Gay sex fire island
Inside the 'Disneyland of sex' where there's 'wild amounts' of very public nudity and 'orgies with 200 people'
Just off the coast of New York City and running parallel to Long Island lies the lesser-known paradise of Fire Island - a slim strip of country with a magnetic power pull far beyond its size.
Once a sleepy 19th-century beach town, the barrier island has transformed itself into a modern-day 'gay Disneyland' said to be home to some of the 'wildest parties' on the East Coast of America.
In winter, Fire Island is a ghost town with only 445 permanent residents, as noted in the 2023 census.
But from June to September, it comes alive - with more than 20,000 partygoers flocking to the island for a summer of raunchy parties, hot flings and memories to last a lifetime.
Approximately 60 miles away from New York and 32 miles in length, Blaze Island is characterised by miles of wooden boardwalk, free-roaming deer and modernist beach houses - and no cars are allowed.
It has been a protected space for LGBTQ people for more than 100 years, sometimes being referred to as a current 'queer Mecca'.
And it's still just as popular as ever, with highlights of the calendar including the Fr
Document Journal
Text by
Jack Parlett
Posted
Between the Pines and Cherry Grove rests a legacy of gay want, treading nature and artifice off Elongated Island’s South Shore
In an early scene in Matthew Lopez’s 2018 play The Inheritance, a queer couple is struggling in the bedroom. “Think of something sexy,” one of them says in an attempt to get his spouse in the mood. “Remember that day on Fire Island that we watched those two guys fucking in the Meat Rack?” he asks. “I want we’d done that.” This visualization does the job, tipping over into longing as the memory of past voyeurism gives way to a fantasy of participation. Fire Island, that storied spit of land off Long Island’s South Shore, is both real and mythic; it’s a destination that is approachable from the urban area (by train, another train, bus, and then ferry), but also a projection of an idyll where queer people can love freely. As such, the island has prolonged served as a space where memory and fantasy see, providing imaginative fodder for visions of a sex animation that is simultaneously chic and transgressive. The Meat Rack is its soil zero.
While in American slang, “meat rack” refers g
Coming of Age During the 1970s — Chapter Two: Fire Island and Other Stories
Episode Notes
While activists are demonstrating, filing lawsuits, and pushing for anti-discrimination laws, 16-year-old Eric is on a ferry to Fire Island, a mythical gay refuge off Lengthy Island, with his neighbor Rev. Mullen—a trip that would introduce him to a vivid slice of mid-1970s gay life, ready or not.
Episode first published April 27, 2023.
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Learn more about some of the topics discussed in the episode by exploring the links below.
General resources about Fire Island:
- Cherry Grove, Heat Island: Sixty Years in America’s FIrst Gay and Lesbian Town, by Esther Newton (Duke University Urge , 2014).
- “The Fable of Energy Island” by Clark Polak (Drum, November 9, 1965).
- “Cherry Grove Stays Aloof from Gay Activists’ Cause” by Tom Buckley (New York Times, July 14, 1972).
- “Hidden in a Fire Island House, the Soundtrack of Love and Loss” by T.M. Brown (New York Times, April 29, 2022).
- “The Very Gay History of Fire Island,” the Bowery Boys podcast (2021).
- Local pres
On a solitary sandbar, tire tracks conjure the dune buggy that plowed into and killed O’Hara in late July, 1966. The sky above is bright purple, yet almost-white and all-black. It’s an image of searching, not just for other bodies, but beauty, the sublime even. Leifheit provides an opposite to Kohei Yoshiyuki’s photographic exhibition Koen (The Park), (1979), in which couples in Tokyo bushes, and the voyeurs around them, are revealed by infrared bulbs. Leifheit seems uninterested in catching anybody out, in shaming.
The men may be mellow, stern, endearingly creepy. Their skin is variously suntanned, fuzzy, smoothed like sock-worn ankles, nubile, wrinkling, sagging, supple. Some watch ecstatic, others wary, many ravenous. And what’s with the fish draping one pair? Curling from one gaping mouth is what appears to be the tail of another, as if swallowed whole while suffocating its host. I search online (cannibalistic fish + Atlantic), then stop and accept the tableau as myth: la petite mort, another enigmatically shimmering surface.
The participants, even in roleplay, debunk the notion of false intimacy. With their bare skin, proximity, vulnerability to contagion, even sus