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[0:00] Jess Rothschild: I am your host, Jess, and this is Finding Fire Island, Episode 3, THE PINES.

[0:11] Jess Rothschild: In this episode, we'll explore how former Pines owner John White brought sophistication with models and celebrities, yet closeted repression to the community, plus the architecture of the million-dollar homes and the stories behind the tea dance and the pavilion. But first, let's touch down with Joel Kim Booster on what many associate with the Fire Island Pines, sex.

[0:26] Joel Kim Booster: You can feel the sex. It's tangible in the air in the Pines. And that, as much as straight people might want to dip their toe into our culture vis-a-vis drag shows, the sexuality, the raw sexuality of the Pines, I think is a big turnoff for a lot of these people. I've had straight friends who have stopped by a pool party in the Pines and left very quickly because things can turn very sexual very quickly at these parties. When they're confronted with actual homosexuality, not just the cultural aspects of homosexuality that they enjoy, like drag, they're confronted with the actual sex of homosexuality. It's like they go fleeing for the hills.

[1:15] Joel Kim Booster: The Pines was developed in 1953, long after Cherry Grove was established as a safe haven. One of the many things I'm obsessed with about Fire Island is the historic rivalry between the two. For this, I turned to filmmaker Parker Sargent and Pines historian John Dempsey.

[1:33] Parker Sargent: The big thing about the Pines and the Grove in the way that they can sometimes be conceived as the Pines is young and the Grove is older is because the Grove has small little cottage houses. This goes back to zoning and all this kind of stuff from way back when. We're all little cottages and our footprint is very limited. Whereas when they created the Pines after that, they wanted huge houses, big mansions for the rich people, but the rich queers who wanted to hide behind walls so that nobody knew what was going on.

[2:13] John Dempsey: There's always been a bit of conflict between the two, kind of a story of richer and poorer in a way, where I think the Pines has always been seen as a bit snooty and a bit of a private wealthy enclave, which isn't entirely untrue.

[2:29] John Dempsey: I think a lot of it comes down to architecture, actually, where you have these homes that typically have tall gates around them. There's a lot of greenery and you have a private pool. And so it's a lot of moving between your private home space, going to the beach when you want to be seen, but then having your own exclusive enclave in your home. Cherry Grove, you're really on top of one another. So it's hard to hide.

[3:13] John Dempsey: Historically, when the Pines was settled, it's as simple as the lots were bigger.

[3:17] Parker Sargent: That's exactly right. It's because development in Cherry Grove happened a lot more organically over a longer period of time, whereas when the Pines was established in 1953, they subdivided it. They created specifically sized lots. So they tend to be a lot larger than what you get in the Grove.

[3:37] Parker Sargent: In the 50s, lots in the Pines were going for around $500. Today, an empty lot will cost you about $500,000, which is still a great deal compared to other places just two hours from New York City.

[3:55] Bobby Bonanno: The nonprofit's mission is to preserve the rich history of the Pines for future generations. It was like going to Fire Island School and learning about all of these people. I don't have a background in archiving and history. I learned it from the ground up. And for 13 years, I've gone down the Google rabbit hole to see this history and meet the most wonderful people. I mean, the families that grew up there. It's an amazing and amazing history. And that's what drew me to this project.

[4:30] Bobby Bonanno: The Pines was initially envisioned as, quote, a family community, aka street families with children. But once word started to spread around Cherry Grove that there was more space and privacy, plus its connection to Broadway and Hollywood personalities, thanks to the very first Pines owner, Peggy Fears, it was a bit of a runaway train.

[4:53] Jess Rothschild: So who exactly was Peggy Fears?

[4:56] Bobby Bonanno: Peggy Fears was a woman who started the Pines. Peggy Fears was a Ziegfeld Follies girl. My understanding is that the Follies girls appeared in multiple different shows altogether, like it was like a showgirl chorus. Some articles around the time describe her as one of Broadway's most celebrated figures. But she really brought that class and sophistication to the Pines, bringing out a lot of her Broadway and Hollywood friends.

[5:24] Bobby Bonanno: John and I found a quote from Peggy Fears herself. A friend of mine said, I'll be your partner and we'll build a charming, sweet little club on that beautiful little harbor. I'll bring over my yacht from Monte Carlo. It will be a darling place. And because of the anonymity that these people had when they came there, it was a real draw. But she also got them to invest. Believe it or not, in that hotel, which was called the Botel, many celebrities stayed there. Elizabeth Taylor's Richard Burton stayed there. You know, there was a very low expectation years ago of what a motel looked like. You know, cinderblock walls were commonplace. People did not expect luxury when they went there. People described the Botel as a prison.

