When I first started going to Fire Island, I was too young to realize why I felt so alone there. Technically, I wasn’t. During those first summers in my early 20s, I was with friends I considered family, and we were surrounded by other gay men who could afford to weekend on the narrow strip of wilderness off the Long Island coast.
A haven for LGBTQ+ people since at least the 1950s and some decades before, Fire Island provides an almost Edenic respite from the straight world. In the Pines and neighboring Cherry Grove, queerness is next to godliness and sexual freedom is a virtue to be worshiped. Geographic isolation is what made these offshore hamlets a sanctuary at a time when queer people faced persecution for mere visibility, and while the community was being decimated by AIDS. Hedonism on Fire Island became its own kind of revolution.
That sense of escape from mainland norms is what intoxicated me in my early years on Fire Island, though I wasn’t running from derision or disease. Tea at dusk and dance floors after dark are where I learned to be proud and sexual and uninhibited, albeit usually under the influence. If I hadn’t yet let go of my shame, at least I could drown it out.
But Fire Island is also where I recognized that, even in an immersive gay fantasia, feeling a sense of belonging was far from guaranteed.
“In our community, money isn’t the only form of currency,” Noah, played by Joel Kim Booster, says in voiceover as ripped queens peel off their shirts on the boat to paradise during the opening sequence of Hulu’s Fire Island. “Race, masculinity, abs — just a few of the metrics we use to separate ourselves into upper and lower classes.”
That thesis sets the scene for an artful and antic-fueled rom-com, written by Booster, that manages to serve its delicately laid romance and comedic bacchanal with a piping hot dose of tea.
Directed by Andrew Ahn, the film deftly illustrates dynamics that much of its target audience know all too well: now that we’ve obtained a degree of acceptance from the dominant culture, gay men are making demands of each other that stress us the hell out. Ferry us off to an island, sic us on each other, and those pressures — to embody fitness, whiteness, wealth, and masculinity — are dialed up to 11. No doubt Fire Island is a privileged escape; it can also feel like a honey trap.
Noah and his crew of misfits first met while working at a Williamsburg brunch spot. They are what Noah calls “poor,” all but one of them are not white, and two of them carry a cheese plate into the hot tub at a pool party — then one yaks in a decorative vase. In other words, they don’t fit the expectation that you have to be “successful, white, and rich with 7% body fat,” as Noah puts it, describing the ideal Fire Island vacationer. (“We are literal trash,” says another friend, played by a scene-stealing Tomás Matos.) They are outsiders in a supposed utopia where only some people have the key.
Over the years, I came to understand that the Pines is as much an enviable getaway as it is a kind of twisted social and sexual experiment. Having an imperfect, Asian body there can feel like wearing an invisibility cloak. Keeping an open heart seems near impossible when the temptation to snap it shut grows greater with every rejection. Affluence is king, and pressures to conform — to attend the right parties, have the best time, and for the love of god, please get laid — are heightened to extremes.
Seeing the joys, but also the alienation and heartache, that I’ve felt on Fire Island so tenderly depicted in this movie is an almost holy experience. When I first started to feel my time in the Pines turn sweet-and-sour, I thought there must be something wrong with me. I was fortunate to have the means to be there, so why should I stress about a monthly gay-cation? But I was growing up, becoming more conscious of my racial difference, and wanted more genuine romance than a beach bender generally allows.
“I used to come here to be gay and stupid, now I come here and I just feel terminally alone,” says Noah’s best friend Howie, played by Bowen Yang in a marvelously delicate heart-on-his-sleeve performance. The pair is perched on the roof of a modest house owned by their den mother (Margaret Cho), surrounded by a canopy of treetops. “I mean like, existentially lonely,” Howie clarifies, when Noah counters that they are “literally swimming in dick.”
In terms of social stratification among gay men, Noah refers to himself in the opening voiceover as “a class traitor” for having a fit body, which grants him greater access than Howie to the so-called sea of dick. It’s a keen observation about the politics of difference and desirability; both Noah and Howie are Asian, and face many of the same slights and oversights. But Howie continually points to the distinction between them, that Noah is still considered more attractive by gay conventions.
While Howie feels outcast on Fire Island, the supercharged environment has helped Noah see how much control over his sense of self he had once ceded to others. “I felt invisible all the time, I was miserable,” Noah recalls. “Then we came out here and, I don’t know, something clicked. I realized how much power I was giving away to other people to make me feel a certain way, and I took it all back.”
Many of us would say we’re on our way to doing the same; still, I might feel more like Howie than Noah sitting up on that roof, depending on the day.
Searching for love amid the tyranny of economic and social caste (a.k.a. a hopeless place) is solid Jane Austen territory, and Booster draws plot inspiration from Pride and Prejudice, a novel about the fallacy of appearances and assumptions. There’s a touch of Emma, too, in Noah’s fixation on getting his dear friend “dicked down” while his own romantic triangle unfolds. (A rigid and seemingly stuck-up L.A. lawyer named Will, played by heartthrob Conrad Ricamora, is the Mr. Darcy to Noah’s Lizzie Bennett.)
The bonds of sisterhood that Fire Island celebrates, and its most captivating love stories, are exclusively between queer Asian men. It’s a reparative yet aching kind of triumph, given how often we are overlooked, considered less desirable or worthy of attention and affection, even in what is supposed to be a liberating refuge.
I wonder what it might have felt like to see a movie like Fire Island before I discovered for myself the giddiness and melancholy of looking for kinship halfway out to sea. I wouldn’t trade away the messy heartbreaks (what else is life for?), but I might have treated myself with more grace. Now I try to focus on drinking in the air, the light, and the hum of affinity underneath the noise.
“I’m so glad you’ve found a way to feel good, despite all the fucked-up shit we deal with,” Howie tells Noah, referring to the defenses his friend has built up around himself. This time it’s Howie who says what everyone could stand to hear, about committing to search for connection despite getting knocked down time and again. “I want to be vulnerable, even if it hurts,” he says.
It’s really the only way to live, at the edge of the world or back on its shores.
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