This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Unknown speaker: People come in in their boats. It would just be wall-to-wall men. All these men with their shirts off that had been working out. It was quite inspirational. I remember working there and seeing it, that the walls would sweat. That's how hot the dance floor would get. I mean, the dance floor, you couldn't really get to the dance floor. And if you could, you were kind of jammed in like a subway, but you're still just so happy to be there, you know? And I would say when the walls sweat and you have to wash the floor three times to set it for dinner, you have tea.

[0:44] Jess Rothschild: I'm Jess Rothschild, and this is Finding Fire Island, Season 2, Episode 3, Sex Before the Internet. We'll explore a time before apps and algorithms, when connection in the pines was an art, the art of cruising. And whether it's 1976 or 2026, it's still present at the island's most beloved daily ritual, tea. And everybody took it very seriously. Everybody was dressed. Everybody was ready to go. Everybody was flirting. Everybody was fun. It was up. It was the highlight of the weekend every week.

[1:18] Kyle Merker: I would have to send me and another doorman to get the DJ out of the booth. They would press against the booth and not let him go. And they would chant. Kevin would squat down, like put the last record on, drop the needle and then hide until we could go get him and bring him into the kitchen. And we would stand there and watch. And he's like, look at this. And the whole place would just be moving.

[1:44] Chris Lovito: Well, there's a very special interaction between all that's going on in the daylight. Of course, you're seeing everything. So you're on the deck and that's where people are gathering and socializing. Bobby Leslie started his DJ career on Fire Island, then rose quickly at Studio 54 and The Saint. So you're on the middle deck right on the harbor and you've got people dancing inside and you're listening to the music that's coming from the dance floor. But then you've got the boats coming and going and you're looking and people are waving to you. They're just arriving for the weekend. So your friend is up on the top deck waving to you and they're listening to the music. And so it's all coming together and swirling together.

And then maybe a seaplane comes in down the boardwalk and you see it land and some friends or VIPs or something are carrying their suitcases over their heads with their pants rolled up. There's just this wonderful melange of the daylight, the sun going down, the light getting warmer and the sky turning orange. It's a very beautiful and special time of day.

[2:46] Bobby Leslie: Everyone loves like the end of the day when the sun is going down, especially in the summertime. At tea, it was a different mood entirely. Far from the marathon 12 hour DJ sets he played in the city. Well, dancing in the daytime versus dancing at night or after hours, it was a more social exchange. You know, you'd see the people next to you. You'd spent the day on the beach or you shared a house together in the pines. And that's why like popular music worked better in like bright light where you could see everybody, because it wasn't like getting lost yourself in trippy music. You know, there is a different mood to daytime music than nighttime music. Electronic music and moody music and trippy music doesn't fly in broad daylight like it does in after hours, like after midnight.

It was more like, oh, here's my favorite song. I can't wait to dance to this. And so there was like that ebullient energy that came with popular known songs. So everyone left tea happy. You'd always bring them up at the very end to such a huge crescendo, because at night, you know, you take them up, you take them down and you sort of level out when they would leave. But at tea, you just take them up, up, up, up, up, and it would be pandemonium. That's the magic of tea dance. You know, it would just get bigger and bigger and happier and happier and more joyful. So by the end of the afternoon, when tea finished, it was just bursting with energy. It was this just burst of happiness.

[4:31] Unknown speaker: Put it all together and you've just got this great concoction of happy energy, you know, especially at the beginning of the weekend and the end of the weekend, even at the end of the week, when people are leaving down the boardwalk and then on the ferries, you're bidding farewell, you're waving them goodbye if they're going on the boat. But it's not a sad farewell. It's like, wasn't this a great weekend?

[4:54] Jess Rothschild: Before the Stonewall uprising, being gay meant living with constant risk of arrest, attack or being outed. Even cruising could cost you your job. Therefore, many lived double lives, one for work and family and another on Fire Island, where they could finally escape if only for a weekend. Suddenly, in 1966, there were whispers. Something was happening in the pines. A tea dance. Sure, afternoon tea had existed for centuries in London and Sunday happy hours. Well, they were already a staple in Cherry Grove. But this was marketed and branded to perfection by John White in the pines. Still, there were limits. John had to be careful. Men dancing with men or women dancing with women could still invite a raid. John hired female bartenders and John would get up on ladders and have flashlights. If men got too close, he would flash the light on them to separate.

