Going into the post-war interval, Cherry Grove turned more and more well-known as an eccentric, outrageous spot, its small-town environment enriched with a vibrant theatrical and drag tradition, and ample venues for ingesting, dancing and public intercourse. The Grove’s extra upmarket neighbour, Fireplace Island Pines, was developed later, within the Fifties, as a “family-friendly” group, though this label did not final for very lengthy, even though quite a few homosexual householders had moved there from the Grove within the hopes that it could act as a extra discreet enclave. By the Seventies, with the flourishing of an more and more public queer tradition within the years following the Stonewall riots, Cherry Grove and the Pines had been each extremely fascinating places, frequented by writers and, together with Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Patricia Highsmith, Carson McCullers, in addition to quite a few stars of stage and display screen. That the supposed golden age of Fireplace Island’s unfastened and liberated tradition was so short-lived, earlier than the HIV/Aids epidemic started decimating its group within the early Eighties, solely additional informs its mythology as a fragile, sacred place, lingering defiantly on the fringes of the Atlantic.
A spot of “loss of life and need”
As a result of this is the opposite factor about Fireplace Island; it’s a haunted place. It’s, as WH Auden writes in his 1948 poem in regards to the place, Pleasure Island, as if the “lenient amusing shore / Is aware of in reality about all of the dyings”. As a lot as a summer season on Fireplace Island is about immersion within the current second (this weekend) or the close to future (this season), the previous isn’t far-off. Scratch beneath the glamorous, hedonistic sheen of its common picture and a wealthy cultural lineage comes into view, together with the ghosts of the varied figures who’ve graced its shores. Earlier than I started analysis on my guide Fireplace Island: Love, Loss and Liberation in An American Paradise, which examines the queer cultural historical past of Cherry Grove and the Pines, whereas interweaving facets of private memoir, I went there within the spirit of pilgrimage, looking for to retrace the footsteps of poet Frank O’Hara, who was killed on the seaside close to the Pines in a dune buggy accident in the summertime of 1966. Standing by the ocean within the early hours of the morning, incanting strains from one among O’Hara’s poems, the deathliness of the place turned vividly obvious; the sense that it’s teeming with the life (or lives) of its previous. Because the narrator of Andrew Holleran’s traditional 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance notes, this can be a place of “loss of life and need”.
