Gay Fire Island

Fire Island is a thirty-mile barrier island off the south shore of Long Island, New York, and it contains the two oldest continuously operating gay summer communities in the United States: Cherry Grove, which has been a gay gathering place since the 1930s, and Fire Island Pines, which developed as a more affluent gay summer community in the 1950s and 1960s. The two communities are separated by about a mile of Fire Island National Seashore, connected by a boardwalk through the dunes and — more infamously — by The Meat Rack, the pine barrens between the communities that have served as a cruising area for the better part of a century.

The fundamental character of Fire Island that distinguishes it from every other gay destination in the United States is the absence of cars. There are no roads on the gay communities of Fire Island; the only transportation is the boardwalks that run through each community, and the only conveyances are red wagons (used to transport luggage and groceries from the ferry dock) and bicycles. The result is a social environment unlike any other: a small, dense, walkable community where everyone you encounter is on foot, where the social life plays out on porches and in the few public spaces, and where the insularity of island life creates the specific intimacy of a place where, by the end of a summer weekend, you have seen everyone multiple times.

Cherry Grove is the original and historically more democratic of the two communities — a mixed gay and lesbian space that has been welcoming women as well as men since its earliest days. The Grove Hotel and The Ice Palace disco are the anchors of Cherry Grove's social life. Cherry Grove has a long history with drag culture; the Foundation for Cherry Grove has documented the community's history since the 1930s, and the Grove has been host to generations of drag performers, including some of the figures who later became important in the broader gay cultural world. The community's architecture is the casual beach shack tradition — small, colorful, densely packed houses on narrow boardwalks — and it retains a democratic, come-as-you-are character that distinguishes it from the Pines.

Fire Island Pines developed later and has always been more affluent and more male-dominated than Cherry Grove. The Pines architecture is the architecture of the successful New York gay man's summer house: modernist, expensive, designed. The social life centres on the harbour and the Pines Pavilion / Blue Whale complex, where the main bar overlooks the boat harbour and the weekend tea dance is the social event of the Pines weekend. The Sunday Sip-N-Twirl is the Pines equivalent of Provincetown's Boatslip tea dance — a weekly afternoon institution that has been running for decades.

The relationship between the two communities has always been complex and mutually dependent. The Invasion — held around July 4th weekend — is Fire Island's most legendary social event: a procession of elaborately costumed drag queens from Cherry Grove to the Pines, arriving at the Pines Pavilion by water taxi, which traditionally descends without warning on the often-unprepared Pines crowd. The Invasion began in the 1970s and has been repeated annually, with varying degrees of coordination and chaos, ever since. It is the best single expression of the dynamic between the two communities and one of the most distinctive events in American gay culture.

The Meat Rack — the pine barrens between the communities — has been the most famous outdoor cruising area in the United States since the mid-twentieth century. The name is explicit; the purpose was always explicit; and the tradition has continued across generations despite every change in social mores and the availability of digital alternatives. The Meat Rack is an integral part of Fire Island's identity as a place that has consistently pushed against sexual convention.

Fire Island is accessible only by ferry from Bay Shore, Long Island — a 25-minute crossing from the Bay Shore Ferry Terminal. The ferries run frequently in summer and on a reduced schedule in the shoulder season; in winter, the communities are functionally inaccessible and almost entirely unpopulated. The summer season runs from Memorial Day in late May to Labor Day in early September. The share house is the traditional Fire Island accommodation format — groups of friends or acquaintances rent a house for the season, sharing costs and building a social unit. Individual shares in houses are available and are how most visitors who are not homeowners spend the summer. Weekend rentals are available but expensive. The red wagon for hauling luggage from the ferry dock is an essential accessory.

For visitors arriving from New York City, the combination of Long Island Rail Road to Bay Shore and the ferry is the standard approach: under two hours from Penn Station to the Pines or Grove boardwalk. JFK Airport is about 90 kilometres from Bay Shore. Fire Island is not a city in any conventional sense — it is a summer community of boardwalk-connected beach houses — but it is one of the most significant places in American gay history, and the experience of arriving at the Pines dock on a summer Friday afternoon, watching the crowd assemble from a hundred different directions, is unlike anything else the gay travel world offers.