[6:03] Unknown speaker: If you watch the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's, there's a scene in the movie that says, come on, we're going out to Fire Island. We're going to go to the blue whale and line dance. And it's a famous scene about that because you were allowed to do that.

[6:08] Julio Torres: When I got there, the amazing thing is I came out in 1973 and that was the same year that the psychological board changed the designation of homosexuality from, I guess, a mental illness to just a condition. In other words, it lost that stigma. So, you know, I just seem to have come out at this amazing mercurial time when there was a lot of transition, a lot of change. Gay liberation, of course, started in '69. I marched in my first gay parade in Boston in '73 and in New York in '74. So I was getting a little more politically aware. But by the time I came out to the island, guys dancing together was a thing. It was not taboo. And we had nothing to worry about the police coming and raiding the place.

[6:57] Unknown speaker: It was at T where John White first discovered a teenage Chris and put him to work. John had been watching me like, who is this kid? And I was not your typical kid. I was a clammer and he liked me and he was like, we want this kid to work. We want to use him as bait, put him at the front. And over the years, people like, yeah, we used to come to T just like to cruise you. It's like, you know, really, like you'd be standing there, you know, with authority and stuff like that, doing everything. And that was the beginning of my time at the Pines was being out front and telling people to come to T and inviting the people to come to T.

[7:48] Unknown speaker: By the late 70s, there was a growing crowd of celebrity fashion and artists. You also couldn't have cameras out like he respected the privacy of his patrons that you couldn't walk in and start snapping pictures of people because here you have people that were actors and actresses and you had people that were professionals at high levels. And at that time you couldn't be out. You know, this was prior to the AIDS epidemic and even more so during the AIDS epidemic, there was more of the paranoia of being blackmailed or I saw you or would your wife like to see this or your girlfriend want to see this? That would be a compromising situation. I mean, it would be funny. It's like, there's a guy smoking a joint and a guy with a camera and it's the eighties.

Who are you going to go for? Well, if it was any bar in Long Island, you'd go for the guy with the joint, you know, and no, take the camera, put the camera away. If I see you taking another picture, I'm confiscating your camera and I want the film.

[8:48] Unknown speaker: Listen, you had Bruce Weber there. You had Ken Hack there. You had Avalon there. You had some of the biggest photographers hunting for new models that were discovered on that beach and found on Fire Island. Okay. That you could do that on the beach, but when you stepped across the gate into the blue whale, it was a whole different ball game. At the end of the season, GQ magazine would come out or I'd see it on the newsstand and I'd pick it up and I would sit there and literally laugh at, I know him, I know him. I've seen him. I've seen her. I've seen this. I've seen that. Even soap opera stars, when the soap opera stars would go on hiatus, you had general hospital at the pines.

[9:24] DJ Robbie Leslie: T evolved as disco and the live DJ became a phenomenon. When you came to the pines, the DJs carried records and the records. When I started to work there at 18 for John White, I used to carry Robbie's records and Kevin Burke, who was a famous DJ, really the house DJ of the blue whale. He used to carry their records. And I was always dying to hear and see what was in there in those crates.

[9:51] DJ Robbie Leslie: In fact, when I was doing it, I would work tea dance and then I'd take the last boat of the day off the island right after tea and then go straight to the palladium. I wouldn't even go home. I'd go straight to the palladium and start working again from like 10 o'clock until four in the morning. So that was, yeah, that was again, that was, uh, that was my high energy. I working all the time days.

[10:15] Unknown speaker: How did you stay up all night?

[10:22] DJ Robbie Leslie: Cocaine. Yeah. Is that, is that on the record?

[10:28] Unknown speaker: Yes. People were very generous back then.

[10:36] DJ Robbie Leslie: Yeah. The magic of that time was that music in the disco era was really born in Fire Island and the music and the sound that came out of that place. Wasn't heard on the radio. Wasn't streaming. Wasn't anything. It was there. I had tapes of the tea dances and still have them that you didn't hear that music on a radio for months.

