The boat slips from the dock into the green, murky canal, and until the ferry makes its way into the Great South Bay, I can hear the grating sound of winches lifting or hauling, the squeal of metal on metal mixed with the high-pitched yowl of a Yorkie squeezed beneath the arm of one of the passengers. Soon all that is left behind. The waters open up and change color; the blotches of oil disappear, and the only sounds are the grumble of the ferry’s motor and the swish of spray against the vessel. A woman in front of me is traveling with her two sons, ten and twelve years old I’d guess, and they sit quietly together, pointing at the gulls and buildings on the Sayville shore. The only two children on the boat, they seem to know how to behave among adults. They are unfazed by the two older gray-haired men with their arms around each other or the lean college student with long dark hair resting his head on the shoulder of his bodybuilder boyfriend.
I grew up in Queens although I haven’t lived in New York City for a quarter of a century. On the way out, the train from Manhattan passed my old neighborhood, dreary files of semiattached stucco houses. In all the years that I lived in New York, I never once went to Cherry Grove or The Pines, the two gay communities on Fire Island. As a teenager I considered them as remote and exotic as Zanzibar, and they do represent another country, even for the people who own houses there. They are, geographically and psychologically, places apart.
The day is hazy, and from the Long Island shore I cannot see Fire Island, which is only a short trip from the mainland. The rather anxious narrator of Edmund White’s first novel, Forgetting Elena, set on an allegorized version of Fire Island, obsesses about “the gauze” that seems to hover in the sky, fearful that it will “drift silently to earth and smother me in its intricate mesh” (FE:38), but to me it looks more like a theatrical scrim that will rise on cue. In the middle of the bay we pass six swans that could have been planted by some overly zealous set decorator, they seem so ornamental and self-consciously arranged. Three are gray, three white, and they strike various attitudes of attention and indifference—sometimes stretching their long necks to adjust a feather in their tails, sometimes looping them into that questioning curve or dunking their heads into the dark, dark water. I realize that one of the reasons I’ve never been out to Fire Island is the theatrical unreality of the place, its dreamland aura. And as I look around at my fellow passengers, I recognize another reason: the men—all of them—are exceptionally beautiful, quite out of my league.
I didn’t visit Fire Island when I was growing up in New York or later in my twenties—around the time the Violet Quill was spending their summers there. I’ve gone only once (when I was well past forty), and even then I brought along a friend, the blond and boyishly handsome writer Clifford Chase, as protection not from being snubbed—I knew no one who might snub me—but from being totally ignored. Actually, the people we met were all cordial, and no doubt my years of avoiding Fire Island were the result of hypersensitivity; and yet a number of men of my generation—handsome, successful, and sociable hunks—had the same reaction. We felt that we had neither the money, the social skills, the style, the stamina and, of course, the looks to fit into the scene. I had been a poor and serious graduate student and, even by Baltimore standards—which are not very demanding—hardly the partying type.
I am not the only person whom Fire Island has made anxious. The Pines has always been a daunting place for those unprepared for its spectacle of beauty. One of the notable documents of the past couple of decades in the history of homophobia is Midge Decter’s twisted little essay, “The Boys on the Beach,” her account of living in The Pines before Stonewall—that is, before its heyday. Even then the body beautiful was the salient feature of gay life in which “flesh [was never] permitted to betray any of the ordinary signs of encroaching mortality, such as excess fat or flabbiness or on the other hand the kind of muscularity that suggests some activity whose end is not beauty” (38). Decter is so unsettled by this display of male beauty that she imagines it as an active attempt to insult, to “mock” and “diminish” heterosexuals, particularly heterosexual men, who are there and witness it: “Naked or covered, then, the homosexuals offered their straight neighbors an insistent reminder of the ravages to their person wrought by heterosexual existence” (38). In one of the more bizarre turns in this studied piece of resentment and condescension, Decter blames gays for their apparent healthiness, as if being beautiful were a sin and heterosexuality a chronic and virtually incurable disease that leads from childbirth to the grave in one steady, unalterable descent. But if Decter’s response is more than a little over-the-top, there can be no doubt that, later on, The Pines could be intimidating even to the average run of gay men.
Fred Lemish, the protagonist of Larry Kramer’s novel Faggots (1978), recalls that he “had first come to Fire Island Pines when he was thirty. He wasn’t ready for such beauty, such potential, such unlimited choice. The place scared him half to death” (224). Richard Bronstein, another character in Faggots, feels a similar Prufrockian trepidation:
When he’d finally summoned the courage to pick himself up and off the beach and have a look around this Forbidden Island, he’d found all his worst fears transmogrified into flesh. Oh, so much flesh! Everywhere! Everyone was Mr. America. And he hadn’t been able to be a Mr. Soho Loft. His workouts hadn’t worked out at all. … He couldn’t look anybody in the eye. They can see I’m a loser. They can see I’ve got the smallest cock in captivity. They can just see it! (242)
Of course, all of Kramer’s Jewish characters suffer from a similar sense of angst, and one could write this insecurity off as an ethnic trait. But writing just a few years later, Edmund White admits in States of Desire just how intimidated he feels by Fire Island. “As a person of average looks and average income,” he writes, the place “fill[s] me with insecurity” since it had become “unrivalled” as “a spectacle of gay affluence and gay male beauty” (294). Writing in Christopher Street in the late seventies, White notes a major shift in gay life which had occurred since 1970, when he left New York to spend the year in Italy. On his return he found that “sexual permissiveness became a form of numbness, as rigidly codified as the old morality,” and that “street cruising gave way to half-clothed quickies.” But the worst change for White was symbolized by the change in fashion: the fantasy costumes he had celebrated in Forgetting Elena, the “gauze robes, beaded headache bands, mirrored vests” had been replaced by what he called “the new brutalism: work boots, denim, beards and mustaches” (BL:40–41). By the late seventies, when he came to write States of Desire, The Pines and Cherry Grove had lost a great deal of their charm: “In general, life on Fire Island is less sybaritic and more ascetic than rumor would have it. The schedule can be daunting” (SOD:292). Fire Island intimidated gay men on three fronts: the aesthetic, the economic, and the sexual. Clearly these aren’t separate—in fact, what is most frightening is how they converge—and no place epitomized their convergence like Fire Island.
Just arriving on Fire Island is a bit off-putting. The harbor at The Pines is small but exquisite. Andrew Holleran remembers it as being a “nondescript dock,” but now “one disembarks at an entrance gate flanked by flower boxes” (“Fire Island”:304). On the day of my visit, a crowd is waiting to welcome the new arrivals: mostly young men in clothes one only sees in the glossy pages of International Male. Dogs on ship bark at dogs on the dock in polite tones, as if acknowledging old friends. But Larry, one of the central characters in George Whitmore’s comedy The Rights, describes his arrival at The Pines in ecstatic terms: “I’ll never forget that entrance into the harbor,” he tells his ex-lover, who has invited him out to Fire Island for the first time:
… the yachts bobbing into view, a wide crescent of yachts skirting the bay. Enchanted older couples perched in the afterdecks drinking—oh, something long and cool. Pennants snapping in the wind. … That extraordinary press of people. That great mass lining the quay. Waving, welcoming us, all us outlanders to their island. Lithesome boys in little T-shirts and little white shorts. Stalwart gentlemen in abbreviated ensembles laced with leather and chains. Statuesque sirens in the flimsiest of shifts … and the dancers! The dancers and the music! The steady thump-thump-thump of the engines and our hearts and the music! It was like Bora-Bora or something! It was like crossing the bar. It was like Disneyland and Cleopatra’s barge all rolled up into one.
My own arrival and entrance into the harbor is far more sedate. I’m struck, once the engine is cut, by how quiet Fire Island is. No one shouts, no one even raises his voice. Even the gulls cry sotto voce. I did not see, as Andrew Holleran’s Sutherland insisted I would, “a very rich Jewess [who had made all her fortune on vacuum cleaners] on one of the boats, and a young man, her social secretary, playing canasta on board” (DFTD:208). There was nothing so ostentatious or vulgar, but of course I have arrived on a Monday, the slowest day of the week, and also some twenty years after its heyday when the social critic Albert Goldman proclaimed Fire Island the future of America. Instead I notice that everyone is acting very adult—but of course, nearly everyone is an adult at The Pines.