[6:11] Bobby Bonanno: The Botel sort of is in today's standards, it's a cinderblock. But the reason it was made of cinderblock was because the first one burned down. So, you know, Fire Island is made of wood.

[6:24] Bobby Bonanno: Fire Island has had nine lives. It's absolutely had nine lives. We've been through hurricanes and storms and fires, but we're still here, like the song says.

[6:36] Bobby Bonanno: In an effort to curtail the growing gay population, the development company advised realtors to pick and choose who they sold homes to. They even planted a large sign in the harbor which dictated moral values, like discouraging speedo bathing suits and writing that exhibitionism in public is below the level of human behavior. The gays would vandalize or straight out steal the sign on weekends. The efforts to stop the gay migration failed miserably.

[7:03] Bobby Bonanno: Cut to the 1960s and enter John White and the Tea Dance.

[7:11] Bobby Bonanno: In the 60s, a man named John White, who was a model, ended up coming and investing in the Pines with several partners, but then bought them all out. And Peggy was out and John White was in. And what John White brought to the Pines was, again, the sophistication of models, more Hollywood.

[7:32] Bobby Bonanno: In 1966, the jukebox was the way people danced in clubs. There was no such thing as a DJ. In 1966, he created a tradition called the Tea Dance. Now, the Tea Dance is replicated in gay resorts all over the world. And this is our claim to fame, that he created it here in the Pines. But it was a very different type of thing. Men were not allowed to dance with men. So the idea of the line dance began, the Madison, where one woman would dance with like seven men, but they allowed that. But John had to stand on a ladder and would shine a flashlight on people when men got too close together. It was for fear of raids. You know, I lived through raids in gay clubs where they would come in and the lights would go up and everybody got against the wall. And that's really what it was about, making sure that everybody stuck to the rules, because in the end it would be on his shoulders.

[8:36] Bobby Bonanno: As discussed last episode, police presence was very heavy in both the Grove and the Pines. In fact, in the 60s and 70s, local police from Sayville had a specific quota of men they were to round up and arrest if they were found soliciting, most often in an area known as the meat rack. The meat rack is the literal connective tissue between the two communities.

[8:59] Bobby Bonanno: You know, the thing that's missing today with phones is what happened there. It was eyes meeting eyes, and maybe it was the darkness, but it added to the sexual allure of it and the physicality of it. So it was a place where people from the city who maybe never had the opportunity to meet people there, you just never know what could happen. The biggest danger of all of that was plainclothes policemen who would go into those situations and lure gay men.

[9:40] Bobby Bonanno: And what would happen is these men would be all corralled, handcuffed to a pole, and when they reached their quota, then they were all brought to Sayville and they were booked. And then it would be published in local newspapers where they could lose their job and be exposed to their family. The great thing about that is John White and also a wonderful man named Jack Lichtenstein, who was a lawyer, would bail a lot of these people out. They would support the community by doing that.

[10:17] Bobby Bonanno: Was John White out or closeted? John White was, I'm going to say, a closeted person. He definitely was a very picky gay. And how I describe him with the Pines is the Pines was his castle and he ruled it like a king, but he also guarded it like a lion.

[10:36] Karen Adair: John White was my neighbor. On one side of me was the TV house, the other side was John White's house. It wasn't that he was closeted. He was best friends with Rock Hudson, who used to come out all the time to visit him. It wasn't so much that he was closeted, it was that there were laws at that time that said that two men could not dance together.

[10:54] Karen Adair: So John, I mean, he could be kind of nasty about it, but he would bring girls from Sayville over to dance with the boys. So if the police turned up, he could say, look, no, it's boys and girls dancing together. He would also sit on a stool in the corner with a megaphone. And if two guys got too close, he would yell at them. What many people don't understand is the Pines was started as a straight community. Yes, the gays came because of the proximity to Cherry Grove, and also they were hearing about this. The undercurrent was gay, but it could not be spoken about. And so he was very comfortable with that. And he liked the fact that it was an undercurrent. And he was not looking to shout it from the rooftops because he was conservative. He was a very conservative man.

[11:42] Karen Adair: My dad was like, well, if I'm gonna spend all this money on renting, why don't I just buy a place? So he started looking and he found two empty lots on the ocean that were owned by Jerry Herman of Broadway fame. And he bought both lots. And I'm embarrassed to say this, but each lot was $25,000, which today, of course, it's over a quarter of a million dollars.