[10:55] Unknown speaker: Tea was ground zero for cruising. Well, outside the meat rack, of course, and was where Kyle Merker met his husband.

[11:00] Kyle Merker: My friend Russell was hysterical. He was very funny. And across the room, I see my husband, George. He's cute. He was with someone. They were like chatting back and forth and he would look over once in a while. And I would look over once in a while. And I said, Russell, look at that guy over there. And Russell was a little bit grand. He can give attitude about anything. He once gave me attitude about toothpaste. I only use McLean's, you know, it was like Russell. So I said, that guy's looking at me. He said, yes. I said, that guy's looking at me. He's like, yes. I said, Russell, that guy's looking at me again. What do I do? He said, you're in the pines now, honey. You ignore him, of course. Which, of course, I didn't do. So that's how I met my husband.

[11:41] Unknown speaker: That was it. How long have you been together?

[11:50] Kyle Merker: 42 years. You look stunned.

[11:57] Unknown speaker: So gay communities, gay restaurants and gay shops, they came up because of safety. It was scary being gay in the 70s. You know, you could easily lose your job. You could get beat up quite easily when you would go out. Of course, you wanted to meet somebody, you know, if not for your life for that night. So everybody went out. That's where you met people. Back in Manhattan, Greenwich Village was the epicenter. Julius's Uncle Charlie's at 4 a.m. The lights came up. Everyone would spill out into the streets. But in the pines, when TN's, it's still seven o'clock. The night hasn't even started. T was over at, I want to say, seven o'clock. Might have been eight, but it was over because they wanted to serve dinner.

So the music would stop. The lights would come on and they would just start pulling out the tables and setting up for dinner while you were standing there. So it was kind of great about it is you didn't spend all night there, but you went there and you had fun. And there was a time to leave and go home and start cooking dinner and have dinner with your friends.

[12:57] Unknown speaker: After dinner, the Blue Whale also offers a late night piano bar and weekend brunch right on the harbor. So, Judson, who is making all of this happen?

[13:05] Judson Morrow: I saw an ad on Craigslist to manage a guesthouse on Fire Island, and I just thought, oh, my gosh, what a perfect job. Judson Morrow worked as a waiter at the Blue Whale in 2011. My best friend in the restaurant where I was working, I can just say I was working at Danny Meyer's Gramercy Tavern. So the reason I ended up at the Blue Whale is because the owner of the Madison Guesthouse at the time was also.

[14:06] Unknown speaker: Blue Whale staff are given their own share house filled with waiters and bartenders.

[14:36] Unknown speaker: One of them is sleeping on the bunk underneath mine. It never happened. It's fine. It's fine.

[14:45] Unknown speaker: I understand that they have a lot of suitors. And also, they don't want to shit where they eat or whatever the phrase is. We were all buds. The restaurant guys were friends with the bar guys. We're friends with the beach guys. It was really sweet living accommodations.

[15:00] Unknown speaker: And it's one of those jobs where you're just kind of in the trenches with everybody, because it's hard. And there is sort of like a boundary between like, a good time and a messy time. And you're the one that has to like pick up the pieces.

[15:15] Julio Torres: Though tea has been replicated everywhere from Provincetown to Mykonos, not everyone has the stamina for it. A friend of mine describes it as a silent auction, where you go and then you see what's there. And you plant seeds. And then later in the week, maybe you'll hit someone up that you met at tea, because it's sort of like a meet and greet or something. It's like a networking event.

[15:47] Ben Rimalower: That's funny. That's true. Well, a lot of people like networking, you know, and I think part of the lesson for many of us that do have the like psychopathic need to schmooze as we get as I've gotten older is to realize, regardless of whether I'm feeling like on top of the world and the queen of tea or like feeling like I don't want to be there and I want to run and hide. Either way, it's costing me a lot of energy.

[16:15] Ben Rimalower: The questions are all the same. Like I think if you know the script, that might be really helpful. It's like, hey, when did you get here? How long are you staying? Where's your house? Are you from the city? Like once you get those like five or seven questions out of the way, if you have more to talk about, great. If not, like you did your thing and you tried. So, yeah, tea can be a sensory overload. The music's blasting. Bodies are pressed together. There are hundreds of people in motion. And yet there's something irresistible about how it ends.

