fire island : seminal epicenter of sun-drenched gayness, pillar of homo joy. i’ve been to this place twice. both times working the fire island dance festival, but this weekend, i was able to experience it for the first time divorced from hauling heavy platforms up and down boardwalks and dealing with hundreds of dehydrated patrons.
my affair with the island started long ago. i met this girl, remy, at an acting summer camp and she told me about her favorite film, parting glances - starring richard ganoung and steve buscemi. in this film, michael (ganoung) and nick (buscemi) are dealing with the reality of nick living with AIDS while michael fantasizes about time they spent living it up on fire island. this film is brilliant. the direction is blissful and each shot seems to be embraced perfectly by the score (mostly excerpts from a mozart rondo and snippets of bronski beat). this film began my infamous affair with the island.
fire island is divided up into several little townships. the most notoriously gay of these places is Fire Island Pines (pictured above - ocean walk). the community has about 700 houses, two or three dance clubs and a harbor with some additional commerce. there are no paved roads in the pines and one gets around by sticking to the (sometimes trecherous) boardwalks.
my experience this past weekend was very nice. a lot of my time was spent schmoozing with potential ticket buyers and selling tickets (to the dance festival) in the harbor, but we were also put up in this beautiful ocean front house.
here is a shot of the ocean with the sun setting to the west (behind me) :
fire island is a sand bar, so all the buildings are basically built on wooden stilts. here is a shot of the house next to ours with a vacant lot in between :
the room i stayed in didn’t have any doors - there was just this big curtain that partitioned it off from the rest of the house. my colleagues and i dubbed it the “orgy room,” but fear not! nothing of that sort occurred there this weekend. i loved the fact that there were sliding doors leading out to the second floor terrace directly from my room. the sound of the ocean while i slept was a lullaby.
this is the master bedroom suite upstairs :
being in this house made me think of remy. the house we stayed in was so similar to the one in the film. i wondered where she was now - i haven’t seen her since i was 16 - and if she still watched parting glances when she needed a little boost, like me.
something about the energy of the pines still remains. even though the gay community has changed and the carefree wildness has been slightly tamed, fire island still embodies a kind of paradise. it would be easy for me to look at the people and politics and get scared or feel judgmental, but fortunately the setting happens to be one of oceanic calm that seeps into you the moment you forget it’s there.
