Jack Parlett - Fire Island: A Century in the Life of an American Paradise

Fire Island is that rare book: a compelling social history of a time and place that, through carefully assembled detail and astute analysis, brilliantly illuminates American culture as well as its topic. Interlacing insightful observations with flashes of personal memoir, Parlett beautifully conjures Fire Island as myth, metaphor, and microcosm of queer culture that profoundly changed America.

Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States

A beautiful, beguiling journey to the ultimate queer utopia, a site of riotous hedonism, wild creativity and immense loss. Fire Island is a fascinating, throbbing history that asks the most urgent of contemporary questions: what does paradise look like, and who does it exclude?

Olivia Laing

The zingy tale of one magnetic placeas well as a sprawling rumination on the intertwined urges to get away and get together. Clued-up but insatiably thirsty, poignant, packed with literary intrigue, Fire Island is a beaming beach read.

Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar

An illuminating, well-written history of a unique place.

Kirkus Reviews

Jack Parlett is a writer, poet and scholar. He is the author of The Poetics of Cruising: Queer Visual Culture from Whitman to Grindr, published by the University of Minnesota Press, and Same Blue, Different You, a chapbook. He holds a Junior Research Fellowship at University College, Oxford, where he teaches American literature and literary theory. His essays have appeared in Poetry London, Lit Hub and elsewhere. He lives in Oxford.

jackparlett.com

Fire Island

A Century in the Life of an American Paradise

Jack Parlett

To Frank

Contents

Written in the Sand

Once upon a time, a name becomes a place. My journey to Fire Island from New York City was a familiar one to many: two train rides on the Long Island Railroad, a bus to the ferry port, and a boat across the Great South Bay. I was an eager traveler that July day in 2017, costumed in my new denim shorts, hailing from the UK but living in the city, and anticipating what Id read of hot nights and midsummer dreams.

Fire Island is a long, thin barrier island off the Long Island coast, located around sixty miles away from Manhattan. Roughly thirty-two miles in length and unusually narrow in shape, with the northern and southern ends an easy stroll from one another, the island is comprised of around seventeen different vacation communities, each with their own distinctive character. Two of them, the neighboring communities of Cherry Grove and the Fire Island Pines, positioned roughly in the middle of the islands horizontal stretch, have a rich queer history. It was to the Grove and the Pines that I was headed.

Like any first time, it wasnt quite perfect. The trip had its share of stumbles and miscalculations. My friend Celine and I were staying in her friends house in Point OWoods, a private, family-oriented community a few miles west of Cherry Grove. From there we set off along the beach around sunset, armed with the hardy accoutrements of island living that had kindly been lent to us by our hosts. It was the first time Id taken bug spray and a headlamp with me on a night out.

As we trudged through the evening sand on our way to Cherry Grove, cold and damp on our bare feet, our journey had the feel of an adventure. To our left stood something called the Sunken Forest, a lush nature reserve made up of American holly trees sunken behind the sand dunes. Rich in its biodiversity, the Sunken Forest is a living legacy of the environmental activism that took hold on Fire Island in the 1950s and 1960s. At this time of night, however, it would be full of ticks, and best avoided. This miniature odyssey along the beach made comically literal how entry into the gay world was a matter of crossing thresholds and traversing some rough terrain. The Sunken Forest acts as a buffer between Cherry Grove to the east and Point OWoods and the other straight communities to the west, as if it prevented cross-contamination; as if the separatism that has long made a community like Cherry Grove unique arose from the islands topography.

We were soon to feel the special charm of such a place. After a slog along the sand, the Groves lights were suddenly tantalizingly close, bright red and pink against the dark horizon. We took our headlamps off and put our shoes back on. We went eagerly up the steps onto the boardwalk, past an oceanfront restaurant with tables of men in nice shirts eating seafood and drinking wine, and wandered into the Ice Palace bar, where a drag show was in full swing, with a queen lip-synching to the Eurythmics.

A giddiness overcame us as we sipped beers and went out to the bars pool deck to smoke a cigarette. We knew that this drink in the Ice Palace would be an initial stop on the nights longer route, but for a moment it felt like time stood still, as if wed always been here, at home in a new place that was disarmingly familiar. Later, we walked along the wooden walkways that divide up the layout of Cherry Grove and stand in place of paved roads, with no automobiles allowed on the island besides utility and municipal vehicles. The same air of safety and affirmation permeated on the boardwalks. The eccentrically named cottages were adorned with fairy lights that looked inviting and kitschy; elsewhere there were plastic flamingos decoratively placed in the long grass and rainbow flags hanging from doorways. We said hello to the people we passed, mostly couples and groups of friends, who happily said hello back, an etiquette of geniality I associated most with rural or small-town life, compared to the urban huff or scowl. With its ice-cream parlor and gift shop, the Groves downtown area did feel like a village, only with more drag queens and go-go dancers; quaint, with an edge of sexual permissiveness.

At the eastern end of Lewis Walk, the horizontal street that runs along the edge of the Grove and faces the Atlantic Ocean, the walkways planks gave way to sand, and the houses were replaced by trees. Looking ahead at the dark passage leading towards more vegetation, I could tell from the excited lurch in my stomach that this was the entrance to the Meat Rack, the legendary wooded cruising ground that separates the Grove from the Pines. Tempted as I was to run straight in and explore this mythical free-for-all, there were other discoveries to be made. We took a direct route along the beach and carried on towards the Pines. On our left were the distinctive modernist mansions the community is known for, imposing geometric visions of glass and wood, with ocean views and swimming pools. Some of the houses had fences up around them, but that could hardly muffle the sounds of parties, the gentle thump of house music. To our right, we could make out the shadows of bodies writhing in the sand. Perhaps the Meat Rack was too busy tonight, or it was still unfashionably early to be seen there.

Before we went to one of the clubs at the Pines harbor, there was a beach ritual I wanted to perform. Roughly following a map on my phone, I was looking for a specific intersection, where Ocean Walk meets Crown Walk. This night in Fire Island was also a pilgrimage of sorts: it was somewhere near this point on the beach that poet Frank OHara was killed in a dune buggy accident, in the early hours of a Sunday morning in July 1966. OHaras work had brought me not only to Fire Island, but to New York in the first place, where I had moved for an extended research trip to work on my PhD about American poetry and cruising. Discovering his poems as a confused student was a formative experience, offering me what felt like a new, private vocabulary for loving other men. As I scrolled to find the list of OHaras poems I wanted to hear in this moment, the excitement of our evening in the Grove gave way to something more melancholy, the buzz fading against the vastness of the ocean. After a pause, I played a recording of OHara reading Ode to Joy, his voice tinny but unmistakable. In that moment, the utopian bluster of the poems first line felt resonant: We shall have everything we want and therell be no more dying.