Fire Island, the ‘hottest’ beach in the world: 100 years of art, parties and wild sex

About 12,000 years ago, nature created Fire Island, which served as a barrier to protect Long Island’s coastline from the hurricanes and cyclones that hit that area of the U.S. A century ago, a group of artists turned this small island into a refuge for the LGBTQ+ community. This thin strip of sand an hour and a half from New York – “as slim as a parenthesis” as Andrew Holleran described it in his cult classic novel Dancer from the Dance – has been a wild corner of the world since time immemorial. It was home to the Unquachog and Secatogue peoples, a hideout for pirates and smugglers and, since 1920s, the Mount Olympus of queer culture and identity.

To celebrate its centenary, the Monacelli Press has just published Fire Island Art: 100 Years, the first book to explore the island’s rich artistic and aesthetic history and its influence on artists such as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Tom Bianchi and Wolfgang Tillmans. Its editor, John Dempsey, a tech executive, historian and president of the Fire Island Pines Historical Society, charts a century of art, drugs and free love on the “hottest” beach in the world, from the island’s origins as a colony of nudists in the jazz age to the present day, via its heyday in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and its decline in the 1980s due to the outbreak of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

By the mid-1920s, prior to the Wall Street crash, New York was already emerging as the capital of skyscrapers. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building were becoming part of the skyline while, less than 100 kilometers from the city, Fire Island still had no electricity, no running water, and no roads or cars. The lack of amenities kept family tourism at bay, but it attracted gays. As Dempsey explains in his book, the LGBTQ+ community has always liked isolated and difficult-to-access spaces because they allow the public practice of intimate behaviors that heteronormative society rejects. The vast dunes and dark pine forests of Fire Island provided the perfect environment for these forbidden behaviors.

In 1938, nature contrived to make the island even more inhospitable and, therefore, more attractive to the gay community. The massive 1938 New England hurricane destroyed the few infrastructures that existed. The natural disaster served as a catalyst for the queer boom. Many owners sold their demolished homes to gay New York artists, from actors to fashion designers, musicians, dancers, architects, interior designers and writers.

The island’s only hotel, Duffy’s, in the town of Cherry Grove, became one of the first gay public spaces in the United States. At Duffy’s, same-sex couples could drink, dance, and kiss without fear of being arrested. Lesbians were also invited to the party. The writer Patricia Highsmith used to take her lovers to Cherry Grove, where she coincided with other powerful women in the community, such as the socialite Kay Guinness and Ruth Peter Worth. Once, Worth was asked what was so wonderful about Fire Island and she replied, “Homosexuality. There I was the majority. That was my world and the other world wasn’t real.”

In the 1950s, “the other world” succumbed to the institutionalized homophobia of McCarthyism. Driven by Senator Joseph McCarthy, U.S. authorities began to hunt down gays. The New York intelligentsia used Fire Island as a refuge. W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood and James Baldwin landed on its beaches and helped build a creative community far from the prejudices and conventions of the time.

Truman Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) in the summer house of theater director and patron Frank Carrington, located between the towns of Fire Island Pines and Cherry Grove. Capote was inspired by his friend, the actress Joan McCracken – another regular holidaymaker on the island – to create the character of Holly Golightly. Capote would begin dating McCracken’s husband, former dancer and novelist Jack Dunphy, who would be his life partner and friend until his death in 1984.

Fire Island also served as an inspiration for Edward Albee, who wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the summer home of businessman and philanthropist Morris Golde. The play examines a stormy middle-aged marriage, and opened in 1962 to become a hit on Broadway. Four years later, Mike Nichols adapted it to the big screen in a version starring Hollywood’s golden couple: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Taylor won an Oscar for her stunning portrayal of Martha, the desperate wife, although it was known that her own marriage to Burton was more tempestuous behind than in front of the camera.

Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret French lived their own cinematic love story on the island. Jared and Margaret were husband and wife and Paul and Jared were lovers. Combined, they formed the artistic trio PaJaMa. Cadmus and the Frenches took advantage of the summers on the island to explore sexual tension and paint illustrious friends such as the photographer George Platt Lynes, the dancer José “Pete” Martínez and Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of the New York Ballet.

At the same time, Richard Avedon and his wife, Doe, rocked up thanks to Lillian Bassman, a fashion photographer and art director at Harper’s Bazaar, and her husband, Paul Himmel. Avedon’s early work for Harper’s was heavily influenced by Fire Island’s aesthetic. The photographer used to coincide on Fire with Leonard Gershe, famous for having composed the lyrics of Born in a Trunk, performed by Judy Garland and James Mason in the musical A Star Is Born (1954). Gershe was inspired by Avedon to write the screenplay for Funny Face.

