Cherry Grove Beach

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Cherry Grove Beach is the ocean-facing stretch of the Fire Island National Seashore immediately in front of the Cherry Grove community, and it has been a gay gathering space since at least the late 1930s, making it the oldest continuously used gay beach in the United States. The beach itself is the wide, flat, Atlantic-facing strand that characterises all of the Fire Island oceanfront — clean, well-maintained by the National Seashore, and backed by the dune system that protects the barrier island. The specific character of Cherry Grove Beach is its community context: the boardwalks of Cherry Grove end at the beach, and the afternoon scene on the sand — especially on summer weekends — is an extension of the social life of the community, with groups of friends, established regulars, and the specific casualness of a beach that belongs to its community rather than to the tourist world. The beach has no formal gay designation and no signage; it is a gay beach because the community that lives behind the dunes has been using it as such for ninety years. The combination of the ocean, the National Seashore's protected dune landscape, and the Cherry Grove community behind it makes this one of the most historically resonant outdoor spaces in American gay life.