Fire Island’s importance to the writers of the Violet Quill is that on the island they could create a place on their own terms, to reflect their own needs and their own values. To be sure, in various ghettos in metropolitan areas gay men and lesbians had created their own neighborhoods. But in the Village, the Castro, or West Hollywood, the boundaries of that community were always blurry. Nongay people passed through. Fire Island’s geographical isolation—even from the otherwise ubiquitous automobile—made it a place where gay people could set the terms of their existence far from prying eyes. Although under the jurisdiction of the Suffolk County police, police raids for public sex ended in the late sixties. Even before Stonewall, lesbians and gay men had enough clout in the area to free themselves from police surveillance and arrest. “These ‘raids’ are a gross violation of civil rights,” wrote Dick Leitsch, the president of the New York Mattachine Society, to county officials, “mockeries of justice, and a blot on the conscience of Suffolk County” (quoted in Newton:200). The Mattachine Society’s protests against police patrols on Fire Island were one of the group’s rare successes, according to Esther Newton (200). Nothing could indicate more dramatically than this battle over public sex the determination of gay Fire Islanders to make the space their own, a place where they could exercise their desires and their fantasies undisturbed by heterosexual values. But it wasn’t merely gay sexual values that were cultivated on Fire Island; an entire gay aesthetic took root on its sandy beaches.
No wonder, then, that Malone, the hero of Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, “felt he had found Paradise his first visit to Fire Island; and it took him three or four summers to even admit it was anything else … because nowhere else on earth was natural and human beauty fused; and because nowhere else on earth could you dance in quite the same atmosphere” (207). Larry in The Rights calls it an “enchanted isle,” alluding to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. What is so special about Fire Island? After all, there are many popular resorts along the Long Island coast. The Hamptons—to which Fire Island is invariably compared—are just farther to the east on the South Shore and perhaps even more famous. But the beauty of The Pines is not the beauty of the Hamptons, whose large homes and spacious gardens are on an entirely different scale. Willem de Kooning, who is so closely associated with the Hamptons, painted a picture Fire Island in his usual palette of dazzling orange, teal, shocking pink, and white. A headless woman leans over another woman, bodiless but for her breasts. A third woman with limbs like tentacles appears to be swimming at the top of the painting. The colors, the shapes, the light are all similar to the work he did in the Hamptons; what distinguishes Fire Island from those other De Kooning paintings is the size (48.3 x 67.3 cm). By De Kooning’s usual standards, it is small; the arabesque of women is pressed tightly together—the pleasures dense with incident.
The scale of Cherry Grove and, to a lesser extent, The Pines is tiny. Although Fire Island in its entirety is thirty miles long, it is only half a mile wide at its thickest. Cherry Grove and The Pines—at the island’s midpoint—are about a quarter of a mile wide. Moreover, the absence of cars in the Grove or The Pines keeps everything within walking distance or, rather, strolling distance, for nothing could be less in the spirit of these resorts than hiking. Consequently, the two communities are shallow stages better suited for comedy than tragedy, small intrigues rather than epic battles. The works in which the Violet Quill wrote about the island—White’s brief novel Forgetting Elena, Felice Picano’s short novel Late in the Season and his memoir A House on the Ocean, A House on the Bay, George Whitmore’s series of short stories in “Out Here: Tales of Fire Island” and his play The Rights—all tend to be chamber works where each detail is carefully wrought. Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, whose climax is set on the island, alone aspires to the grand, the tragic, the epic, although its ironic, shimmering tone keeps deflating such aspirations. Perhaps Larry Kramer’s ending to Faggots feels particularly overblown because he has set his apocalyptic conclusion in a site where hyperbole signals campiness rather than the mock heroic. Fire Island is a place for the small and exquisite, the lapidary and the luxurious.
Coupled with the smallness of Fire Island’s scale is the density of the living accommodations. Cherry Grove, the older of the two communities, is a quaint grouping of bungalows, packed cheek to jowl. The Pines is newer and more upscale. But since The Pines is bordered by a national park, it cannot grow out; it can only become denser. Because so many people want to stay on Fire Island, rents are astronomical, and because the rents are astronomical, those staying there need to attract others to split the costs. Even by the late seventies, it cost $10,000 to $20,000 to rent a house for the summer, and the houses sold for as much as half a million dollars, according to White (SOD:291). “To meet the high rents, sometimes as many as ten men share a house—even more, if half-shares (every other weekend) are sold,” White informs us. Felice Picano gives an even more detailed account of the economic history of The Pines. Once straight couples left The Pines (like Midge Decter and her husband Norman Podhoritz, editor of the ultra-conservative magazine Commentary), “moneyed gays” moved in. But as The Pines grew more crowded, “those older, more moneyed gays are going to the Hamptons,” leaving their designer houses to what Picano calls “new kinds of gay ‘families’ of everywhere from three to eight people.” Consequently, by the mid-seventies the population of The Pines had become “professional and fairly successful, if less wealthy, but also younger, hipper, better looking, dance-and-recreational drug using rather than cocktail party and alcohol imbibing, [and]. … a lot more ‘out.’” (HOB:147). Since The Pines was populated by “designers and architects,” the newer homes were “wild, whimsical and wonderful” (HOB:148). “It was landscape and weather and decorations as much as bodies” that made Fire Island so wonderful for Picano, “flags, kites, giant pennants of colorful Japanese fish and flowers fluttering at different elevations from eaves and roofs and poles, enormous hanging graphics covering outer-decks walls, and weird instant beach sculptures constructed overnight, as though by marine elves” (HOB:186). In short, the island was filled with the fluttery, the ephemeral, and the fantastic—a particularly gay aesthetic of the times.
Although The Pines was virtually all gay, it is important to remember that not all gay men went to Fire Island. Not even all New York gay men went to Fire Island. It took money and connections to find a share to rent. Although some lesbians had enough money to continue going there, the rise in prices made it increasing difficult since women in general earn less than men. Blacks and people of color were also less likely to have the money or the connections needed to get a share. The number of gay men involved in the life of The Pines was reasonably small. Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance ends with the exaggeration: “I used to say there were seventeen homosexuals in New York, and we knew every one of them, but there were tons of men in that city who weren’t on the circuit, who didn’t dance, didn’t cruise, didn’t fall in love with Malone, who stayed home and went to the country in the summer. We never saw them. We were addicted to something else” (249). Picano makes the same point but with slightly larger numbers. “After a year or two of going out to The Pines, going to dinners and parties, to the Botel for Tea Dance and on weekend nights to the Sandpiper and the Ice Palace in Cherry Grove, and after talking and going to bed together, and tripping on mescaline together on the beach, we all came to know each other well. … The ‘Gay Two Thousand’ someone called us a few years afterwards.” (HOB:185). But whether the population was seventeen or two thousand, it was still relatively few compared to the size of gay New York or gay people in America. Yet because it was depicted repeatedly in so many gay books of the period, The Pines became a symbol of gay life—a symbol of the erotic and aesthetic lavishness of successful gay men who had thrown off the shackles of puritanism and homophobia. Of course, once Fire Island became a symbol, readers usually ignored the subtleties of the works about Fire Island—which usually suggested its fragility and brittleness, the struggles of class and self-acceptance.
Without meaning to, the image of Fire Island blotted out any other picture of being gay, or seemed to. Next to The Pines, all the other gay resorts at the time—Provincetown (Massachusetts), Rehobeth Beach (Delaware), and even Key West (Florida), all of which I visited in the seventies—paled by comparison. Picano captures the aggressive self-confidence and self-promotion of The Pines: “Face it, we pretty much created the seventies! Its music, its way of socializing, its sexual behavior, its clubs, its clothing, its entire sense of style and design, its resorts, its celebrities, its language!” (HOB:416). Those two words, “Face it,” tell me all the reasons I didn’t visit The Pines in the seventies; they capture the tone—the confrontational, matter-of-fact, fast, and frankly sexual tone—that dared rather than invited, that challenged and chilled rather than welcomed and warmed.
