Jack Parlett’s “Fire Island” is a sweeping, meditative history of the queer summer mecca.
W.H. Auden and James Stern on the beach at Fire Island in the summer of 1946.
Credit...Bridgeman Images
By Wayne Koestenbaum
By Wayne Koestenbaum
NEW YORK TIMES
June 7, 2022
FIRE ISLAND: A Century in the Life of an American Paradise, by Jack Parlett
The few times that I — bespectacled and pale — visited Fire Island, I felt out of place. The poet Jack Parlett, who describes himself as an “‘otter,’ or maybe a ‘bear’ in training,” and who has mixed feelings, too, about paradise, hugs his ambivalence and makes good literature out of it. His concise, meticulously researched, century-spanning chronicle of queer life on Fire Island captures, with a plain-spoken yet lyric touch, the locale’s power to stun and shame, to give pleasure and symbolize evanescence.
Fire Island, a 9.6-mile barrier island off Long Island’s south shore, less than two hours from Manhattan, can claim centuries of indigenous habitation and “around seventeen different vacation communities,” including Cherry Grove and the Pines, where the queer plot thickens. “Wallflower sensibility” authorizes Parlett to be a skeptical yet definitive narrator of Fire Island’s carnival, a diorama he embellishes with autobiographical asides: “Ever since I came to know myself as a gay man, I made the unconscious assumption that my own heavy drinking habits were linked to my sexuality.” Quick personal vistas turn his book into a hybrid act, a place-based memoir sketching the evolution of a community animated by sexual arrangements.
Parlett is no more sanguine than I am about the possibilities of community, much as we long for it, yet the book’s most practical aperçu arrives when he recounts a therapist’s advice: “When you walk past another gay person on the street, give them a smile.” Parlett explains: “The queer community has been historically adept at sustaining itself on such passing looks.” To honor cruising’s perpetual afterlife, smile today at a stranger. Extend your gaze for an extra three seconds. See what next transpires.
Parlett entertains us with a grocery list of walk-ons, cameo players in a sword-and-sandal psycho-epic. Walt Whitman saw a “wild sea-storm” on Fire Island. Claude Lévi-Strauss called it a place of “gay farcicality.” James Baldwin (who once wrote, “I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure”) worked on a draft of “Another Country” on Fire Island, where Janet Flanner, Patricia Highsmith and Carson McCullers held louche court. Andy Warhol filmed “My Hustler” on the beach, where Derek Jarman later made a moody, prismatic Super 8 film. Liza Minnelli paid a “papal visit” to Fire Island in 2012. I wish I’d ferried there to receive unction.
James Dean stayed there as a “professional house guest.” After his untimely death, the poet Frank O’Hara wrote the star’s name as a funeral gesture in Fire Island sand. O’Hara himself died there (at age 40) after being hit by a dune buggy. His death burnished the island’s status as a haunted necropolis: “The fact that he died on the beach at Fire Island continues to bear, in all its randomness, some kind of mythical weight. That night provides a point at which O’Hara’s own legacy, as a beloved gay poet, meets with the history of a place that would become synonymous with a new kind of sexual citizenship.” AIDS devastated the island; elegiacally, Parlett has put poets (from Whitman and O’Hara to Melvin Dixon, Reginald Shepherd and Assotto Saint) at the center of Fire Island’s paradoxical story, a knotted skein of plague and paradise.
Parlett is sharp-minded about gentrification, class, racism and the “structural privilege” built into Fire Island’s style, a hegemonic strand. The vanguard 1970s journal Fag Rag forbade Fire Island to be mentioned “in poems submitted to the publication,” yet Parlett reminds us not to stereotype Fire Island, which contains diverse milieus: “It’s worth noting that when people use ‘Fire Island’ as a shorthand for bad gays, they’re usually talking about the Pines, rather than the more mixed and relaxed Cherry Grove.” He pays filial attention to archives and to the table talk of queer elders; intergenerational wisdom lends his tale its crepuscular bite. Belatedness and regret tinge any P.O.V. shot onto this oasis: “Fire Island still makes me think of Balbec,” he acknowledges, referring to Proust’s own brand of seaside Elysium. Toward such lost destinations, we look with moon-drunk longing: “I felt the pull of paradise thinking.”
At its best, this book enacts a glancing yet trenchant meditation on community, “ecological precarity” and the fugitive links between place and sexuality. The island evolves, its tired fixities metamorphosing into bold new stances: Recently, radical art projects (sponsored by the arts organization BOFFO) have brought such writers, artists and performers as Sam Ashby, Leilah Babirye, Kia LaBeija and Jeremy O. Harris to this sandbar, a place described eloquently by Andrew Holleran as “slim as a parenthesis.” Expand the slim addendum — perhaps that’s the book’s moral. Extend the parenthesis of paradise to accommodate more of your messy heart. Parlett’s prose is never messy; its well-timed pulsations bring beach light onto the page.
Wayne Koestenbaum’s most recent book is “Ultramarine,” the third volume of his trance poem trilogy.