[12:03] Ben Rimalower: He built the house, which then, of course, cut off Jerry Herman's view of the ocean, and he was pissed off, and he sold the house and bought another house. I'm like, why did you sell the land if you didn't want anybody building a house there? So that's how I ended up in Fire Island.

[12:16] Ben Rimalower: Ben Rimelauer recalls seeing line dancing in The Pines in the 1996 film Stonewall, starring Guillermo Diaz, when he was back in college. The other thing that made an impression on me about Fire Island when I was still in college was — I don't know if you've ever seen the 1996 movie Stonewall. I'm obsessed with that movie. Yeah. It's really shot on Fire Island. You see the old — it's before the pavilion, it's the Sandpiper, I think it still was. And on the dance floor, they dance side to side, and you can only dance facing with a woman. And there's token women there. And when they're on the beach in their Speedos, when the cops walk by, they have to cover up. And I remember you see that Maddie Dean is kind of having this moment of like, oh, wow, this place is pretty closeted.

It's not the free place. And of course, it became that in the 70s and to this day in a way. But you still feel The Pines has a stuffiness about it. I guess maybe The Pines is more like Hell's Kitchen or something in terms of gay equivalence nowadays.

[13:16] Joel Kim Booster: While The Pines of today can be a free-for-all for gay expression, I and many others do still feel the presence of John White's internalized homophobia occasionally lingering in the air. I mean, listen, you know, I was talking about wearing caftans and dresses and being a little, you know, gender bendy and outwardly sexual. I think there's still a presence on Fire Island of those gays who are standing in the corner sort of looking down their noses at it and saying like, this is why we can't have nice things because there are gay guys who act like you on the island. You know, I've had conversations like that from, you know, a gay types on the island. And, you know, you have to remember because it's so economically impenetrable, you're getting a lot of self-selection of gay guys that are like investment bankers and tech startup millionaires and real estate agents and all types of gay guys working in, you know, respectable fields who want to be respected and don't want to feel like their sexuality is taking away from that.

And I think even though they're in this incredibly gay space that is historically in its DNA gay, they still come there and want to remake it in their image and say, no, we're respectable. We should be acting respectable, you know, just because it's a gay space doesn't mean we should run wild with the way we dress and the way we act and things like that. Whereas, you know, for me, Fire Island is a gay Fantasia. It is a place to let loose and become the greatest version of yourself that you can be, that you're sort of held back from being year round in straight world.

[14:55] Matt Rogers: Something we must bring into the picture here is one of the most important fabrics of Pine Society, which is the Pines Pantry, the area's first and only grocery store founded in 1953. Yes. So this is one of the most iconic things. When I was in high school, my little sister and actually all my girlfriends in high school worked at the markets on Fire Island. There's sort of a uniform for the army of, I'm going to call them 16 year old girls that work there, which is a hooded sweatshirt, tiny lacrosse pants or cross country shorts or whatever, like mesh shorts rolled up at the top. And then you've got a sock and like a Nike slide. And in terms of what we're doing with our hair, we're tossing it up into like a messy bun or something, devil may care, that just gets the hair out of our 16 year old girl faces so that we can ring products through the ringer and work the cashier.

These girls are working long shifts. They get on that boat at like 6 a.m. or maybe even earlier so their shift can start at 6 a.m. But those 16 year old girls, you know, the Amandas, they work very hard all day to provide the gays with sustenance for their week.

[16:09] Matt Rogers: For Long Island high school and college kids, a summer job working at the pantry or on the ferry has grown into a highly coveted position. Boys pulling dollars out of Speedos to pay for anything from Prodos to lube is met with utter nonchalance. In a New York Times piece last year, the manager was quoted as saying she could write a book about what they have seen and heard here. So I was really inspired to give a nod not only to the film Fire Island, which does depict a pantry girl. Our friend Marsha Belsky came in and just did a cameo as a pantry girl, did a great job. And in the movie, she was being harassed by a patron of the Pines Pantry, just like I'm sure many pantry and market girls have been in their tenure.

So I dressed up as one of the pantry girls for Halloween. And, you know, I will say I do tend to nail it on Halloween. I kind of always get it right. But this is in my top three, maybe even my number one costume ever in terms of how many people were like, oh, my God, I want to tell you I saw you and I immediately got it. They are a crucial part of the ecosystem of Fire Island.

