Few places in American cultural history have played as profound a role in the development of queer artistic life as Fire Island. During much of the 20th century—particularly from the postwar years through the onset of the AIDS epidemic—it became perhaps the nation’s most vital seasonal gathering place for queer women and men writers, painters, playwrights, dancers, architects, photographers, composers, actors and designers.
They encountered one another not at rigid conferences or within academic walls, but on sun-bleached beaches, narrow boardwalks and shaded decks overlooking the Great South Bay. The island evolved into an informal academy of the arts and a sanctuary for those whom mainstream society would not yet name, let alone welcome.
Off the Beaten path
Unlike Provincetown or Greenwich Village, this long slender barrier island was not easy to access; reaching it required a deliberate choice. Artists and non-conformists made the trek precisely to find a rare topography of acceptance. Creative conversations unfolded seamlessly over shared dinners, afternoon swims and late-night gatherings in modest beach houses. In this isolated environment, friendships naturally deepened into collaborations, and collaborations coalesced into artistic movements.
The island’s physical isolation made this possible in ways that are easy to underestimate today. With virtually no automobiles, life moved strictly on foot along miles of pristine coastline and elevated wooden boardwalks winding through maritime forests and over fragile dunes. Walking encouraged conversation; the absence of cars slowed time and fostered chance meetings, creating a genuine ecosystem for both art and community. Crucially, the accommodations were affordable enough to sustain them.
To encounter Fire Island today is to feel a profound distance from that early world.
What one notices first is immense affluence—and a striking shift in volume. The landscape is now defined by magnificent houses, immaculate modern architecture, high fashion, high-octane parties, and real estate of staggering value.
While residents and visitors work conscientiously to protect the extraordinary flora and fauna of this national seashore, the relationship between the human and the natural ecosystem remains fragile. The delicate patches of nature look almost as if they are on exhibit in a habitat museum park. One cannot help wondering how long such ecological delicacy can continue to coexist with such intense human development.
That ecological fragility opens a deeper cultural question: What is the relationship between this contemporary culture of money and the artistic ecosystem that nourished queer creativity for over a century?
As I walked the pristine beaches, bordered by one expensive beach home after another like a precious pearl choker, I thought of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico—a compelling example of the power of money to reshape an artistic community—which I have been visiting since 1967. For decades the city nurtured struggling painters, writers, musicians and actors from Mexico, Canada, the USA and around the world, because it offered what every creative community requires: affordability, conversation, and time.
Then, almost overnight, international acclaim—helped in no small measure by Condé Nast’s repeated crowning of San Miguel as one of the world’s most beautiful cities—accelerated a wave of prosperity that remade the city in the image of its newcomers, rather than in the values of the original residents or the artists who once flourished in its richly diverse milieu.
An explosion of creativity
Fire Island tells a related story, though it began from a different kind of scarcity and offered special refuge mainly to queer artists. The postwar decades were extraordinary and cannot be recreated. In Cherry Grove and the Pines, gay men and lesbians could, perhaps for the first time, live openly among other queer people of all stripes and varieties. Because mainstream society excluded them, artists found a home in one another here—Frank O’Hara, Paul Cadmus, W. H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Edward Albee, all alongside dancers from the Paul Taylor Dance Company and the New York City Ballet. Fire Island was less a traditional resort than an artists’ colony of the first order.
That colony was never only male. Women writers, Carson McCullers and Patricia Highsmith, among notable others, spent pivotal time in Cherry Grove during the 1940s and 1950s, using its liberated sanctuary to write and live outside mainland constraints.
That world did not erode from any single cause, but through several shifts arriving in close succession. The AIDS epidemic devastated an entire generation; many who defined the island’s creative life died in the 1980s and early 1990s, leaving behind an irreplaceable loss. Meanwhile, LGBTQ+ people slowly gained greater freedom to live openly in urban centers across the country—New York, Chicago, San Francisco—eroding the island’s singularity as a necessary sanctuary. Finally, skyrocketing real estate prices, as has happened in nearly every historic artists’ colony, made it increasingly difficult for younger, emerging artists to spend summers here.
Yet, I would hesitate to call what remains mere nostalgia.
The island’s creative life has not disappeared. The annual Fire Island Dance Festival continues to attract internationally recognized performers; the Arts Project of Cherry Grove commissions ambitious new work in theater, music, literature and the visual arts; and the restoration of the historic Carrington House reflects a conscious effort not merely to preserve the island’s artistic legacy but to renew it.
What has fundamentally changed is the nature of creativity and the conditions surrounding it. Artists no longer depend on Fire Island in quite the same way. Instead of serving as a singular hidden refuge, it now functions as a vital site of gathering, performance, memory and community.
