How Fire Island Became an LGBTQ+ Destination

Stretching 31 miles parallel to Long Island’s South Shore, Fire Island boasts over a dozen quaint seaside communities that have attracted vacationers for more than 100 years. But since the mid-20th century, two of its easternmost hamlets—Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines—have come to define Fire Island in the popular imagination as a destination for LGBTQ+ people.

So much so, says Jack Parlett, author of Fire Island: A Century in the Life of an American Paradise, that the island has come to represent a kind of utopia for the queer community well beyond New York.

Removed from the rhythms of everyday life by its car-free boardwalks and tranquil seclusion, the island hosts a vibrant social scene, highlighted by summer events such as the Pines Party, a massive fundraiser that draws thousands for a beachside celebration benefiting LGBTQ+ causes.

“It symbolizes a place away from the dominant culture—the sort of morality of the mainland—where people are free to have sex, to connect, to dance, to experience queer joy in a place that feels unbridled and not bogged down with the things that restrain us in everyday life,” Parlett says.

Rustic resort communities in Ocean Beach, Saltaire and Cherry Grove were well established among Long Island families by the late 19th century. But Parlett writes that it wasn’t until the 1930s that gay men and lesbians among the “bohemians from the city and stars of the Broadway stage” who frequented Ocean Beach began to explore Cherry Grove.

Unlike its neighboring community several miles west, the Grove lacked both electricity and local policing in the 1930s. Its remoteness, Parlett says, was “very appealing to a community of people who were looking for a vacation spot where they could feel like they weren’t being scrutinized.”

“You had the feeling of really being on the edge of somewhere—on the edge of the Atlantic. So, it was kind of an escape from feeling hyper visible,” Parlett explains. “I think that was crucial to its appeal.”

Throughout this early period, queer people from the city visited alongside the Long Island families who owned houses and property in the Grove, creating what Parlett describes as an atmosphere of “mutual suspicion.” While there was never really a sense that the community changed hands from those Long Island families to the “theater people,” Parlett cites anthropologist Esther Newton’s 1993 book Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America's First Gay and Lesbian Town, in which she identifies the “Great Hurricane” of September 1938 as a turning point.

The storm decimated many of the houses in the Grove, spurring old families to sell off their property. “Rental and property prices plummeted,” Parlett writes. “As the history of queer neighborhoods the world over tells us, such enclaves usually form, in the first instance, as a result of cheap rents in run-down areas.”

The “theater people” bought up those lots, further embedding a queer community in Cherry Grove. What emerged in the decade that followed, Parlett says, was a queer scene that was not altogether different from the one we know today. Social life in the Grove revolved around the bar at Duffy’s Hotel—which had survived the hurricane to reopen in 1939—and other watering holes. “They weren’t specifically queer bars. They weren’t even run by queer people,” Parlett explains. “But the demographic, the people who happened to be there, sort of made them de facto queer spaces.”

Parlett points to W.H. Auden’s 1948 poem “Pleasure Island” as an encapsulation of Cherry Grove’s reputation in the 1940s. “He wrote about this place that was hedonistic, gossipy, full of sexual possibility, with a very active bar scene,” Parlett says. Queer people in the Grove “were getting naked together on the beach, they were going to parties dressed in drag, they were sharing beds, sharing partners. I guess the word that comes to mind is ‘frolicking,’ in the sense that there was a great freedom, even as far back as the '40s. It was a space to play.”

But visitors to the Grove weren't entirely safe from anti-gay violence during this time. Longtime Grove residents interviewed in Michael Fisher’s 2018 documentary Cherry Grove Stories recall a period in which visitors were not allowed off the ferry from Sayville unless they could prove they were staying with someone in the community—a measure instituted to prevent violence against the gay community.

Tensions with the remaining longtime residents and local police also continued into the mid-20th century. Arrests for public nudity were common, as were police raids on the Meat Rack, a wooded area separating Cherry Grove from neighboring Fire Island Pines, where men cruised for sex.

The raids and arrests continued into the 1960s, but they began to subside after the Mattachine Society, a pre-Stonewall gay rights organization, campaigned against them in the late '60s. The decline of police raids marked a turning point. Combined with the growing number of LGBTQ+ homeowners, businesses and social institutions on the island, it helped cement Cherry Grove and the Pines as places where queer people could live more openly than they could in many parts of the country.

But the struggle against police abuses wasn’t the only conflict to emerge in the 1960s. By that point, two generations of queer people with significantly different outlooks on visibility were sharing Fire Island’s beaches and boardwalks, leading to what Parlett describes as a “splintering” between the out-and-proud, rambunctious folks in the Grove and the more discreet, professional class who sought refuge in the neighboring Pines.

The division between the two communities came to a head in the summer of 1976, when Teri Warren, a Grove regular, was turned away from a restaurant in the Pines for wearing drag. In retaliation, a group of Grove regulars and residents dressed in drag boarded a water taxi the following July 4 to invade the Pines. Parlett writes that they were greeted with cheers in the Pines harbor, and the event—now known as the Invasion of the Pines—has become an annual tradition drawing hundreds of drag performers and thousands of onlookers on Independence Day each year.

While Cherry Grove and the Pines have come to symbolize a kind of paradise for several generations of LGBTQ+ people, Parlett is quick to point out that not all LGBTQ+ people have historically had access to that paradise. The dominant demographic in both communities has been affluent white professionals.

“It’s not that there weren’t people of color there or that there weren’t working-class people there. But they weren’t as well represented in the spaces on Fire Island as they were in comparable venues in the city, which has a much more diverse and mixed and integrated queer community,” Parlett explains.

“It’s offered a really important haven for many queer people. That doesn’t mean that it’s always offered a haven to all queer people or to all types of queer people, and that’s what complicates the picture ultimately,” Parlett says. “As with any utopia, the real picture’s always more complicated. It’s a place that’s always changing, and I think it’s changing a lot today.”

Still, for many LGBTQ+ people, Fire Island remains one of the few places in the world where queer life feels not only accepted, but woven into the fabric of everyday life. As the island continues to evolve, Cherry Grove and the Pines remain enduring symbols of queer joy, resilience and belonging.