[16:51] Grant Rudder: Everyone drifts to the pier and gathers to watch the sunset. I am the ringleader in the house where I'm texting people and looking at the phone to see what time the sunset counting back 10 minutes. I'll make sure that we all get there. So I'm alerting everyone. I'm letting know the time. Of course, you can bait them easily if you say we're taking a house picture. But really, it's just a nice experience to be able to have everyone come and appreciate the sunset. And I love it. You're meeting people that you haven't met yet. The shared experience of the sunset, whether it's a countdown, or people are drinking during some tea that they shouldn't be having in their hands, and they're still hiding them.

But I love that moment. It's something I will go to on my own. You know, there's not loud music. It's one of the few social activities where the music isn't blasting. So it's very special to the pines and the way that dock is situated where it faces the sunset is perfect.

[17:55] Unknown speaker: On Fire Island, chance encounters have always been part of the draw. A glance on the boardwalk, a moment on the beach. Now it often starts on a screen. And in a place built on openness, no cars, doors left unlocked, that shift changes the energy.

[18:13] Unknown speaker: Sex was still around a lot more than maybe now. Well, not now, not more than now, I don't think. But the meat rack was certainly still much more vibrant at the time. The first four years living on Fire Island, I was in Cherry Grove with my friends. And we would walk through the meat rack to come to tea in the pines every night that we were here. And there were always men cruising around in the meat rack and activity going on. I mean, there's still some there, but everybody's on the apps. So they are hooking up in their homes.

[18:49] Unknown speaker: Well, it's made the meat rack into a kind of a museum where people actually go to see the meat rack. Oh, I've been to the meat rack. Yes, I have. I've spent some time in the meat rack. I ain't going to tell you all my business.

[19:07] Billy Porter: You know, I'm a gay man of a certain age. Yes, I was in the meat rack. I moved here December 27th, 1990 to be in the original cast of Miss Saigon. And so at the time, a lot of the Broadway community people went out there on Mondays because that was the day off. So you left. You went out on a Sunday night. You stayed through Tuesday afternoon and you came back to do your show. I remember how magical it was. I'd never been to a place like that. I didn't go to we grew up very poor. I didn't go on vacation. I'd never experienced the beach. So it was always magical. And then everybody was gay, which also was like there was a safety in that it felt like an embrace in a lot of ways. And I do have to say for my black brothers and sisters, it wasn't integrated. It's way more integrated now. That's the only thing that was difficult for me, you know, was that there weren't a whole lot of us out there. There's a lot more now.

[20:27] Bob Howard: At 85 years old, Bob Howard is still on the sex apps. Oh, yeah, sure. I use Grindr. It certainly is very efficient and it saves a lot of time and trouble and money in the bars. I much prefer it because I don't like to drink and it's a waste of time, you know, hanging out in bars. And I'm of the generation, Generation X. Like I say, we are the analog to digital generation. And I don't think we talk about that enough. I didn't have a personal computer until I was 30 and I didn't need to have one.

[21:02] Bob Howard: I heard about the Pines phone book, which was created way before cell phones, just landlines. The Pines phone book was the creation of an 11-year-old girl named Emily. It was called Emily's phone book and her father was a gay man who had a house out here at the beach. His name was Charlie Zippy. He was a publisher and to keep his daughter busy because there was nothing for a young girl to do out here. Really, there were no other kids around. He said, why don't you make a phone book? We need a phone book here. And we did. There was no way to know who was around. And so Emily went door to door and that's how the first phone book in the Pines was born. And everybody was in it from David Geffen, Calvin Klein, all the way on down.

[21:41] Unknown speaker: The phone book is organized by boardwalk and lists each member of a share house, including pets and drag names. In this house, they had a PBX switchboard with different phone lines to each room.