FIRE ISLAND: A Century in the Life of an American Paradise, by Jack Parlett | Illustrated | 269 pp. | Hanover Square Press | $27.99
June 7, 2022
FIRE ISLAND: A Century in the Life of an American Paradise, by Jack Parlett
The few times that I — bespectacled and pale — visited Fire Island, I felt out of place. The poet Jack Parlett, who describes himself as an “‘otter,’ or maybe a ‘bear’ in training,” and who has mixed feelings, too, about paradise, hugs his ambivalence and makes good literature out of it. His concise, meticulously researched, century-spanning chronicle of queer life on Fire Island captures, with a plain-spoken yet lyric touch, the locale’s power to stun and shame, to give pleasure and symbolize evanescence.
Fire Island, a 9.6-mile barrier island off Long Island’s south shore, less than two hours from Manhattan, can claim centuries of indigenous habitation and “around seventeen different vacation communities,” including Cherry Grove and the Pines, where the queer plot thickens. “Wallflower sensibility” authorizes Parlett to be a skeptical yet definitive narrator of Fire Island’s carnival, a diorama he embellishes with autobiographical asides: “Ever since I came to know myself as a gay man, I made the unconscious assumption that my own heavy drinking habits were linked to my sexuality.” Quick personal vistas turn his book into a hybrid act, a place-based memoir sketching the evolution of a community animated by sexual arrangements.
Parlett is no more sanguine than I am about the possibilities of community, much as we long for it, yet the book’s most practical aperçu arrives when he recounts a therapist’s advice: “When you walk past another gay person on the street, give them a smile.” Parlett explains: “The queer community has been historically adept at sustaining itself on such passing looks.” To honor cruising’s perpetual afterlife, smile today at a stranger. Extend your gaze for an extra three seconds. See what next transpires.
Parlett entertains us with a grocery list of walk-ons, cameo players in a sword-and-sandal psycho-epic. Walt Whitman saw a “wild sea-storm” on Fire Island. Claude Lévi-Strauss called it a place of “gay farcicality.” James Baldwin (who once wrote, “I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure”) worked on a draft of “Another Country” on Fire Island, where Janet Flanner, Patricia Highsmith and Carson McCullers held louche court. Andy Warhol filmed “My Hustler” on the beach, where Derek Jarman later made a moody, prismatic Super 8 film. Liza Minnelli paid a “papal visit” to Fire Island in 2012. I wish I’d ferried there to receive unction.
James Dean stayed there as a “professional house guest.” After his untimely death, the poet Frank O’Hara wrote the star’s name as a funeral gesture in Fire Island sand. O’Hara himself died there (at age 40) after being hit by a dune buggy. His death burnished the island’s status as a haunted necropolis: “The fact that he died on the beach at Fire Island continues to bear, in all its randomness, some kind of mythical weight. That night provides a point at which O’Hara’s own legacy, as a beloved gay poet, meets with the history of a place that would become synonymous with a new kind of sexual citizenship.” AIDS devastated the island; elegiacally, Parlett has put poets (from Whitman and O’Hara to Melvin Dixon, Reginald Shepherd and Assotto Saint) at the center of Fire Island’s paradoxical story, a knotted skein of plague and paradise.
Parlett is sharp-minded about gentrification, class, racism and the “structural privilege” built into Fire Island’s style, a hegemonic strand. The vanguard 1970s journal Fag Rag forbade Fire Island to be mentioned “in poems submitted to the publication,” yet Parlett reminds us not to stereotype Fire Island, which contains diverse milieus: “It’s worth noting that when people use ‘Fire Island’ as a shorthand for bad gays, they’re usually talking about the Pines, rather than the more mixed and relaxed Cherry Grove.” He pays filial attention to archives and to the table talk of queer elders; intergenerational wisdom lends his tale its crepuscular bite. Belatedness and regret tinge any P.O.V. shot onto this oasis: “Fire Island still makes me think of Balbec,” he acknowledges, referring to Proust’s own brand of seaside Elysium. Toward such lost destinations, we look with moon-drunk longing: “I felt the pull of paradise thinking.”
At its best, this book enacts a glancing yet trenchant meditation on community, “ecological precarity” and the fugitive links between place and sexuality. The island evolves, its tired fixities metamorphosing into bold new stances: Recently, radical art projects (sponsored by the arts organization BOFFO) have brought such writers, artists and performers as Sam Ashby, Leilah Babirye, Kia LaBeija and Jeremy O. Harris to this sandbar, a place described eloquently by Andrew Holleran as “slim as a parenthesis.” Expand the slim addendum — perhaps that’s the book’s moral. Extend the parenthesis of paradise to accommodate more of your messy heart. Parlett’s prose is never messy; its well-timed pulsations bring beach light onto the page.
Wayne Koestenbaum’s most recent book is “Ultramarine,” the third volume of his trance poem trilogy.
FIRE ISLAND: A Century in the Life of an American Paradise, by Jack Parlett | Illustrated | 269 pp. | Hanover Square Press | $27.99
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