Edmund White’s Forgetting Elena, about a fantasy kingdom turned democratic, reflects some of the social changes that were occurring on Fire Island. In its highly elliptical way, the novel relates that there has been a bloodless revolution on the island—bloodless but not without violence, since one of the homes of the old guard is mysteriously burned down in what everyone regards as an act of political arson—replacing the Old Code with the New Code, a world of aristocratic privilege with one of egalitarian permissiveness. Of course, in the late sixties—and Forgetting Elena was virtually completed by 1968 although not published until 1972—American society was split between the Old Code, which was pro-war, pro-white, and affirmed patriarchal privilege, and the counterculture, which was antiwar, pro–civil rights, and inclined toward feminism. But according to Esther Newton, there was a split more specific to Cherry Grove:
The social, economic and environmental changes wrought by the feverish gay real estate and commercial entrepreneurship of the sixties met with a certain degree of resistance from Grovers. The homogeneous and harmonious gay “country club” of the 1950s split into factions for and against gay commercialism. I will call the anticommercial camp “conservatives” because they looked back toward the simplicity and social harmony of the fifties as the ideal. The conservatives also resented the ongoing shift in the very definition of what a Grover was—from an artistic, class-based notion that could include lesbians and straights, to one which emphasized gay male sexuality. Opposing the conservatives in the local scene were the real estate developers and business owners, the “commercials,” and their employees, who represented themselves as dynamic, forward-looking and egalitarian in contrast to the elitist conservatives. (Cherry Grove, Fire Island, 136)
Despite the “egalitarian” rhetoric of the “commercials,” the effect was quite the opposite, and even more rigid and exclusive attitudes evolved governing Fire Island behavior. Almost all the Violet Quill work written about Fire Island includes class conflict of one sort or another—the differences between rich and poor, artist and nonartist, young and old. Like small-town life in general, Fire Island society seems to emphasize class divisions rather than erase them.
Yet despite these social upheavals, the aesthetic of the small and exquisite, the ephemeral and the flamboyant, was established early in Fire Island’s collective consciousness. One can find it in perhaps the first work of fiction set on the island—the brief sketches John Mosher wrote for the New Yorker and collected in Celibate at Twilight (1940). The central figure, Mr. Opal, a semiprecious gem of a man, regards the cottage he has built after the “Hurricane of the Century” devastates the island in 1938.
Mr. Opal’s house was finished, his small and perfect jewel of a house was done at last. So he himself thought as he sank back in one of the big rattan chairs in his living room and appraised the sailcloth curtains with immense satisfaction. For the moment, he was alone and might indulge himself to the full, unobserved, in a gratification that was frankly smug, at a work accomplished, at a creation of his own at last complete. The curtains gave the final needed refinement to the establishment. They hung stiffly from the wooden poles in glowing melon masses, and had in this place, Mr. Opal concluded, almost a kind of elegance. “A gentleman’s house,” Mr. Opal thought in a sudden spasm of self-appreciation. “I can live here on this island for decades, for the rest of my life.” (122)
Mosher was gay and, according to Esther Newton, one of the first gay homeowners in Cherry Grove.1 His parties were the first to bring large numbers of designers and artists out to the island for the weekend (Newton:32).
The work of the Violet Quill that epitomizes the aesthetic of exquisite, luminous detail is Edmund White’s brief but lapidary first novel Forgetting Elena. All its characters are acolytes in “a cult of beauty” (172), and their bible is a purple book that includes a chapter on “Aesthetics as Ethics” (167). When a house catches fire, those attending a dance watch the blaze admiringly from a distance. The “man in the centipede costume” remarks (like an art critic), “Pity there isn’t a touch more blue in the flames. Blue, being a recessive color, would give more depth more plasticity to the whole swirl and make it much more impressive, I think” (FE:23; italics in original). The never-named narrator, who has been surrounded by housemates and guests and their eternal chatter, finds that he would
prefer staring at the foliage that nearly has engulfed our cottage. One bush, or tree, particularly interests me because it has three different leaf shapes, one that looks like an elm’s, another with three lobes and a third that looks like a mitten. This plant has arched over to touch a holly bush, creating a dark tunnel of waxy greenery and a grill of shadows. Our house, like the others I’ve seen, stands on stilts above marshy ground. The decks and walks, built of rough-cut withered planks, are raised. Long strands of grass have grown up between the slats. Constantly bruised by passing feet, the strands have withered, turned brown and now lie listlessly across the wood, like tiny whips in tatters. The immediate vicinity is hillier than the area around the harbor and in one direction I see a black cottage, timidly ostentatious, perched high above us, flying four purple pennants. (Forgetting Elena, 29)
As readers of Forgetting Elena will recognize, the medievalism of this picture of Fire Island is intentional (at one point, Elena is described as having “stepped out of a medieval book of hours” [71]). We should recognize the dark tower from which fly four purple pennants—purple the color of royalty and homosexuality—as though it were a detail in a Bayeux tapestry. But the castle is only a cottage, and although by contrast it may appear to be perched high above him, its elevation is “timidly ostentatious.” This exquisiteness of detail cannot fully mask the summer resort on which it is overlaid.
One can get lost in the thicket of dense detail, just as people could get lost in the thicket of beach shrubs—the famous “Meat Rack” that separates Cherry Grove from The Pines and which acts like a kind of Forest of Arden. What is lost most frequently in that dark wood is one’s sense of self. Thus the anonymous narrator of Forgetting Elena looks for details that are not only beautiful but self-reflexive, telling him who and what he is. For the conceit that governs the novel is that the narrator, who wakes like Kafka’s Gregor in “The Metamorphosis,” discovers not that he has turned into a bug but that he has suffered a change even more disorienting—amnesia. Unable to figure out where he is or even who he is and afraid to tell anyone about his loss of memory, he is forced like an anthropologist dropped into some strange but beautiful society to observe the folkways of the natives and to discern the rules by which they live. Like Lévi-Strauss working out the structure beneath the seemingly chaotic rituals of Melanesian gift-giving, our narrator-hero puzzles whether “beneath the casual manners, a sophisticated machinery is governing every detail? Just as every word or movement takes on overtones and produces ripples that work through the entire society, so every object must be wired to every other” (55). An aesthetic sense is not merely a mode of pleasure on Fire Island, it is virtually a means of survival.
One appeal of this narrative approach is that it speaks to the experience of many of White’s original readers who came out in the sixties and seventies when gay social life was much more cut off from mainstream America and operated in its own unfamiliar and often inscrutable codes of conduct. The first time I went alone to a gay bar, I was whisked away to an after-hours party of about a dozen people given by a rich and prominent figure in Baltimore gay society. I didn’t drink but, afraid of attracting attention by abstaining, I asked for whatever the person next to me was having. I watched for clues when to smile, or cast my eyes to the ceiling—the discussion, as I recall, was about divas who had passed their prime, and so eyes were often rolled heavenward. We all listened as our host played recordings of the music he had stipulated to be performed at his funeral. I watched to see what was the proper response, not knowing whether he was ill or merely morose. Did one cast baleful glances of sorrow in his direction or peals of hysterical laughter (which seemed to consist of several different levels of intensity and meaning quite beyond my comprehension)? The younger men at this party had extremely fast reflexes and could produce with magical swiftness lighters out of their pockets just as the older gentlemen brought their cigarettes up to their lips. I didn’t have a lighter or such good reflexes, so I performed what seemed to be the only other service young men were allowed to do in public—I collected people’s glasses and brought them up to the bar for “freshening.” My experience was not unusual. In fact, I would hazard to say that it was a common one for many young men in the process of coming out at the time. Thus, White was able to tap the kind of process of social imitation and analysis, a kind of initiation by cocktail, that gay young men went through in the years immediately before and after Stonewall.
What complicates the efforts of the anonymous narrator of Forgetting Elena—and for us initiates into the gay world—is that the rituals of the society are not static, indeed they seem constantly to be shifting and subject to revolutionary change. The narrator may hope to find some unifying system, but he discovers instead a society “mad for novelty” in which language is “inexact, experimental, an amoeba possessing mobility but sluggish and perfectly adjustable” (72). This society prefers things “original and complex and elusive” (76), unaware even that it speaks “a peculiar, unfathomable dialect” to the outside world (75). The sensibility cultivated on Fire Island is one that favors subtlety (although with a decidedly theatrical flair) and fluidity and thus requires a sense of tradition with a desire for originality and freshness.
