"Its Own Province": Fire Island Households and the Meanings of Gay Friendship

In her much-maligned 1980 essay, "The Boys on the Beach," Midge Decter followed conservative trends in presenting gay men as the primary avatar of the family’s downfall: “No households of wives and children requiring security; no entailments of school bills, doctor and dentist bills; no lifetime of acquiring the goods needed for family welfare and the goods desired for family entertainment." She pointed to Fire Island, where she and her husband Norman Podhoretz once spent their summers, only to find themselves repelled by the increasing openness and "shrillness" of the Island's gay vacationers. Decter's re-idealization of the heterosexual household stands in contrast to the ways Fire Island itself provided gay men spaces to experiment with alternative domestic and relational arrangements. In the 1970s, rising rental prices and increasing competition across the Island made living together in larger numbers more necessary—with as many as ten people crowded into a single house any given weekend. While this communal living was sometimes challenging, it also came to be experienced, represented, and remembered as one of the Island's primary attractions. The specific domestic styles varied, from the campily-named bungalows of Cherry Grove to the fashionably modern homes of the Pines. Among these variations however, the recreational domesticity of Fire Island came to provide a model for many men of what gay life could and should be—a community rooted not in biological kinship or monogamous romantic relationships but in open, flexible, and lasting friendship circles, bonds that would become only more important with the emergence of AIDS.