Fire Island
Love, Loss and Liberation in an American Paradise
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- € 8,99
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Fire Island: a slim strip of land off the coast of New York, and a place of hedonism, reinvention, liberation.
Arriving on the island after a break-up back home in England, scholar and poet Jack Parlett was beguiled by what he found. Here were the halcyon scenes of Frank O'Hara's poetry; the bars where Patricia Highsmith got drunk; the infamous cruising sites; and the dazzling beaches where couples had fallen in and out of love, free for a sun-kissed moment to be themselves in the time before gay liberation.
Tracing Fire Island's rich history, Parlett leads the reader through the early days of the island's life as a discreet home for same-sex love, to the wild parties of the post-Stonewall disco era, to the residents' confrontation with the AIDS epidemic, and into a present where a host of new challenges threaten the island's future.
Lyrical and vivid, Fire Island is a hymn to an iconic destination, and to the men and women whose ardour and determination spread freedom across its shores.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Literary theorist Parlett (The Poetics of Cruising) delivers an immersive history of Fire Island and the evolution of LGBTQ culture in 20th-century America. Documenting the island's Native American origins; the emergence of Cherry Grove and its neighboring community, Fire Island Pines, as refuges for those seeking to evade "the scrutiny of mainland morality"; and their development as increasingly risqué and sexually permissive vacation destinations in the latter half of the 20th century, Parlett excels at portraying literary odd couples who helped shape the culture of Fire Island. These include "gay patron saints" Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde (though Parlett admits there is "no real evidence" Wilde visited the island), writers Frank O'Hara and James Baldwin, and novelists Carson McCullers and Patricia Highsmith, who were part of Fire Island's "lesbian literati" in the 1950s and '60s. Parlett also does an admirable job illuminating how the Stonewall Riots, the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, and other events affected the island's gay community, though his attempts to weave in autobiographical reflections are somewhat less effective. Still, this is a rich and rewarding study of Fire Island's vital role in LGBTQ history and culture.