[17:15] Ben Rimalower: While the Ice Palace and the Monster were home to the birth of disco and Cherry Grove initially, the world of art, design and fashion were booming in the Pines, with people like Calvin Klein and Robert Mapplethorpe buying homes. Yeah, the Pines became the go to. Models, celebrities, fashion, all these different people came together to hang and to brainstorm and to be inspired because that's what that place did. It inspired you. Nobody had a cell phone. They had anonymity. They could be themselves. They could let their hair down. Nobody was taking any pictures, which I wish they did. And I'm still digging for half of them. I call it a creative melting pot because that's literally what it was.

[18:01] Ben Rimalower: In 1980, the Sandpiper restaurant was finally replaced by a true club, the Pavilion, as it is known today. They decided to make a new club called the Pavilion. So there was a lot of controversy about that. The community had a lot to say about it because they love the Sandpiper. They love the simplicity. So here was this big box. That's what they called it. They said that it was the box that the new ferry had come in. And a lot of it also had to do with sound. People complained about the Sandpiper because of the music, late night music. So they felt like they needed to encase. Of course, years later, it was totally embraced. But the Pavilion brought about the idea of all night dancing. So it took it away from the ice palace and brought it back to the pines.

The great thing about it was the balcony that was upstairs. It was a very simple structure, but the balcony was phenomenal because you got to be in the dance without dancing. You could be part of the music and just watching all the people down below and see your friends and look up and be part of the group, but maybe not necessarily in the group. And that's when the era of all night dancing went through the roof.

[19:24] Paul Rudnick: Paul Rudnick is a prolific screenwriter and playwright responsible for the First Wives Club, Sister Act, Jeffrey, In-N-Out, among many others. I lived in the pines for 16 years and vividly recall the evening rituals beginning with tea at the Blue Whale. When the ferry comes in, some people just sort of flood off the ferry right into tea. You know, they just barely drop their luggage. They're just there to start partying. I think especially people who work in the city and have nine to five jobs, they can't wait. And so they get started the second their feet touch the deck. Also, because over the years, the timing for dancing got later and later and later until nobody was going out until 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. or, you know, what was the cool moment to make an entrance?

Then you'd go home and take your disco nap. And then you'd wake up and take your disco drugs. And then finally, after you got all of your friends assembled and dressed and waxed and toned, then you might head down to the pavilion to start dancing or you get on the boat and go to Cherry Grove to go to the Ice Palace. You know, there were all these opportunities, but it became this sort of like Louis XIV court system where everyone had their spot and their role in the evening.

[20:41] Paul Rudnick: I think it's also interesting how the art of meeting people has so drastically changed because now, today, when you go to tea, everybody is staring at their phones, of course, because you have even more information. You know, it's the gay dream where you get to not just gossip about someone, but get hardcore data and photos to add to your file on them. So it's you know, it's while although it's interesting, it's it's still even in an age of such incessant tech. If you go to Fire Island, you're going there to see people in person. You know that certainly everyone's phones facilitate hookups and party invitations and scheduling, but you're still there in the flesh.

[21:26] Margaret Cho: Margaret Cho's memories are very Pines brand sex forward. It's definitely more like, who did I hook up with? Who did I fuck? Who did I didn't get to fuck? It's more like the minutiae that sort of stands out to me as being really fun, like the legendary sort of partiness of it, like the decadence of the drugs and the drinking, if that, or just the decadence of the sex or that the meat rack and always sort of finding what you want there. Margaret told me the story of wandering across the meat rack using just a flip phone before iPhones. You I guess you should bring a flashlight, but you couldn't even see anybody. So if you're like hooking up with a mysterious stranger, the guys would be looking at each other's dicks using the dim light of a flip phone, which I think is so funny, like just to try to assess whether or not you're going to do this, but looking at like the scant glow of a Nokia, it's going to give you all the information you need to want to hook up with somebody.

But that was just a funny image of like, they're like trying to figure out who to fuck out there. I mean, in a way, Fire Island was Grindr before there was Grindr. You know, it was kind of in one-on-one hookups between people who would not otherwise have ever found each other.

[22:46] Christopher Rawlins: If the first Pine visual you think of is its hedonistic atmosphere, the second is most certainly the architecture of the home surrounding you, castles in the sand. Christopher Rollins is a renowned New York City and Pines architect and the author of Fire Island Modernist. I spoke to Christopher about the challenges of building a Pines home. Wow. Where do I start? So I think that the most difficult conversation that I have as an architect with clients is that at one point it was sort of the Wild West out there. People just sort of built what they wanted willy nilly. And now they're quite strict about lot coverage and environmental concerns and energy codes and all of that. So my first interview with a client typically goes something like this.

