Jack Parlett on Fire Island's Queer Literary Hsitory

At Lit Hub, Jack Parlett looks at the queer literary history and oft-neglected present of New York's Fire Island, well-known for being the place Frank O'Hara died, "a place where hedonism could be balanced with reflection, where joy co-existed with the space to ruminate upon mortality." More:

...It offered repose from the hectic and over-determined “meanings” of urban life. Fire Island was somewhere over the rainbow—a place where you could look up and see a “nickelodeon soaring over the island from sea to bay.”

But these were still the years before the rainbow was an explicitly political symbol for gay liberation. The subsequent decade of drugs and disco might then seem, at first glance, to be the island’s Golden Age. Some of the best-known gay novelists of the 1970s, including Edmund White, Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano, writers who later formed the Violet Quill collective in 1980-81, used it as a setting.

But Fire Island emerged from its 70s literary outings as a risky and even melancholic space. Holleran’s 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance, re-issued this June by Vintage Books with a Tom Bianchi cover and a new introduction by Alan Hollinghurst, figures Fire Island as a dazzling, intoxicating purgatory that inspires suicidal and self-destructive devotion amongst its “herds of stunning men.” It is known by some characters as “Dangerous Island,” because “you could lose your heart, your reputation, your contact lenses.” And the final hundred pages of Larry Kramer’s controversial Faggots (also from 1978) paint life on the island as an abject farce of fucking, fisting, and father-son wrestling in the Meat Rack, the infamous wooded cruising area between the Grove and the Pines.

By troubling the island’s paradisiacal status, albeit problematically, these novels ward against a nostalgic framing of the 70s as the utopic calm before the storm of what followed. In the years of HIV/AIDS, Fire Island was once again imagined, and with some urgency, as an elegiac landscape...

Read on at Lit Hub.