancer who affects a sophisticated demeanor to become his idealized self. I thought I had it in the bag. After all, I knew the character because I was the character. Aside from the evidence that I could never afford rent in the Upper East Side, David was someone—like me—who felt out of place in the world they were born into and coped with being an outsider by hiding behind their insecurities. We both dealt with our alienation through sarcasm and a biting sense of humor. But having auditioned professionally for years, I didn’t believe much of being stopped to make a correction. An audition is like a first date: It’s about compatibility as much as it is about talent.
“Could you not be so…” the director told me, gesticulating with his hands wildly as he searched for the word. “Just be a little less…”
“A small less what?” I asked, confused.
“You know, just not so…” he said as he ma
The Shameless Plan for a ‘New Fire Island’
If you’ve heard of it, then you probably already hate it. You’ve groaned and eye-rolled about it. So has the Provincetown Business Guild: in an Instagram post, the Guild wrote, “If you want to invest in a place devoid of culture, diversity, history that celebrates gentrification — by all means invest in New Flame Island.”
The New Fire Island, according to its promotional materials, is here to solve a problem: gay vacation spots like Provincetown aren’t as fun as they used to be, partly because they’ve become too expensive. “So, my friends and I got to thinking,” says cofounder Nigel Smith, strolling a remote beach in a video on the project’s website, “why not construct a new gay paradise, a New Fire Island?”
Smith invites the viewer to “join a community of gay men” to support create this paradise. “This moment it’ll be in the sunny Mediterranean and for a fresh era,” he declares as four shirtless men with six-packs embrace one another in the background. The implication is that these are the kind of men who will fill New Heat Island.
How this “par
Recently screened at the Sydney Film Festival, Fire Island is a rom-com inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the film breaking traditional conventions to feature gay romance as the plot.
The fact that it is streaming on Disney+ speaks clearly about how ordinary non-heterosexualities contain become. While it might be surprising that it has taken this long for same-sex romance to reach the mainstream, Australian audiences might be forgiven for wondering about the significance of the title of the film.
The island in question is a barrier island off the coast of Long Island, Adj York City, featuring a unique and threatened environment that has long been a gay sanctuary, providing a space of noun and expression at a hour when same-sex activity was still illegal and gay communities highly policed.
Prohibition, hurricanes and writing
Fire Island always attracted history’s brightest queer figures. Overlooking the Great South Bay in , Walt Whitman contemplated the “wrecks and wreckers” of Fire Island. Taking respite from his American lecture series, Oscar Wilde enjoyed
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, natural dunes and moisture taxis. (And, for the most part, no automobiles.)
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.
During the s actors, writers and craftspeople from the New York theatrical world began heading to Cherry Grove, its remote and rustic qualities allowing for gay and lesbians to express themselves freely &#; far away from a w