At Cherry Grove

Fire Island, 35 miles long and never more than half a mile wide, runs parallel to the South Shore of Long Island. Famous for its rare ecology as well as its gay nightlife, it flips the traditional narrative of queer migration from rural to metropolitan America on its head. The ‘sunken forest’ – scrubland through which deer wander freely – is next door to the barrier island’s gay villages: Cherry Grove (the community more closely associated with lesbians) and the Pines (gay men).

A rainbow flag flew beside the Stars and Stripes as I arrived in Cherry Grove harbour last September. ‘Few other minorities have depended on being so hidden for survival as the gays,’ Esther Newton wrote in Cherry Grove, Fire Island (1993), but nearly twenty years later I found the opposite. Joan and Lorraine have been together for thirty years and have summered on Fire Island for nearly as long. They introduced me to Susan Kravitz, a photographer, who first came here with her husband in the 1970s. Seeing the island’s gay visitors at ease with one another made it easier for her to come out. After she left her husband, Fire Island was a ‘pure safe haven’, she said. ‘You could come here and be who you wanted to be.’

The earliest gay visitors to Cherry Grove arrived in the 1920s, ‘theatre people’ from New York City; mostly white and middle-class closeted gays and lesbians who heard of the place through word of mouth. Away from their families and jobs, but only two hours from the city, the island was the perfect place to escape to relative freedom.

By the 1950s and 1960s, Fire Island had made it into gay pulp fiction novels, and the increasing numbers of visitors included working-class women from Jewish and Italian immigrant families who came on day trips or took jobs at Cherry Grove’s mafia-backed bars. The place also appeared in local newspapers, which viciously outed men who had been arrested for ‘public indecency’. The stories of persecution could have put gay visitors off, but they didn’t. It was ‘a constant play place’, according to Edrie, who bought her cabin on the island in the 1970s, and joined in with the costume parties and theatre performances.

Cherry Grove, as a mixed-gender community, stood apart from the second-wave feminist lesbian separatist communities formed across North America in the 1960s and 1970s. When Edrie first arrived at Cherry Grove, men outnumbered women, but the Aids crisis changed that, causing the death of a significant number of the community’s male homeowners. The main divide today, as far as I could tell, seemed to be not so much between men and women as between (older) homeowners and (younger) daytrippers.

In the evening I walked east through the Meat Rack – an outdoor cruising ground – to the Pines, which was developed in the early 1970s as a family community but soon adopted by gay men spilling over from the Grove. As I passed the large, gated modernist houses set back from the boardwalk, there was loud music playing (you might be missing a great pool party, if you could only see through the trees). In the words of Andrew Holleran’s novel Dancer from the Dance, a paean to late 1970s gay culture in New York City, the Pines ‘was for madness, for hot nights, kisses, and herds of stunning men’.

Newton described Cherry Grove twenty years ago as ‘too white, too middle-class and too middle-aged to be a microcosm of America’s diverse lesbian and gay communities’. The same is still said of the Grove and the Pines today. In Fire Island: Love, Loss and Liberation in an American Paradise, published last year, Jack Parlett writes:

The fact that the Grove and the Pines have long provided respite from anti-gay oppression does not mean that they have also succeeded in undoing other imbalances of structural oppression. Its offerings as a hedonistic idyll seem utopian in the abstract.

Conversations I had on the island seemed to confirm this: only four Black drag queens have won the Miss Fire Island pageant in seventy years, I was told, while most homeowners are still wealthy and predominantly white. But attempts to change this history of exclusion are underway: the BOFFO artist residency was established on the island in 2012 and invites predominantly queer artists of colour.

At Edrie’s house, I asked if the lesbian communities of Cherry Grove had sex like the men at the Pines. ‘I think I heard of a threesome in the eighties,’ Kravitz’s wife said, not kidding. ‘In those days’ – the 1950s and 1960s – ‘women didn’t talk about sex generally,’ Edrie said, ‘or even breasts.’ But there was ‘dyke drama’, Kravitz said. When someone’s relationship wasn’t going well, everyone would know about it. The women supported one another emotionally; new arrivals had often left husbands and children behind. The stakes were high. For much of the 20th century, it was difficult to gain and maintain financial independence if you were out as a gay woman. ‘You could be arrested, put in the mental hospital, your family would be ruined,’ Kravitz said of the 1970s.

A lot has changed since then. As ‘acceptance’ of LGBTQ+ people has somewhat improved, we have spilled out from ‘gaybourhoods’ into a more dispersed social geography. Sold the false promise of safety and inclusion, we told ourselves we no longer needed to band together or visit gay bars as we once did. Greater sexual fluidity among a new generation bolsters our community in some ways – there are literally more of us who identify under the LGBTQ+ umbrella – but makes it more porous in others. Our wins have therefore also been a loss: there were an estimated two hundred lesbian bars in the United States during the 1980s; in 2019 there were fifteen.

In this context, Cherry Grove is an outlier. But the future is uncertain. In the US in 2022, drag performances have been attacked, right-wing extremist groups were intercepted en route to a Pride event in Idaho, more than 2500 books have been banned, and there is real talk of rescinding same-sex marriage.

Esther Newton splits her time between Michigan and a lesbian RV park in Florida, where a ‘Don’t Say Gay Bill’ was passed in July. It’s a ‘big contrast’ to the Grove, she told me, when we talked over Zoom recently. Cherry Grove is a form of resistance, she said, and yet it is political without being overtly political; it has always been chiefly a resort, a place to escape from the homophobia of the outside world.

Fire Island may not exist for ever; its position on the edge of the Atlantic leaves it vulnerable to hurricanes and rising seas. But Newton is confident of its resilience. It has deeper roots than most LGBTQ+ communities: men used to cruise there during blackouts in the Second World War; it endured the devastation of the HIV/Aids pandemic in the 1980s and 1990s; and the tourism industry has bounced back after the Covid-19 lockdowns. It isn’t perfectly unified or inclusive, but nor is our wider LGBTQ+ community. Fire Island, like all queer utopias, and indeed most holiday resorts, is a place on which to project our fantasies, a place of ongoing potential.