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Recently screened at the Sydney Film Festival, Fire Island is a rom-com inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the film breaking traditional conventions to feature gay romance as the plot.
The fact that it is streaming on Disney+ speaks clearly about how ordinary non-heterosexualities have become. While it might be surprising that it has taken this long for same-sex romance to reach the mainstream, Australian audiences might be forgiven for wondering about the significance of the title of the film.
The island in question is a barrier island off the coast of Long Island, New York City, featuring a unique and threatened environment that has long been a gay sanctuary, providing a space of freedom and expression at a time when same-sex activity was still illegal and gay communities highly policed.
Prohibition, hurricanes and writing
Fire Island always attracted history’s brightest queer figures. Overlooking the Great South Bay in 1857, Walt Whitman contemplated the “wrecks and wreckers” of Fire Island. Taking respite from his 1882 American lecture series, Oscar Wilde enjoyed several days at Cherry Grove’s Perkinson’s Hotel.
In the Prohibition years of the 1920s, Fire Island’s remote location attracted a new crowd of thirsty mainlanders. To New York’s gay theatre personalities, the Grove’s relaxed policing suggested freedom and safety, though they remained outnumbered by the island’s wealthy heterosexuals.
In the Great Hurricane of 1938, two thirds of the island’s cottages were destroyed. Amassing large debts in the effort to rebuild, straight locals rented their properties to a younger metropolitan crowd, a crowd who heard whispers of the island’s untamed beauty throughout New York’s downtown gay scene. By the 1940s, the island’s small contingent of gay theatre personalities grew to a vibrant queer majority, and Cherry Grove earned its name as America’s first gay and lesbian town.
Read more: https://theconversation.com/art-freedom-and-drag-invasions-the-history-of-new-yorks-fire-island-as-a-gay-sanctuary-185214