[21:57] Hal Hayes: So everybody had their own phone. And that was back in the days of your little answering machine with a little tape cassette in it that would record the messages. And also in those days, we had the phone book here in the Pines that was cross-referenced by first name, last name, and address. So if you had met someone at tea or at the pavilion out one night or even on the beach and you didn't exchange information, you know, nobody had cell phones, so you weren't really giving somebody your phone number back in the city, but you would be able to say, ah, you know, that person's was like John, but he was living with somebody I know. And I know they're at 436 or whatever that you say. You could go to 436, go down the list and see, oh, John. Ah, OK, that's his name. And I have his phone number back in the city. But sadly, you know, with the advent of cell phones, that kind of died.

[22:56] Unknown speaker: Were you in it?

[22:57] Hal Hayes: Absolutely. And we were in it every year. And I would be sure to get all my housemates' names in it. And we just had one phone number here, 631-597. Well, back in those days, it was 516-597-9175. I still remember the number. But yeah, the guys that lived in this house, they had a PBX switchboard and separate phone lines to each bedroom.

[23:16] Mike Balaban: Mike Balaban has studied every generation of cruising from the 1960s to today's app driven world. You'll walk down the street. You might actually go to the to a village park or somewhere and you'd see someone sitting on a booth and you'd walk up near them. You might say, do you have a light? You'd carry cigarettes even if you didn't smoke. You might say, do you have the time? Anything to start a conversation. And that's how a lot of people met.

[23:50] Mike Balaban: The other thing was walking past each other on the street and then they'd walk past you and then you'd follow them and then you'd walk past them and switching places. Or if someone's walking towards you while you're walking towards them on the sidewalk. And, you know, there was a very pronounced aversion to ever being thought of as gay by the average straight guy. There was a fear. Right. There was a nervousness. If they saw you looking at them, they'd look away as quickly as possible, a flash. But if you saw a gay man, there was a delay. They still look away, but they'd be like a half second delay. And you think, oh, that guy's probably gay. And so you're walking towards him. He's walking towards you and he looks at you, but looks away and you keep walking past each other and you count one one thousand two one thousand three one thousand and you turn around.

And if he turned around at exactly that moment and looked at you, bingo, you're both gay. Cruising was essential because we didn't know how to find each other otherwise. And it doesn't happen now because everybody's got a phone in their hand while they're walking or they're in a bar and they're looking at their phone to see who's interested in them 30 feet away. You can't fucking talk to each other.

[25:19] Unknown speaker: So it made me wonder, at what point does connection become compulsion, where the next connection is always one tap away and never really turns off?

[25:30] Unknown speaker: Yeah, I have been in recovery for 11 years and it took me a very long time to stop everything because the minute I put one thing down, something else became my problem. So I put down crystal meth. I became a raging alcoholic. I put down alcohol. I picked up marijuana. I put down marijuana. I picked up inhalants. I put down inhalants. I picked up cigarettes. I put down cigarettes. And I was a maniac on the sex apps. And it's all because I have a very fucked up reward circuitry. And with the app specifically, they provide constant micro hits of dopamine. And if you can get that in your pocket all day long, it just feels so good.

[26:21] Unknown speaker: I do see the transfer of addiction in the sense of transfer of addictive energies. Certainly, there are a lot of people that identify as sex addicts, but that's a very different thing than somebody who is pop psychology, quote unquote, addicted to Grindr or sex or their phone or whatever. And that validation, that little hit of dopamine is extremely addictive by design. This is not accidental. This is exactly what these programmers have made these apps to do.

[26:57] Unknown speaker: I'm someone who has a really addictive personality. I want too much of everything all the time. And it's much easier for me to go from 60 to 0 than from 60 to moderation. And I kind of think that that spectrum

[27:44] Lina Bradford: I love meeting someone in a public space and finding out that it's not going to work instead of, to be quite frank, douching and then riding my bike two miles. No one's mastered the art of cruising quite like the woman who became a cultish force in the Pines, DJ Lina Bradford. This is in our DNA. This is in our DNA to search and to find and to be tuned in. We're not doing this because we have these devices that are kind of getting in our head, like it's not natural. Baby, talking to somebody, that's natural. Flirting with somebody, that's natural. We have this in us. First of all, I am the queen of flirtation. I can seal a deal and it got perfected on that island, being out there for 10 years.