It's going to cost you twice as much as you think it will. And you're going to have a smaller house when we finish than when we started because you're overbuilt. And how do they respond? About half the time they show me the door and the other half they pour a stiff drink and they say, let's get to work.

[23:40] Christopher Rawlins: What would you say are the staples of a Pines home? At the time that the Pines was settled, the kind of threshold for comfort was rather different than what we have today. And by that I mean people didn't demand gigantic bathrooms or lots of them or gigantic bedrooms.

[24:05] Paul Rudnick: Or even an en-suite bathroom for every bedroom. And so, Pines houses are actually rather modest, which is not to say they're not luxurious. What I love about them is that while being modest in scale, they can be quite glamorous with their spaces and with their ambiance and with their materiality. The houses are clad in naturally weathering cedar that requires no maintenance, and sliding glass doors that don't flap in the breeze. You just open them up and you let the breeze come through one side and go out the other. And that's about it.

[24:41] Paul Rudnick: Horace Gifford is a fascinating figure in Pines' history of the 1960s. Gifford designed a remarkable series of beach houses that influenced the terrain and culture of the Pines forever. Most of Gifford's clients were already out of the closet, or as out as they could be in the 60s and 70s. Horace Gifford was instrumental in creating houses that were all in cedar and glass, basically, and so they read just like these kind of angular sculptures in the landscape. It makes a lot of functional sense, too, in the sense that drywall on a house that's on stilts and all that dampness tends to mold and get kind of cracky. And when you treat everything essentially like a deck or exterior siding, it just holds up a lot better. And that gives it that kind of Porn Lodge aesthetic that people associate with the Pines.

[25:34] Paul Rudnick: Perhaps what's most interesting about Horace Gifford is that he actually never had his architecture license. The reason for that is because Horace Gifford was arrested on his 33rd birthday in 1965. He was entrapped in a raid in the meat rack, which is the cruising spot between the Pines and Cherry Grove, taken to the mainland, and in New York State, one of the qualifications to be a licensed architect is to be of good moral character, and his arrest on the description is that he was arrested for loitering for immoral purposes. So he had a rap sheet, and in fact, the local paper issued this outrageous headline, and it said, “Police Pick a Pansy Bouquet in You-Know-Where.” This was typical treatment of homosexuals at the time, and Fire Island was under the governmental jurisdiction of the mainland towns, which were far more conservative, and so they used Fire Island in a sense as a revenue stream to entrap and arrest people and as kind of political theater to distract people from the solving of real problems, and you see that still going on today in various forms.

[26:25] Paul Rudnick: I talked to Paul Rudnick about an article he wrote for New York Magazine in 1993. He described the Pines as Marie Antoinette's sandbox. It exists solely for pleasure. The homes are gorgeously maintained by a stealthy army of housekeepers, houseboys, plumbers, and electricians who work their expensive magic midweek and vanished by Friday night, leaving only gleaming countertops and neat piles of fresh beach towels. Oh, that’s absolutely true. I mean, every place there is Barbie’s Dream House. You know, they exist only for show, and that’s part of the charm.

[27:33] Paul Rudnick: You described this first rental house as a treehouse on stilts with a wall of glass greeting the ocean. It’s kind of enchanted, and there is something in the air out there that I felt nowhere else. One of the things I noticed was I was unable to work while I was out there, that wherever I go, you know, I would bring my iPad nowadays, you bring your MacBook, whatever, and I would always be busy. And out there, it was as if the island was telling me, “Not here. That’s not what this is for.” So it was delirious, and to this day, I’ve never been anywhere that intoxicating.

[28:02] Paul Rudnick: You bought the infamous, iconic Pyramid House. Yeah. My husband and I lived in the Pyramid House for about 16 years, and the Pyramid House, there was kind of a landmark, because it looks like a pyramid, or as some guys would say, a witch’s hat. It’s also been described as if the Louvre was made of shingles and on the beach. A little bit. Well, we added the glass wall, I’m proud to say. We Louved it, and it was shaped like a pyramid, and had just such sort of personality even before you walked in the door.