Such an obsession with novelty that finds “anything not up-to-date preposterous” (126) produces enormous anxiety, particularly for the narrator, who as an amnesiac has no sense of tradition and who gets more lost as he goes along, swamped by the ever-shifting significances around him. In a gesture that scandalizes some and embarrasses others, he takes to the dance floor and begins a performance in which he wants to control all the meanings by “generating” them out of himself. He hopes to prove that “I’m not the agent of order, but its source. No need for me to mend the design when I am generating it from the center” (FE:130; italics in original). Yet as soon as the dance is over, his doubts return: “these wastes of water, sand and sky … resemble me, we’re all dispersed. I’m a carousel of possibilities turning on emptiness” (132). The narcissistic order by which he had hoped to capture and stabilize the world proves to be a weightless gauze hovering above him, unanchored to anything solid and threatening to descend and smother him.
The world of Fire Island will not allow itself to be stabilized. At the outset of the novel, White gives a particularly telling example of the maddening shifts of language and manner that run amok in this society “mad for novelty.” Billy, one of the narrator’s housemates, remarks about a penetrating analysis of a fellow housemate, exclaiming, “You have swept that boy back.” Someone asks about this curious usage, and Billy explains quite cheerfully that “back” is the latest way of saying “thoroughly” at the hotel. “For instance, you might say ‘I’m going to clean this house back,’ or, if you’re dressing up, ‘Tonight I’ll give you fashion back’” (6). Billy doesn’t recognize, so inured is he to the language fashions of his day, that the expression “I’ll give you fashion” is hardly idiomatic. Of course, all subcultures produce their own idioms to indicate and maintain group identity. But White satirizes the very trendiness of gay language and its specificity—“back” means “thoroughly” only for the hotel’s population; the rest of the tiny island community finds this particular change in dialect almost impossible (even in context) to understand. To a greater or lesser extent, all the beauty on Fire Island is ingrown and claustrophobic. The lushness of the island is all artificial, since as an extended sandbar it could boast nothing more fertile than various grasses—and even these have had to be meticulously planted and maintained. The wild, overgrown feel of the place is the work of decades of dedicated homeowners and well-paid gardeners who have made a kind of faux-Tropics east of New York.
I have called Forgetting Elena a novel about Fire Island, but it never mentions the name, and White wrote me that the setting “was only very approximately Fire Island.”2 The setting is imported from the world of comic operettas—The Student Prince, for example. But because the setting is so unconcerned with reality, so pleased to be viewed through the Vaseline lens of the imagination, Forgetting Elena is, I would argue, a better representation of Fire Island—a community, after all, dedicated to fantasy—than any “realistic” treatment would be. For in this ambiance of lords and ministers, ladies-in-waiting and servants in livery, White can capture simultaneously the unreality of the resort, its strange and magical beauty, and its anarchic hedonism as well as satirize those very qualities. In the same letter that he distanced the novel’s island setting from the actual Fire Island, White describes The Pines as “always a poetic melancholy place that combined a heart-rendingly beautiful landscape and seascape with an intense social life reminiscent of high school and an abundant sexuality.” By invoking the intensity, fantasy, and cruelty of adolescence, when passionate friendships are as ephemeral as they are life-changing, he has characterized the very ethos of Forgetting Elena.
White wrote me that although the island in Forgetting Elena was mostly imaginary, “to the degree I pictured it at all, it was The Pines.” Nevertheless, the narrator wonders whether he is “The Master of the Grove” (37); the Hotel is directly across from the Palace just as the Cherry Grove Beach Hotel is just down the boardwalk from the Ice Palace. But it would be a mistake to tie the allegorical too tightly to the real Fire Island; both are unreal places one can imaginatively visit but not live in for long. In Dancer from the Dance, Andrew Holleran strives for a similar effect. Through his heightened lyricism, he spreads across the island a kind of fairy-tale magic that he paradoxically hopes will capture the more salient reality of Fire Island in the seventies.
Down at the beach, in both directions, people faced the sea in the lotus position, meditating. The sky behind us was a tumult of gold- and salmon-colored clouds in the west, and before us the day had already died, unwitnessed, to give birth to the primal dream of this particular place, the musical, glittering, erotic night. Everyone—everyone except us, and the people meditating on the ridge of sand facing the sea—was preparing now for that magical night, showering, dressing, locating the pills they would take at nine o’clock after a light supper so that by midnight the night would be even more illusive. (Dancer from the Dance, 212)
Holleran’s and White’s strategies are similar. White’s allegorical dreamscape develops the magical, illusory atmosphere, while Holleran evokes and discards—or almost discards—the detritus of the everyday world. But for both men, Fire Island is a “primal dream,” musical, glittering, and erotic, dotted by men as beautiful as flowers, engaged in a spiritual exercise that makes them only more beautiful.
Perhaps the reason that Fire Island is so often wrapped in a dreamlike haze is not merely its beauty but the drugs that were so much a part of the life of the community. Drug taking became an art on Fire Island, possibly the epitome of the gay need to aestheticize experience. The gays of the seventies developed the “contoured” drug trip, a rigorous and exhausting spiritual discipline if there ever was one. Here’s how Roger Sansarc, the hero of Felice Picano’s novel Like People in History, describes a typical night:
A hit of window-pane acid, softened with a few joints of good grass before we left the house and on the way to the Pines harbor, where we would catch one of the small water taxis to flit us across the black bay waters. Upon disembarking at Cherry Grove, we’d cosmetically inhale a hit of coke for that “Entrance Buzz,” into the Ice Palace, a sort of last-minute blush-on. During the remainder of the night, we’d pick ourselves up with poppers whenever appropriate. As a rule we eschewed angel dust and ethyl chloride, two popular “enhancers” among our set. But we always carried a light hypnotic—Quaalude or Dormidina—to ease our way off the acid, which could at times become speedy and teeth-clenching.
The trick to taking one’s down was to do so at the exact point when one was about to be physically and mentally exhausted, but before one actually was. … Those who didn’t contour their drugs, who took too many ups or downs, or took them too early were “pigs.” Tales of extreme piggishness were gossiped about—“She was found facedown on the edge in the Grove Meat Rack, out like a light! Not even the deer would fuck him!”—and laugh at it all the following week. (337)
It was a miracle if anyone ever completely escaped the barnyard epithet. Picano’s porcine metaphor suggests the polarities that serve as the aesthetic limits on Fire Island. On the one hand, there is the smooth “contoured” drug experience—something beautifully proportioned, classically heightened, and sensitively controlled. The “pigs” are rough, crude, demeaned, insensitive, and wild. Picano allows no middle ground—and in the absence of such a middle ground rests the great anxiety of failing to perform to the island’s standards. A person might arrive thinking that he was beautiful, only to discover through some miscalculation that he had turned into a beast “not even the deer would fuck.”
The passage refers to sex in the Meat Rack. It is not foregrounded but rather presented as the predetermined end of an evening of drugs and dancing, the final movement in the contoured drug experience properly wrung to its last drop. The scandal is not that one is seen in the Meat Rack having public sex but rather that one could not contour the evening skillfully enough to finish it off with the proper élan. Public sex is viewed as the appropriate aesthetic conclusion to an artistically controlled experience. To burn out before the night is done is to be like the fire in Forgetting Elena that lacks the right recessive tints.
Places have a special role in gay literary tradition. Venice, Capri, Alexandria, and Oz are four that spring immediately to mind. Fire Island is the most recurrent locale for the Violet Quill. Christopher Cox’s only book is A Key West Companion, a guide to another resort island. Robert Ferro returns repeatedly to his family’s beach home on the Jersey shore, the place he and his friends dubbed Gaywyck, after the home in yet another novel of the period. The most extreme of these localities is the planet Splendora, which appears in Ferro’s last novel, Second Son. Together they seem to form a gay archetype: the-place-to-be-gay. Let’s take a side trip to Splendora before exploring Fire Island any further.