Baby, any man I wanted, I had and it happened because I learned the art of the craft on that goddamn island. For a decade, Lina blurred the lines of performance art, music, and seduction. To give you a little prerequisite, I, when I first got to the island in 2005, I was a vegan. I didn't drink, I didn't smoke, and I was celibate for five years. I think we spoke about this. So it's not like I didn't have game, but my game wasn't on the level of what it became and where it is now. And especially, why did I ever think that it was going to happen on an island full of faggotry? Like, seriously, like, I mean, come on. I was fascinated by Lina's ability to take over a place with so few Black people, let alone trans women, and become completely desired.

For me, it's always been about the energy of the person and what they bring to the table. And obviously, that's what people were feeling in me too. You know what I mean? Like, bitch, you may have never been with a girl like me, honey, but all of a sudden you're like, I gotta have this bitch. It's comfortability. It's knowing who you are. And at the end of the day, especially in our community, a lot of people fight with their self-assurance, with their ability to be not only self-aware, but to give themselves some grace and not be so hard on themselves. So you have to have that awareness. It was just the going after sexual part I had repressed for a long time. You know what I mean? And Fire Island gave me the ability to, like, really get into it and let go of it.

And it's true. And especially a girl of my experience, you know, being mixed-race and being of this experience, you know? So because I'd always worked on my spirituality and I was in a very good place prior to the island, the craft of flirting and all that stuff was going to come to me fierce, honey. And it did. So I was ready for the lessons that it was going to teach me, and I was also going to teach it a lesson and a new spin. And I did. And I did. And I still do. The art of cruising was perfected on Fire Island.

[30:50] Doug Harris: There are kids that are out there now, they don't have a clue as to how to do it. I've been coming to the Pines since 1975. I described nights that felt made for cruising, the moon over the ocean with a soft, romantic glow. I told you about Cruise Quarters, C-R-E-W-S. It's where Sip and Twirl is now. The Cruise Quarters was a kind of dark, divy-looking bar with a pool table in the middle and a bunch of guys standing around with a beer in their hand and smoking cigarettes. You met people.

[31:39] Mike Balaban: I'm a physical media archivist. For over 50 years, I've kept my gay travel guidebooks. These were essential in the 1970s. The two guides, Dameron Domestically and Spartacus Internationally, that showed these are the bars, this is the corner, this is the area, it's risky, at your own risk, A-Y-O-R. If you didn't have that and you were in a new city, you were dead, unless you used your sixth senses. You use your eyes and your nose, you'd see a group of guys dressed in tight jeans with colored handkerchiefs coming out of their pockets, standing in the doorway, and there's no women in the group. That must be a gay bar. And that's how we got along. We learned a language that the rest of the world didn't learn. We talked about how cruising has changed over time from analog to digital, starting with the hanky code.

[32:32] Mike Balaban: Well, the hanky code was a clear way to designate to other gay men that you were gay. If you saw somebody with a handkerchief, they weren't going to be straight, but it was more than just that. They were color-coded and each color represented a certain activity. Light blue was, you know, oral top, I think, and, you know, yellow was golden shower piss, and red was fisting, and everything was a different color. And if you wore it in your left pocket, it meant you were a top. And if you wore it in your right pocket, it meant you were a bottom. I don't know what you did if you were both top and bottom. But you were able to communicate in ways that, given that we had no other way of meeting, no other way of communicating, it was a short code for finding people like us who had the same interests and appetites we did.

And it worked for a while. I mean, it still would have been useful if you needed to find somebody into piss, but who knows? Gay magazines became popular in the 90s. People began placing personal ads in The Advocate and The Village Voice. Any way and every way we could find to meet each other. I put an ad in The Advocate, All American and Gay Seek Same. It probably took three weeks to get a couple letters back and forth, you know, and you just, that was the only way to do it. There was no internet. It was all snail mail. And you put up with it.

[34:07] Mike Balaban: The 90s also saw the rise of 900 lines, phone-based hookups, where switchboards connected people across the city. And then we started developing the phone lines where you'd pay a dollar, two dollars, three dollars a minute. And people met that way. But basically, you had no way to meet anyone other than hearing their voice. So you don't know what they look like. Nonetheless, you're going to take a chance on getting together with them. And you're paying a dollar a minute for the privilege of deciding if you're going to get together. But again, the people that own those things controlled a goldmine. We were horny and hungry and knew no other way to meet. So we willingly put up with it. Did I personally put things in there or did I call people from there? You trying to get in my business again?