[28:31] Paul Rudnick: The Pyramid House is located on Sail Walk, and underwent an extensive renovation by famed Pines architect Hal Hayes. We added actually three little guest cottages that all had pyramid roofs, because the house itself is fairly compact. You know, you’ve got the upstairs is the living area with the big glass and with the full pyramid effect, and downstairs was our bedroom, you know, and there were bathrooms, but that was kind of it, and there was a pool, and then in order to be able to host people, we did have these little cottages, and there also was nice because there was a real privacy factor there, which I think everybody enjoyed. But also because of the shape and the history, it was easy to give people directions, because I think people aren’t big on house numbers out there, or even knowing the names of the walks, also because people tend to change the street signs out there to something more obscene. But we could always say, “Just keep going until you see a pyramid,” and they would find us.

[29:28] Paul Rudnick: Are you aware this house is currently on sale again for six and a half million dollars, or you can rent it for 125 grand a month for July and August? I will just say with a certain skepticism, we haven’t lived in that house for six or seven years. That’s nonsense. I mean, God bless them, all the luck in the world. Every time people try to jack up the prices at Fire Island, and it’s expensive, but it’s not the Hamptons, and when those numbers get batted around, I’ve never heard of any house on Fire Island going for that kind of money. And this house, actually, as I just said, is fairly small, and it’s a big trek, and you can’t have your driver bring you out there. So I would be somewhat doubtful of that ultimate sale price. So I hope they get whatever they dream of, but that’s certainly nowhere near what we paid or sold it for. I think it’s wishful real estate.

[30:24] Paul Rudnick: Paul looks back on his 16 years in the house fondly, but doesn’t miss the Universal Pines experience of lugging all of your crap to these remote locations on the island. You have to be prepared. That was a hike to get there, and there are a few little buggies that people will take, but not many, and you have to bring everything in your little red wagon, and you become your own pack mule. But it was a glorious house, and we had the very best time there.

[30:49] Paul Rudnick: If you own a house in the Pines, you become very popular automatically because people like being invited, and we had some of the best times. It’s sort of a pleasure to be able to tell people, “Oh, come on out,” because it couldn’t be more casual. I mean, when I say that gay casual, I mean people brought coordinated everything, but especially patent leather tote bags, often the round, real Barbie hat box bags, and I would think, “Okay, you do realize you’re still a man, but it looked beautiful.” You know, if it was a big party weekend, if it was a white party or when there was the morning party, you would see these stacks of Louis Vuitton match luggage, and steamer trunks, and Gucci, and everything else, and you would realize, “Oh my God, these people just got off a plane from Rome,” and they would often bring their pets with them as well.

[31:36] Paul Rudnick: One of my favorite battles ever was between two massively well-built hairdressers who both had small dogs, and the dogs began to yap at each other and take bites out of each other. And these two incredibly sculpted six-foot-eight hairdressers started to yowl at each other, and my favorite thing was the ultimate insult in that face-off was when one of the guys said to the other one, “I want your card.” And I thought, “Really? That’s the best you could do?” But I kind of loved them for that, and I thought, “Is he going to give him his card? Like, you know, ‘Here, my good man.’” But the fairy was already part of the drama that people welcomed, because of course it had a built-in audience. You know, everyone was watching them going, “Oh, I like her.” You know, and they’re carrying their dogs as if they’re clutch bags.

[35:46] Paul Rudnick: We met Tomek Dash in Episode 1, “Gay Summer Camp.” Tomek founded BEBEC, the Black and Brown Equity Coalition, in an effort to connect the island with the progress happening around the country regarding race and trans issues. Two key drivers for Tomek were the lack of affordable housing and the microaggressions he personally experienced in the Pines. You know, I felt like when I first stepped off of the

[36:09] Joel Kim Booster: I wouldn't say it wasn't welcoming, but I was just like, where do I go? There's no map when you get off at the gazebo to tell you where to go. It's like, is this the only commercial district? Where can I go pee? You know, it's like these little things that people who have access to housing out there don't have to think about. It's also kind of cliquish. You know, you're not like really walking around and like seeing people and everybody's like, hey, how are you? Welcome. This is the magical land of queers. So yeah, it's kind of like figure it out on your own. And just as a black person, I think I'm always hyper aware of my identity. You know, I went there definitely with a guard up just because I didn't know, am I going to experience microaggressions? Like, what are these white folks going to be like, you know? Did you ever experience microaggressions?

[36:56] Brian Moylan: Yeah, absolutely. On Fire Island?