Splendora is a planet located somewhere between Robert Ferro’s imagination and the constellation Sirius, and just how seriously (or “siriusly”) we are to take its existence is one of Second Son’s self-conscious critical questions—but then again, Second Son, Ferro’s last novel, is filled with similar mysteries. For example, Ferro hoped it would be the first novel about AIDS, but he never mentions the disease from which the heroes suffer. Rather the novel speaks of “the Plague,” and this heightening of the rhetoric corresponds to the general apocalyptic spirit of the novel, which, like all of Ferro’s work, oscillates between realistic and visionary modes. In Second Son the connection between the domestic and the mystical, the mundane and the fantastic, is more dangerously and disturbingly insistent than in Ferro’s other work, and Splendora is the nexus. The novel’s heroes, Mark and Bill—modeled quite clearly on Ferro and Grumley—have a friend, Matthew, a tender and comic portrait of Andrew Holleran, their longtime friend. Matthew is a major contributor to the Lambda Project, a gay scientific expedition that will take gay men from the Plaguetorn Earth, which is doomed to destruction, to Splendora, a mostly gay planet where men have learned how to reproduce homosexually, although just how remains “something of a mystery” (189). Luckily, Splendorans resemble earthlings (“they are gracile—long, lean, delicate, in the sense of a swimmer’s body as opposed to a fullback’s”) and find us sexy (“We are not the first nor the last to track the clues [of Splendoran origin]. Simply however the best-looking”). Indeed, we learn that the Egyptians are part of a Splendoran Diaspora, sent away when their own planet was threatened by an exploding star. The book leaves ambiguous whether Splendorans—who have cracked the problems of the space-time continuum as well as homosexual reproduction—have found a cure for the Plague, but since they welcome the sick to their sphere, bets are on that they have a successful treatment or will come up with one soon.
Splendora, in short, is nothing less than a gay utopia—a world created and controlled by gay men—whose name is a translation of their word for “bright lovely being” (187). Splendora is Fire Island, Key West, Provincetown, the Russian River (California), and the Isle of Capri all rolled up into one, a place where “impulse” is equated with “the actual accomplishment” (189), where desire is immediately translated into action, a place-to-be-gay without stigmatization or the need for justification.
All these places-to-be-gay bear enormous similarities. They are not at the center of things but at the margins—islands at land’s end where only the cognoscenti can find their way. They tend to be small, linked by interpersonal connection rather than an impersonal bureaucracy. There civility—not brute power—reigns. These are places where beauty and intelligence hold sway—though style has a way of being corrupted into mindless fashion. They are also places that are endangered or, as in the case of Splendora, have survived disaster. Finally, they are places where Nature doesn’t become a code of normative rules but an invitation for infinite invention and transformation.
This last point requires some expansion. Lying behind these places-to-be-gay is a different way of conceptualizing Nature. Since at least the Bible, people engaged in same-sex eroticism have been attacked for acting contra naturum, in the belief that “natural law” is a highly restrictive set of norms. In contrast, these places-to-be-gay rest on an understanding of Nature as a force of diversity and variety. There isn’t one tree, but thousands of different trees. Not a single apple, but dozens of varieties of apples. In contrast to the concept of a normative Nature, this alternative Nature avoids uniformity, particularly in small matters—fingerprints, snowflakes, the wings of mayflies—where it goes wild with possibilities. Felice Picano articulates the tension between these two ways of conceptualizing Nature in Like People in History when the narrator-hero, Roger Sansarc, explains to his young lover how shocking AIDS is in a metaphysical sense to the habitués of Fire Island:
Nature is usually so tightfisted with what it provides. So very prudent how it husbands its resources. Why would Nature go to all the trouble to create so much luxuriance in what after all was a group of nonreproductive creatures? Why create such an extraordinary generation of beautiful, talented, quirkily intelligent men, and then why let them die so rapidly, one after another? It doesn’t make the least bit of sense. It’s not natural. It’s not the way Nature behaves. (416)
Picano can reconcile the tightfisted nature of strict norms with the luxuriant nature of gay creativity, but only by believing that these extraordinarily beautiful and “quirkily intelligent men” were produced for some special mission. But he can’t reconcile either way of conceiving of Nature with the wastefulness of AIDS, which seems to mock both the economy and the extravagance of Nature.
These two competing notions of Nature—Nature as normative and Nature as floridly inventive—play themselves out in the various gay utopias imagined by the Violet Quill. On the one hand, nothing seems more natural than other planets, governed as they are by the most basic laws of physics; yet on the other hand, nothing seems more supernatural (in its way) than intergalactic travel. Splendora embodies both the natural and the supernatural, a rule-governed world that somehow circumvents the strictures of rules. And the same is true of Fire Island. It is at once an escape to the natural world from the concrete, steel, and glass environment of Manhattan and an entrance into the otherworldly—a metaphysical dream. In Fire Island the most beautiful and symmetrical forms of the male anatomy expose themselves against a Nature where the pines are grotesquely twisted and stunted like overgrown bonzai. The island is remarkably lush, not because it has been left untouched but because its inhabitants have so carefully fertilized the barren sands to create their gardens. In short, Fire Island is one example of the denatured nature of the pastoral tradition. It is a tableau out of Edward Hicks’s “Peaceable Kingdom” paintings.
On the way back to the ferry, I watched a doe and her fawn grazing in the dunes. A man in one of the grander and more modern beach cottages opened a large sliding glass panel and walked out onto his sundeck. We expected the deer to run away, but they continued to munch quietly on the grass. From his terrace, the man threw down some bread—the heel of a French loaf—and the deer, who turned from the grass, quickly snatched it up. By then several of us had gathered on the boardwalk, trying not to frighten them off; but since waiting any longer meant missing the ferry, we eventually had to step forward. We needn’t have worried. The deer completely ignored us even though we passed within arm’s length. In fact, just as I was going by, the fawn brazenly tried to grab a drink from his unsuspecting mother’s nipple—some milk to wash down the bread—and only let go when she roughly pushed her rump against him. As we went down to the boat—Argonauts from a mythic land—mother and child stood once more contentedly nibbling the grass at dusk. Such is the civilized Nature of the island—its happy habitat. This is not wild Nature, Nature red in tooth and claw, nor is this domesticated Nature. It is Nature that stands in some mythic place somewhere between.
The great model of the gay utopia (although he never called it that) is W. H. Auden’s “Eden,” which contains at least “one extinct volcano,” a “precipitous and indented sea-coast,” and a population of 5,004; which bans automobiles and airplanes and gets about on animals, “narrow-gauge railroads, canal barges, balloons”; whose fashions are drawn from “Paris in the 1830’s and ‘40’s”; whose “sources of public information” are “gossip, technical and learned periodicals but no newspapers”; whose public statues are confined to “famous defunct chefs”; and whose entertainments include religious processions, brass bands, opera, and classical ballets. To be sure, Auden’s Eden is replete with his own personal prejudices—movies are excluded and the “economic activities” include lead mining and chemical factories, not the sort of items most gay men would like to include in their visions of paradise. But then again, what would be the point of a gay utopia without such eccentricities (Auden:7)? Not surprisingly, Auden bought a house in Cherry Grove in 1945 and spent most of the summers of 1946–47 there before finding a remoter island on which to live.
Still, these places-to-be-gay—whether Splendora or The Pines—although removed from the rest of the universe, are not independent of it. The muck of the rest of the world encroaches upon it. Andrew Holleran writes of the beach being closed to swimming because of sewage. “Unreal sea!” he shouts like Tiresias in Eliot’s Waste Land, who finds himself in the midst of an “unreal city.” “It looked … perfectly beautiful, immense, invigorating—so green I stood skeptically at the edges for almost an hour before I saw the first tiny fleck of raw sewage, like a jellyfish in a transparent wave, floating into shore” (GZ:32). Similarly, Forgetting Elena is dotted with brand names: the light of the street lamp is the color of Mercurochrome (84), a wart on someone’s ear “looks exactly like a Rice Krispie” (100), and an enormous statue of Elena’s black companion has hair “made of Brillo pads” (147). Even in this space removed from the world, the marketplace will not be denied. Everyone wears “bellbottoms” (167), and the novel virtually opens with someone putting on a recording of Mozart’s “Dissonant” string quartet (8), as if quite literally setting the tone for the action. In George Whitmore’s play, The Rights, the characters find their feet blackened by either sewage or an oil spill. Indeed, Whitmore, who envisioned a collection of stories about Fire Island (“Out Here: Fire Island Tales”), was the most eager of all the Violet Quill writers to reveal the sordidness that seemed suspended in what otherwise appeared “perfectly beautiful, immense and invigorating.”