[35:00] Billy Porter: I mean, yeah, I called a couple of escorts from Ajax. I'm telling some real personal shit right now. I was what you considered a top, the AIDS crisis. The idea was that if you bought them, that's how you got it. So the gym culture where people were trying to look a certain way to deflect that they were ill. And then, oh, I'm a top, I'm a top, was the common fear-based response. But by 30, I was ready to be versatile. And I didn't really know where to go. And I wanted a professional. So I did go to Ajax. And you had to vet over the phone. They had pictures, but you had to call. You had to talk. It wasn't text message. You had to hear the voice. You know, that was a part of the allure of it, your voice. But I had to hire a professional to teach me how to bottom. Don't ask me questions you don't want the answers to, honey.

[36:08] Judson Morrow: I co-host the podcast Dads and Daddies. I noted when apps like Grindr rose, they coincided with a major medical breakthrough, PrEP, the pill that dramatically lowers the risk of HIV. I feel like there's this dramatic shift right around like 2015, 2016, because the internet in your pocket has taken hold. And PrEP is now commercially available to prevent HIV infection before sex. So those two things together, it's like, okay, I'm going to meet you in a bathroom, in a bathroom while I'm just like out in the city. So what does dating look like for the next generation? I do think, oh, it's sad. You know, in my work as a podcaster in Deshaming Sex, we have had a lot of young listeners say like, I pine for a time where cruising was real.

Like, I don't want to be on the internet. I don't want someone to judge me based on four pictures. Like, I want them to feel an electron exchange on my presence. Or especially in New York, it can seem like there's a lot of opportunity cost. It's just like, oh, not that guy, not that guy, not that guy. There's always something better. And the reality is when you're cruising or at a party, the only thing that's there is what's right in front of you, where if you're on a grid, it's like you have 200 options. When you look at early liberated spaces like the Pines, desire wasn't filtered through screens. No profiles, no swiping, just presence. Bodies in motion, reading each other in real time. Messy and chaotic, but alive. That is what made tea at the Blue Whale so important.

[38:03] Chris Lovito: Finally, I told you something wild. After John White's death in 2004, rumors began to fly that the Blue Whale might be renamed to One Lone Hill after the original lifeguard station in the Pines. Word came out that they're going to change the name of the Blue Whale and it infuriated me because it was a direct violation of everything John stood for. The most iconic gay bar in, if not the country, the world that set the standard and started a tradition since 1963, 64, you're going to wipe it out because some group says that a name and a branding isn't important to call it the Blue Whale, like it's time to update. If anybody remembers the Limelight that's now a pizzeria, it's blasphemy. I was going through the clubs that have gone from the Tunnel to the Limelight to the World to the Saint, all of these iconic clubs that are gone.

This is the last great stronghold of that movement that started it all. You can go anywhere in the world and you hear the term tea dance. Tea dance started in the Pines. And for those guys to change that, I felt was a horrific act against the community and that if I had anything to say about it, I was not going to let it happen.

[39:30] Chris Lovito: As word spread, I was telling others on the ferry and caught the ear of another community member, Bobby Bonanno. They got to the point where we were entering the harbor. I stood up and was pointing at the Blue Whale. Do you want to call that the Blue Whale or do you want to call it One Lone Hill? And people started murmuring and looking at each other. And Bobby got off the boat. He looked at me and he goes, oh, my God, that was the most impassioned speech I ever heard from a straight man protecting gay culture. In the end, the community made sure it lived on John White's legacy and tea at the Blue Whale. I'm like, this is our home. I'm part of this community. And if they do it right, then let's do it right together. You don't have to take my opinion. OK, I'm a straight kid from Long Island. What do I know?

[40:26] Jess Rothschild: Finding Fire Island is created, executive produced, and narrated by Jess Rothschild. Co-produced with the Pines Historical Society. Sound design by Caitlin White. Video editing by Evelyn Darr. Special thanks to the Pines Foundation and Sage USA.