[36:58] Joel Kim Booster: Yeah. It's little things, you know, the way I describe microaggressions, it could be equivalent to a mosquito bite. But when you have like lots of little mosquito bites, it becomes a problem. So sometimes when you're talking about them, it sounds like trivial or something, but it's not, you know? So it's times when I've needed sunblock or something. It's like, well, I thought black people don't need sunblock. Or, you know, one time I was staying in somebody's house and they had to leave all of a sudden to go back to the city because they had an emergency. And I was kind of like left to take care of the house. And one of their friends popped over and for some reason assumed I was the cleaning person, which was really weird to me because it's like I was like relaxing in the house.

[37:47] Joel Kim Booster: Bebek now coordinates a slew of Juneteenth events, including the MX Fire Island pageant, a huge solidarity march along the beach, plus four days of a tea takeover, all celebrating black and brown excellence. One of their greatest achievements has been flying the progress flag at the end of the Cherry Grove dock, which now includes black, brown and trans people in the iconic rainbow flag. Victor Jeffries is on the board of Bebek alongside Tomic Dash. Victor, like Brian Moylan, says that the Fire Island's schedule is quite reticent to change. Beach, tea, dinner, house party, venture to Cherry Grove, rinse, repeat. I would describe it as lemmings. Like it is a great example of how we are lemmings.

It's like a thing that one does. You at this time, you do this thing and it's the same thing every single day. I think the funny thing about the Pines and Cherry Grove really is that they are both very reticent to change. It's like, here's what you do on Friday. Here's what you do on Saturday. Here's what you do on Sunday. Everyone's doing the same thing, and it's very regimented. The schedule, girl, and you could not break it. You don't want to show up to tea early. You don't want to show up to tea late. You don't want to stay at tea too late. Lemmings, homosexual lemmings.

[39:06] Brian Moylan: And right after that, you're going to go to the dinner. It's a very cyclical place. I grew up Catholic and I've traveled a lot. I'm not a practicing Catholic, but I will say when I was in the middle of a very small village in Ghana during university at a place where I didn't speak the language and went to a Catholic mass, it was so comforting to go to mass because I knew exactly what was going on because it is a very regimented and codified kind of process. Very similar to Fire Island, right? This idea of this is quote unquote what you do. But what's interesting to me, and as I've gotten older, there was and has always been another group of guys who weren't at all interested in that, who were either sober people who had opted out, they were older, they'd have dinner parties, they'd stay at home and garden, they'd just go to the beach. Half of the island was doing what I was doing, the schedule, and half of the island was like, have fun, boys. We did this already.

[40:11] Brian Moylan: I did a lot of Fire Island reporting at Gawker and Next Magazine. I was working for Gawker and we broke the news about the sale of the pavilion. I'm good friends with Daniel Nardiccio. Because of my work at Next, I knew all of the promoters and owners and things like that. And so I started hearing that Eric was going to sell all the properties downtown, sell the pavilion, found out who the people were, tracked them down, got them on the record, maybe before they were willing to talk, let's say. So people would always be like, oh, we're trying to get this new party started on Friday. We're trying to do whatever. But you could never break through. It was always so regimented. And I mean, the one summer it was really different was the summer when the pavilion burnt down and there was nothing to do. Again, it's comforting and nice to have these schedules at the same time. It's a very easy way to become stagnant. It's a very easy way for the thing to kind of die a little bit. Right.

[41:10] Joel Kim Booster: So how do we keep this place kind of magical and wonderful? Because it is, you know, Fire Island potentially is like the closest thing to a utopia one can find. Victor and Tomek work closely with organizations like BAFO, an artist residency program that has been running in the Pines for over a decade. With BAFO each summer, artists are invited to stay for one to four week residencies to create a body of work. At the end of the residency, the artist is invited to share their work through an exhibition, installation, a performance or a reading. But what else is necessary to bring Fire Island even closer to its full potential? One is to give voice to black and brown people that manifest a million different ways. Getting more opportunities for black and brown talent, trans talent to be out there performing. DJs, drag queens, more presence. We are excellent. Fire Island should be excellent in showing the best of the queer world.

[42:05] Ben Rimalower: In contrast to Daniel Nardiccio bringing big names like Patti LuPone, Carol Channing, Liza Minnelli and Alan Cumming to the Ice Palace in Cherry Grove, the Pines culture really isn't centered around entertainment. Most people there are not there to see shows. I had a terribly hard time selling my shows the times that I did them a few years back because it's not unlike Provincetown and even to some extent unlike Cherry Grove. People in the Pines don't want to see shows. They want to go there. They want to have dinner with their housemates. Maybe they grab a slice of pizza. You know what shows they're going to? The drag shows.