Whitmore’s The Rights premiered on January 4, 1980, at the turn of the decade and at the end of that brief period between Stonewall and the first appearances of AIDS, when gay men had just begun to realize that their great experiments with sexual liberation had run their course, but had not yet figured out what next to do. The Rights can be read as a summary of what happened to The Pines in the 1970s and an indictment of how cruel the island could be to the poor, the aging, and the less-than-butch. It dramatizes the conflict between the new gay men of the seventies—men who had become rich and powerful while denying their insecurities about being gay—and the gay bohemians of the 1950s and ’60s, who were poor, effete, and openly vulnerable.
Representing the new gay man are Paul, a wealthy playwright who has given up the little Off-Broadway houses of his youth for the lucrative venue of television, and his lover Buddy. Paul is “in his late 40s to early 50s” and described in the stage directions as being “distinguished” and “in good shape.” Buddy, who is in his early twenties, is very handsome. Buddy, particularly, typifies a certain strain of the post-Stonewall generation—not Kennedy’s children but Nixon’s spawn. He has come into his sexuality without experiencing the repression and stigmatization that Paul felt in his youth and with little of the social consciousness that came from those struggles. Far from stupid, Buddy has nevertheless embraced his own physical beauty as the easiest path to attaining his relatively privileged environment. The combined pleasures of sex and gay high society have offset whatever doubts he may have about his purposelessness. In his extraordinary story “An Oracle,” Edmund White draws a portrait of a Buddy-like character who has survived into the 1990s, a man who has gone to the gym three times a week for twenty years, never questioning anything but the installation of a fruit-juice bar and computerized billing; a man who, when told by his dying lover “You must look out for yourself,” asks himself “But what self?” (DP:116). Set against Buddy and Paul is Larry, Paul’s former lover, an OSQ (Old Style Queen, as my friends would dub him). Comfortable and even a bit proud of his economic and social marginality, but feeling increasingly out of touch with the changes in New York homosexual society, Larry clerks in a bookstore.
Kindness, however, is not the reason Paul has invited his poor friend Larry to his luxurious summer home on Fire Island, nor are his motives from nostalgia for their long friendship or a sense of social obligation; rather Paul desperately needs Buddy’s permission to restage a little musical they had written together some twenty years before. Paul, in fact, having forgotten that Larry controls half the rights, has illegally contracted with producers for a production. The oversight is typical of Paul, who doesn’t allow anyone to interfere with his ambitions and who regards the past as a mere commodity waiting to be repackaged. He hopes that the idyllic scene at his house on Fire Island will somewhat soften Larry, who he knows will be hard to sell on the project. As an OSQ, Larry prefers to be difficult whenever possible; not only that, the production will be for television, a medium that, as a theater queen, Larry regards with utter disdain. Proud of his bohemianism, Larry is horrified by the increasing commercialism of gay life.
Among George Whitmore’s greater strengths as a writer was his ability to dramatize generational and cultural differences, and the ways such differences affect economics, psychology, aesthetics, and even political beliefs. In his remarkable story “Bearing Arms,” which for unexplained reasons remained unpublished at Whitmore’s death, he narrates the conflicts between an old leftist, Estelle, who seems open to every minority cause but gay rights, and the young new leftist, modeled on Whitmore himself, who had hoped to confide in her about his own growing awareness of his homosexuality.3 In a drunken rage, Estelle calls her protégé a “faggot” for his pacifist beliefs. In The Rights, Whitmore dramatizes a different generational conflict—one that can’t forget its past and another unwilling to remember it.
Thus Paul’s forgetfulness is not merely a plot device to set up the farce, but part of Whitmore’s critique of post-Stonewall gay culture. Ironically, Paul, who’s forgotten Larry, plans to set their musical—whose action had originally been set in some fairytale future—in the 1950s, when Paul and Larry were lovers. Whitmore’s point is that the past is not so easily expunged, even by those most committed to its erasure. Even more ironic is the fact that Paul has made his career adapting historical dramas for television. His “Life of Socrates” (for the Hallmark Hall of Fame, no less) featured Elsa Lanchester as Socrates’ wife and contained “those cozy little domestic scenes around the household shrine”; he has cast “Betsy Palmer—no, Polly Bergen—as Madame Curie”; and in his retelling of “A Christmas Carol,” he has even snagged Tony Perkins to play Charles Dickens. Paul clearly has no concept of what it means to be faithful to the past; for him the past merely provides the raw material for a commodity to be repackaged and sold.
If Paul is the gay man who won’t remember, Larry is the queen who won’t forget. As a clerk in a bookstore, he becomes a symbol of the gay collective memory. His language, gestures, and attitudes are conspicuous throwbacks to an earlier style of gay behavior—an impoverished gay bohemia, the sort of gay life that flourished in the Off-Broadway world of the fifties. Their musical, “a nice little story with a lot of heart,” sounds vaguely like The Fantasticks, except their musical ran three performances, not five decades. Larry clings to this more intimate world where theater retains its idealism, and he rejects any attempts to turn their modest little structure into a “brick-by-brick reconstruction of the Petit Trainon,” whose interiors look “like a cross between Roseland and the Waldorf Wedding Suite.” Whitmore’s notes on the costumes stipulates that everyone but Larry should wear “whatever might be currently fashionable on the Island” while Larry is “dressed in his own version of resort wear: yachting costume.” For Larry, obviously, Noël Coward will forever be the benchmark for elegance.
Larry’s concern for history contrasts not only with Paul’s whitewashing of the past but, most strikingly, with Buddy’s almost complete ignorance of it. Buddy, Paul’s lover, has never heard of Roger Casement, whose The Black Diaries Larry is reading, nor learned that Henry James was “queer.” When Larry expatiates on “our hidden heritage,” Buddy answers, “I’m not a gay libber.” Indeed the title of the play has a double valence. Of course The Rights most explicitly refers to the collective privileges and protections included under the copyright on the work Larry and Paul have written together, but it also refers to gay rights. “Don’t you think it’s just frightfully important? Our rights?” Larry asks Buddy, who answers in a way that was typical of the Fire Islander of the time: “It just doesn’t have anything to do with my life.” Buddy’s sole concern is promoting the disco song he’s written with a friend. For most of the play, Larry tries to use his coownership of the rights to keep Paul from producing their little musical; Larry wants to hold on to and control the past, even one that has failed, because he fears future change. By the end of the play, however, he realizes that exercising his rights could afford him a better future. We may read into this a similar—if not identical—political message.
As noted, Buddy is not stupid—to the contrary, the conclusion of The Rights shows him to be quite savvy. He represents instead a common figure of Fire Island literature: the young man caught up in the superficialities of the island, its absence of historical awareness, and its mindless hedonism. Buddy’s ignorance of politics exemplifies one of the ways that the powerful exercise their power. In Forgetting Elena, the Minister of the Left, who is a friend of Valentine’s (the forgetful narrator-hero), announces rather brusquely about Elena, “Let’s be honest. … I’m as glad as you are that [the people] believe all these fads and styles are so desperately important; it keeps them busy and makes them feel they count. But we know it’s money and power that keeps the first families first” (FE:82). The power of the beautiful is nothing compared to the powerful who use the beautiful as a diversion. In Dancer from the Dance, Malone, who is presented as the gay ideal of beauty and placid good manners and gives up a successful career as a lawyer for “a career in love,” becomes in the end a person stripped of both the love and beauty he desired. “In a country where one is no more than what one does (a country of workers) or the money one possessed, Malone had ceased, like us, to have an identity at all. He was simply a smile now, a set of perfect manners, a wistful promise, as insubstantial as the breeze blowing the hair across his forehead,” and, consequently, the narrator wonders “why Malone had fascinated us so” (219).