Artists Peter Hujar and Paul Thek also took to visiting Fire Island in the summer and settled in a fisherman’s house in Oakleyville, the small town where Greta Garbo also spent her summers. While Hujar dedicated himself to painting his friends (almost always clothed) and his lovers (almost always naked), Thek produced landscapes in watercolor that evoked the fragility and resistance of the environment.

The Fire Island community survived the persecution of McCarthyism and was able to experience the birth of a new era. In the 1960s, architects such as Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey and Horace Gifford replaced the old beach houses with modern temples to hedonism – minimalist spaces designed for maximum pleasure.

Gifford’s arrest in 1965 for “illegal behavior” ruined his career in New York, but triggered his rise on the island. The architect designed more than 60 houses there, giving the area its distinctive style of wooden houses drawn in simple lines with large windows, all perfectly integrated into nature. Gifford became an icon in his own right. He would receive his clients on the beach wearing only a pair of Speedos and would draw the plans of his projects in the sand with a stick. According to Christopher Rawlins, author of the book Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction, the architect once told a wealthy gay client, for whom he had designed a house, “Now you’ll have 20 closets that you can get out of.”

But most of the residents of Fire Island had already come out of the closet, or at least as much as was possible in the 1970s following the Stonewall riots. Designer Calvin Klein bought a house from Horace Gifford in 1977 and hired him to expand it. The architect lined the pool in black and placed a mirror at one end to make the pool appear larger. The mirror also meant that the designer’s guests – Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, Perry Ellis, David Geffen, Barry Diller, Prince Egon von Fürstenberg and countless men in tight trunks – could see themselves reflected as they swam.

As John Dempsey points out in his book, the simple lines of Fire Island’s architecture and the pastel colors of the beach, sand, and sky inspired Calvin Klein’s minimalist clothing collections. In 1982, Klein launched his underwear line with a huge billboard in Times Square on which model Tom Hintnaus showed off his attributes in white briefs. The world had never been exposed so publicly to a naked man. Visitors to Fire Island, on the other hand, had been seeing Adonises like Hintnaus strolling the streets of Cherry Grove for decades.

In the midst of the disco era, nightclubs such as The Ice Palace and Pines Pavilion were wild. Former model John Whyte opened the Blue Whale bar in Fire Island’s Pines, where the Tea Dance, one of the first openly gay parties, was held every night. There were no teapots and no scones were offered, but cocaine, poppers, and LSD were served on a silver platter.

That’s also where the first after-parties took shape. The most daring then got lost among the dunes and pine forests of Meat Rack, an area between Pines and Cherry Gove where cruising was practiced. “Fire was a really amazing place... It was crazy fun, a very, very vividly sexy place,” David Hockney said of it.

Artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Larry Stanton and the illustrator Antonio Lopez were regular faces at these endless parties. Mapplethorpe’s vitalist photos taken on the island and in New York helped to introduce the eroticized male nude into the photographic canon. What no one could see was the devastating pandemic that would hit this community lurking around the corner.

In June 1981, the first HIV/AIDS headlines appeared. “Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals,” was the headline The New York Times went with on July 3 of that year. John Dempsey mentions the testimony of acclaimed photographer Nan Goldin, who first heard about the so-called ‘gay cancer’ that same summer while on vacation on Fire Island: “We all laughed. We didn’t know the magnitude of the matter,” she said. The disease desecrated the island’s homosexual population. Dempsey recalls in his book how many heterosexual and lesbian locals cared for the sick who had been abandoned by their families, doing so until the end.

HIV/AIDS killed many prominent members of the New York arts community who spent their summers on Fire Island; For example, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Horace Gifford... But the pandemic failed to snuff out the island’s spirit. Today, everything remains the same as when it started: cars are prohibited and wearing clothes is optional. Many artists still arrive every summer on board the ferries to rest, create, have fun and enjoy some free love.

“Nothing is lost as long as it is remembered,” said the banker Arthur Lambert, a Fire Island regular. Social media continually remind us of the mystique and aesthetics of the island. Its imagery is more alive than ever on Instagram, where hundreds of thousands of men post millions of photos of themselves posing in Speedos every summer, showing off well-defined muscles, handsome friends and endless parties. Before, these ‘demigods’ only inhabited the thin tongue of sand that stretches off the coast of Long Island. Now they are everywhere, in every swimming pool of an impossible blue, on every beach of unbelievable beauty.

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