[42:42] Joel Kim Booster: Yeah. I was going to say the RuPaul's Drag Race stars have changed the game because they have that kind of a following. So if you were going to buy tickets to see Shangela or Bendelecrem or Bianca Del Rio when you were in Provincetown and it was sold out, oh, but look, they're there at the pavilion while we're in the Pines. Jansport played the pavilion at 6 p.m. I could not believe this. No issue getting in.

[43:06] Ben Rimalower: Yeah. Well, they're still experimenting because even with someone like Jansport, who's a star from RuPaul's Drag Race, it's still not in people's minds to see these. I've seen some fabulous performances. I mean, Lady Bunny and Shangela's show that I saw at the pavilion were two of the greatest, but it's still not what they're there for. The thing that I've seen the most in the Pines that I have been obsessed with and will talk about to the day I die is Pixie Aventura. And she would do every Monday night at the Ice Palace for years. Now she's Monday nights at the pavilion in the Pines. And she is just so brilliant. And she's proving that you can really make it and get to the next level as an artist who does drag without RuPaul's Drag Race.

[43:46] Joel Kim Booster: I asked Brian Moylan about the Pines evolution, particularly now that more gay men are having children. You know, part of what I loved about it was that it was and still is the last gay ghetto. It's like the last place where it's only gay, mostly only gay dudes in the Pines. You know, as long as the straight people and women and the kids, oh my God, gays and their babies, as long as those people were respectful of the kind of gay rules applying, I am fine with anybody coming in here. But then it would be like the gays with the babies. They'd be like, oh, do you have to be naked on the beach? It's like, yes, bitch. And fucking three years ago before that kid, you were too. So let's not forget. I saw you taking two nicks at once in the back room of the underwear party. Let's not pretend like none of that happened because you have a kid, OK?

[44:45] Paul Rudnick: You talked about a woman being in your share house. Oh, yeah. So is it true that there is a powerful lesbian contingent in the Pines?

[44:51] Brian Moylan: Oh, absolutely. In our house alone. And I think, again, because the Pines is a bit more upscale, I remember always being so impressed with how many lesbian accountants and dentists there were. You know, these very powerful professional women. And because then you'd see them getting on the ferry to go back to work and suddenly there'd be a, you know, a snappy low heel and a suit. But yeah, there were a lot of couples, too, which was nice. And our house tended to be paired up. But yeah, for a place that's sometimes thought of as relentlessly male and white and gay, there was more diversity than you might imagine. I think racially a little less. So I think that's improved. But yeah, there were plenty of women and power lesbians.

[45:36] Joel Kim Booster: I also chatted with Ben Rimalower about my place as a woman in the Pines. I've met incredibly wonderful people on this side of the island who share fascinating stories and artifacts about their homes with me. I recently met a friend of Ben's who invited me to his house on Ocean Walk to show me an extremely rare deck of playing cards from around 1992. It was called a, quote, dyke deck with screen printed photographs from legendary lesbian photographer Catherine Opie. They feature highly stylized portraits of Catherine Opie's queer community and friends from San Francisco. He found the deck of cards when he first bought his house and now has them all beautifully framed and on display. I mean, these are my people.

Another good thing, though, now is that I do see the Pines integrating more. We're all able to step outside what the stereotypes were before. You know, I mean, you are a gay woman and you don't fit what was considered a stereotype of that. You know, you're a lipstick lesbian and not in a way that's confining. You know, you're empowered, but you're also chic and, you know, fashion.

[46:39] Paul Rudnick: And are you talking about me?

[46:40] Joel Kim Booster: Yeah. You know, and so you're not somebody that's intimidated by some like bougie white boys in the Pines, you know? No, nor should you be. You know, not that women that hang out in the grove don't have, like, you know, beautiful hair like you do would be intimidated by them. But, you know, they might not want to put up with it, whereas you actually like it. You know, you're a Bravo queen. You're into all that stuff. So I think the communities are sort of becoming a little more fluid in a really healthy way.

[47:37] Joel Kim Booster: We're going to cover the ritual of tea, the underwear party, the Pines party, and hear about the thriving sober communities which balance it all out. You see this, like, laser light show of the highest quality that you would see at a rock concert or whatever, you know, intense. I mean, people on boats must be like, what the fuck is going on on Fire Island? See you next time on Finding Fire Island.