The criticism of Buddy (and Malone) as beautiful-looking, emotionally placid, and intellectually vacuous is one that has been traditionally leveled at Fire Island. Alexander Goodman, in his book A Summer on Fire Island (1966)—part pornographic novel, part sociological study, part gay rights essay—has one character, Bill, an executive from IBM, remove the Barbra Streisand albums (which have been playing continuously on the stereo) so that he might think. His housemate, Charles, shrieks in horror:
Think!!! Then you really don’t belong here. Get thee back to IBM! Thinking is much, much worse than Bartok. There are strict Fire Island rules against it. Frankly, Bill, just between us girls, what is an intelligent, cultured “thinking” person like yourself doing at Cherry Grove in the first place? Why would any self-respecting “thinker” spend a whole summer among these very sweet, very amusing, but generally bird-brained queens and faggots? (A Summer on Fire Island, 43)
Charles suggests that Bill “hand over [his] tube of K-Y and [his] beaded bag” and “leave Cherry Grove this minute.” And Malone—who did not start out as empty-headed—warns the young intellectual John Schaeffer, who has fallen in love with him, of the moral and spiritual risks that the beauty of Fire Island and its inhabitants holds.
Never forget that all these people are primarily a visual people. They are designers, window dressers, models, photographers, graphic artists. … They are visual people, and they value the eye, and their sins, as Saint Augustine said, are the sins of the eye. And being people who live on the surface of the eye, they cannot be expected to have minds or hearts. It sounds absurd but it’s that simple. Everything is beautiful here, and that is all it is: beautiful. Do not expect anything else, do not expect nourishment for anything but your eye—and you will handle it beautifully. You will know exactly what you are dealing with. (Dancer from the Dance, 228)
David Leavitt in his introduction to The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories mistakenly believes, “According to Dancer from the Dance … only the most exceptionally beautiful among gay men were entitled to erotic fulfillment” (xviii). But Holleran’s point is just the opposite: those entranced by their own beauty, or just beauty itself, will never find erotic fulfillment or any other kind of fulfillment at all because living “on the surface of the eye, they cannot be expected to have minds or hearts.” For while it is true that Holleran, White, and Whitmore respond to the physical beauty both of Fire Island and of the men who vacation there, they are terrified of the Medusa-like effect of such beauty—that it will hollow out the heart and the mind, and will turn the spirit to stone. Dancer from the Dance is suffused with an elegiac longing for a lost world in which beauty and innocence are combined with emotional warmth and an intellectual stimulation, but it is a cautionary tale about mistaking Fire Island or the disco circuit for such an idyllic place.
One can gain a sense of the subtlety with which the Violet Quill manages this critique of the Fire Island aesthetic by comparing it to Larry Kramer’s depiction in Faggots—published the same year as Dancer from the Dance, and to which it has been compared, most notably by Reed Woodhouse (120–24). Kramer emphasizes the role of public sex in a way that no one in the Violet Quill does. He satirizes the contention that public sex is beautiful by revealing it to be base, vulgar exhibitionism. Leather Louie, “with his hand on the rubied swastika so smartly medallioned over his black leather chest,” intones (in the original Italian) Michelangelo’s dictum, “One doesn’t achieve inner discipline until one reaches the extremes of art and life” (Faggots:274), but it is not clear whether it is art or life whose extreme Louie is pompously and pretentiously entertaining at the moment. Later at the same orgy—in a scene that is a haunting reminder of Malone’s speech to John Schaeffer, Tim Dildough, the new male supermodel, refuses to have sex: “I want to be looked at by everybody and to pass around my beauty so the world can appreciate my handsomeness,” he explains to one admirer who tries to engage him in conversation. “But I don’t want to have to talk. I just want to be seen. And to be worshiped for my beauty” (278). Kramer, too, is concerned about the sins of the eye.
In contrast to the Violet Quill and, I dare say, most visitors to Fire Island, Kramer mocks the landscape, emphasizing the grotesque abjectness of public sex.
So, picture if you will, a particularly scenic nook, slightly off the beaten path, just to one side of the main highway through the woods, in this veil of myth and story, equidistant from The Pines and Grove, an open patch trod down by years of Indian braves, deer, then men, surrounded by tall evergreens and ringed with low ones. The moon was just able to klieg it into atmospheric cofraternal welcomeness. … And was there much finery everywhere! Iron crosses and swastikas and military marching boots with soles like heavy slabs of darkest bread, visors and helmets and caps and hoods and bayonets and swords and rifles and holsters and bullet belts plugged full with poppers. And on [the host’s] belt, the smart executioner’s mask he’d borrowed … to later case his head. Very smart. Very sinister. (Faggots, 270)
The sarcasm of the passage is sufficiently marked that the concluding lines (“Very smart. Very sinister”) are thoroughly ironized. The split infinitive—“to later case his head”—provides just the right awkward touch to make the paragraph’s conclusion seem the very opposite of smart and sinister. But it’s hard to know what to do with Kramer’s distinction between Indian braves and men, as if Native Americans were subhumans more akin to deer than to actual people. Is this also meant to be ironic, or is it a subconscious bit of racism?
The orgy episode in Faggots reaches a grotesque climax when Dinky Adams, the object of Fred Lemish’s amorous longing, is subjected to Jack Humpstone’s punishing ministrations. Tied to a sling lashed to four trees, Dinky is fistfucked before an admiring crowd. “Look at those doors open,” they cry in amazement. “That guy can really take it.” Ecstatic with Humpstone’s arm complete in him, Dinky mumbles, “I can feel!” But that does not end the scene. Kramer continues:
Dinky just continued to jerk up in pleasure and smile at heaven. The elusive heaven. Now so close. Now almost here. He tried to say a few more words to Jack, “I … I … I … want … your … other … arm!” (Faggots, 283; ellipses in original)
I am not entirely sure how Kramer wishes readers to respond to this passage. Certainly not with unalloyed humor. We clearly are meant to feel disgust, but is that disgust meant to be yoked with pathos, horror, or clinical detachment? Some sort of sublime is at work here, but it is hard to know what sort of response it warrants. Whatever it is, it is not the exquisiteness usually associated with Fire Island and with the Violet Quill’s treatment of it. Kramer’s methods are far more over-the-top than anything the VQ would attempt.
In its way, Felice Picano’s Late in the Season, which he began in the spring of 1980 at the Ferro family’s beach house in Sea Girt, New Jersey, is yet another cautionary tale about the effects of wealth on the new class of gay men, and in many ways it uses much of the same material in The Rights, which had had a showcase performance the winter before. Jonathan is a successful man of the theater who, after an apprenticeship of writing Off-Broadway musicals, is composing the music for his first Broadway show, with the unlikely title of The Lady and the Falcon. Jonathan’s somewhat younger, but clearly more handsome lover, Daniel, is also at a turning point in his career—scheduled to star in a BBC dramatic series. Since the filming is in London, Daniel has gone to England, leaving Jonathan to finish the score at the beach house in The Pines. Fire Island is almost empty since it is late in the season, but in the neighboring cottage appears Stevie, a young woman going through one of those late-adolescent identity crises in which she is uncertain of everything—whether to go back to college, marry her boyfriend, get a job—everything, that is, except her desire to have sex with Jonathan. And she succeeds.
At issue are Jonathan’s motives for risking an eight-year relationship with Daniel by pursuing this newly found heterosexual impulse. Picano is not against viewing Jonathan’s actions as a way of breaking down the homo/heterosexual binarism under which he has operated for so long, but the timing of Jonathan’s actions suggests that more is happening. Are identity crises contagious? Perhaps. Does writing The Lady and the Falcon require Jonathan to have more knowledge of feminine psychology? Perhaps. But more to the point, I’d argue, Jonathan’s heterosexual activity is tied to his drive for commercial respectability. Making it in the mainstream theater seems to require making mainstream love. In the novel’s strangely moving conclusion, Jonathan is saved by his own paralysis, his own inability to be tough. Daniel rushes back from England to rescue his relationship with Jonathan and gets him alone on Fire Island. During the night Jonathan is awakened by Daniel who is having a nightmare. The incident seems to disturb Jonathan more than Daniel since the internal debate whether to awaken Daniel or leave him to his bad dreams involves “far-reaching consequences [that] would determine the rest of his life” (247). In the end Jonathan does nothing, but his paralysis shows just how weak he really is and how much he requires Daniel’s soothing comfort. The novel concludes: “His despair had made his choice for him. He let himself be held” (250). In the post-Stonewall era, gay men may have come to think that they are butch, Picano seems to be warning, but they have not come close to the heartlessness required by the heterosexual world of success. Our despair saves us from a worse fate—anesthesia. The pain he feels at his lover’s distress reminds him where his heart is.