An ever-evolving local culture
Fire Island has become what the French historian Pierre Nora called a lieu de mémoire—a place where memory itself becomes part of the living landscape. The beaches, boardwalks, houses and dunes carry the presence of successive generations; that accumulated memory becomes an active part of the creative experience for those who arrive today.
The wealth and resources concentrated in certain strata of American queer culture have made this renewal visible—even as that same visibility mainstreams much of its artistic possibility. The past here is not safely archived; it is actively inhabited.
Yet massive wealth has undeniably flattened the exuberance of cultural and artistic diversity—not intentionally, but simply by dominating the physical and human landscape. Even so, artistic productivity always finds a way, and there are strong currents of emerging diversity breaking through the surface.
In 2009, architect Faris Al-Shathir and landscape architect Gregory Sparks launched the BOFFO [English slang for wildly excellent/successful] Residency Fire Island in the Pines to counter the feeling that the community had become culturally “one-note.” Their explicit goal is to nurture queer and trans artists, diversify the island’s creative spaces, and give back to the local community through public art.
Beyond the summer residency, the organization is widely recognized for the annual BOFFO Fire Island Performance Festival. Held directly on the beach and within architecturally significant local homes, it features an immersive, sunrise-to-sunset marathon of experimental dance, live music, radical performance art, and DJ sets.
The paintings of T. M. Davy illustrate the island’s continued power to inspire genuine interiority. Davy depicts Fire Island neither as a loud spectacle nor as a nostalgic paradise, but as the quiet life of an intimate queer community: friends reading, couples resting, solitary figures walking the dunes, deer emerging from the woods, birds in the marsh, and twilight on the beach. One critic aptly described these paintings as portraying the “quiet freedoms” of queer existence.
That phrase deserves close attention. Davy reminds us that queer life need not always be represented through crisis or spectacle. It may also be represented through ordinary happiness, companionship, contemplation, and the quiet rhythms of daily life. For generations, representations of gay life in art heavily emphasized tragedy, persecution, secrecy, or pure spectacle. Davy instead paints ordinary, casual happiness—and that may prove to be among his most lasting contributions.
Davy is an artist with an established reputation. But what of emerging artists? Do they find support and nourishment in a culture dominated by money and the logic of the market? Can they build community networks that sustain serious work without succumbing to an attention economy that glamorizes the artist while trivializing the art into a commodity and a quick sensation?
The many contributions from women
Whereas Fire Island’s artistic mythology was historically dominated by gay men, today many of the most interesting artists shaping its cultural life are women, including lesbians and trans artists. This shift has been driven largely by the Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR) in Cherry Grove and BOFFO in the Pines, both of which have intentionally broadened who gets to create work here.
Among the women artists most closely associated with contemporary Fire Island is Nicole Eisenman, one of America’s most celebrated painters, whose work masterfully combines humor, politics and queer life, and who created installations for Trailblazers Park in the Pines. Similarly, Lola Flash, a pioneering Black lesbian photographer whose documentation of queer communities spans decades, has made Fire Island a central subject in both her photography and her writing on queer history.
Scholars and curators have also reshaped how the island’s history is understood—notably Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva, who curated The Lesbian House and has written the first substantial history of lesbian life in Cherry Grove as part of the Fire Island Histories Project.
The future of community
Nik Vallen is an artist I have met here who has thought carefully about these questions. He describes his practice as a deliberate effort to build self-sustaining community networks that enable artists to create cultural alternatives to the dominant fare of glitter and commerce. Working with natural dyes and hand-worked fibers, Vallen creates works that function not merely as artworks but as acts of cultural resistance—an insistence that community, sustainability and craftsmanship still matter.
Vallen wonders whether true community—with organic, integrated artistic expression at its center—can be built and sustained in the midst of all this prosperity. It is an honest and serious question, and I find myself asking it too.
Can Fire Island hold two cultures simultaneously? One is the culture visitors see first: magnificent houses, manicured landscapes, fashion, parties and extraordinary privilege. The other is much quieter: painters in studios, writers revising manuscripts, musicians practicing, people walking the beach before sunrise, and evenings spent reading rather than performing.
This second culture is less visible, but it may also be the one that fundamentally sustains the island’s creative life—carrying forward the long tradition of queer artistic community that made Fire Island, for so many, a place unlike any other on earth.
Whether Fire Island can continue to nurture artistic diversity remains uncertain. History suggests that artistic communities rarely survive prosperity unchanged. Yet artists have always sought places where conversation, beauty, friendship and imagination converge. If Fire Island can continue to offer those gifts—even amid extraordinary wealth—it may yet remain one of the indispensable landscapes of queer American culture.
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2026 © nicholas.patricca@gmail.com
Nick Patricca is Professor Emeritus at Loyola University Chicago, member of San Miguel PEN MX Centre, and active member of the Dramatists Guild of America.