The working title for Late in the Season was A Summer’s Lease, drawn from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, which begins:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date …
Shakespeare opposes the immortality of art and love to the mortality of the flesh. It is a poem in which immortality does not so much short-circuit mutability but, rather, Death forces Life into action—or, as Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 73, “To love that well which thou must leave ere long.” It is fitting that despair becomes the sign of love in Late in the Season for, at least since Shakespeare’s time, the love of one man for another must exist within the eternal shadow of death.
Giovanni Francesco Guercino, sometime in the 1620s, painted a picture, now in the Galaria Corsini (Rome), which is described by Joshua Reynolds’s biographers as showing “gay frolickers stumbling over a death’s head” sitting atop a moldering piece of masonry (Panofsky:309). Carved into the brick or stone, beneath the skull, are the words ET IN ARCADIA EGO, the voice of Death telling the inhabitants of a pastoral retreat: “Even in Arcadia, there am I.” Guercino meant by the phrase that Death can be found even in an ideal pastoral landscape. Panofsky shows that Nicolas Poussin altered the notion. In Poussin, “Arcadians are not so much warned of an implacable future as they are immersed in a mellow meditation on a beautiful past” (313). Both interpretations apply to Fire Island as a pastoral setting where Death stalks and an idealized past is recalled. At the end of Dancer from the Dance, for example, Malone and his friends scan the crowd at a party, “looking at the new faces with an odd sensation of death, for they had all been new faces once” (226). This “odd sensation of death” is both the elegiac recollection of a golden past and the proleptic vision of everyone’s—even the youngest and most beautiful person’s—impending demise. Malone warns Schaeffer that he “no longer live[s] in the magic world that is yours for ten more years. Adolescence in America ends at thirty” (227). Et in Arcadia ego.
Death in Arcadia: its chilling effect is the contrast between the seeming immortality of youth and beauty and the austere, unyielding figure of the skull. Even the earliest gay accounts of Fire Island trade on this contrast. Alexander Goodman retells the tale:
A slim, good-looking boy was being screwed by a big Negro. Just as the Negro was about to come, he snapped a popper. He first inhaled it, then he passed it to the boy, then he inhaled it again.
The tremendous stimulation from the sexual act and the drug tore at his heart and broke it. At the height of orgasm, the man died.
For several minutes the boy lay there, not realizing that the body above and in him was that of a dead man. (A Summer on Fire Island, 96–97)
Elsewhere love and death remain distinct, what is above and within stay separate, the ecstatic and the fatal unfused. But on Fire Island they are indistinct, inseparable, commingled.
The association I am drawing between Fire Island and Death is based not merely on the fact that Dancer closes with Sutherland’s unintended suicide from pills or that the note found by his body is signed with “a forest of X’s … which looked like crosses, but were really kisses” (233) or that Malone is rumored to have died in the real-life Everard (New York gay bathhouse) fire, in a kind of lieberstode more consuming than any individual love he had ever felt. Nor does it rest on the fact that Forgetting Elena also ends with suicide by pills (“After [a] dismal bacchanalia”) and that Elena leaves no note but a feeling that “pills and poems are called for; a purge for the bowels; a poem to facilitate the search for experience” (171). These works alone do not constitute a long enough pattern. But add George Whitmore’s stories and the design becomes clear. “The Black Widow,” a piece of macabre humor, pits the narrator, a selfdescribed “style queen,” against Gerald Manheim of Grosse Point, the enormously wealthy, enormously handsome recluse of Ocean Walk and East 63rd Street, who has been widowed by four lovers—Arthur, Hans, Larry, and George—and who affects a disdain for the superficial, hedonistic, egocentric anti-intellectual values of upper-class white gay life. Despite Gerald’s fatal touch, the narrator initially falls in love with him and tries to hide his “style queen” values. But in the end, Gerald’s earnestness—and the ghost of Wilde is not far from “The Black Widow”—begins to smother the narrator. He runs back to The Pines to get away from Gerald, who nevertheless follows in hopes of retrieving him. Cornered on the Botel’s deck, the narrator is forced at last to explain to Gerald why all his lovers have perished: “Poor Gerald, you bored them all. To death! You killed them with kindness … You killed them, you see, with your perfect love!” (43; ellipses in original).
Death stalks Fire Island, according to Whitmore, because it is a place of and for extremes. It is a precipice from which one falls either to one’s death or back into mediocrity and the mundane. “The Black Widow” contains no middle ground between the extreme superficiality of style queens and the extreme earnestness of Gerald Manheim’s perfect love. The trip out to Fire Island is itself dangerous, and Joseph Olshan’s Nightswimmer begins with a character committing suicide on the Long Island Railroad, en route to the island. In Dancer from the Dance, Malone is rumored to have committed suicide by swimming out into the ocean as if he were trying to reach the Jersey shore alone by night. Moreover, Fire Island is not merely dangerous to longtime residents of the island; the briefest contact can be fatal.
In “Last Dance,” an unpublished tale in Whitmore’s Fire Island series, Grogan, a teenager from a small town in California, comes to Fire Island to be near his former high school teacher, Stan, whom he loves. But Stan will not have sex with Grogan until the boy has “come into himself.” In high school, Stan’s refusal forces Grogan to take up dancing because it
took the place of the sex [Grogan] was too frightened to have. In the discos, in the little bars off back alleys, in tiny overstuffed bars heady with the scent of sweat, cologne and piss, he danced with strangers, danced in knots of three and four, danced in dark corners by himself, danced barechested, danced naked. Dancing, he allowed hands to caress him, strip him, use him, take him as he wouldn’t elsewhere. Dancing, he crossed over into the final chastity, yielding to worshiping himself, his glistening flesh, his image in the mirrors, the surge of blood through his body, the loss of consciousness dancing brings.
Finally, Stan brings the boy out to Fire Island because, according to Grogan, if “I can want [Stan] here I can want him anywhere.” Unfortunately, Grogan falls in love with the narrator, who, unlike Stan, is a dancer. At the Ice Palace night after night, Grogan and the narrator dance with more and more abandon. On the final night the beat
came like a barrage of thunderclaps upon us, the building shook under our feet, and the light cut into the room, cut into the dancers, shattered their features, their hands, their glistening arms and chests, into a thousand fragments. Grogan floated … his face a mask of rapture in the strobe light, spinning wildly, like a weathercock in a storm. He spun, spun, his eyes widening impossibly, his mouth agape. He spun, spun, seemed to leave the ground. I heard a gasp, felt it against my face, then his arms flew up, his hands flew up, his head fell back, his jaw was working, working, his throat was working, working, exposed to the cutting edge of the beams, his hand descended, his fingers strained out for me, his fingers tapped my shoulder once, again, trailed off my arm, he fell to the floor.
Grogan dies from a heart attack caused by some previously undetected predisposition. “Last Dance” is very Hawthorne-like—a moral tale of the diseased desire for perfection, for an extremity of intensity that it is not fit for humans to experience, for a degree of beauty that is monstrous, deadly, and in need of retribution. Et in Arcadia ego. Also in Arcadia I am.
Once the AIDS epidemic began, the Violet Quill writers turned their backs on Fire Island as a scene for their stories, plays, and novels—at least for a while. The site, which had been such a staging point for their raids on, if not the inarticulate, at least the unspoken life of certain gay men, became after AIDS a location of less strategic value. In a sketch he published in his 1985 collection I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore, Ethan Mordden depicts a character clearly modeled on Andrew Holleran “ensconced with friends between Pines and Grove. Between: as if respecting fashion but resenting it.” The character has been “hiding from both the swank and the drab, hiding between, as if instituting a new sort of gay in which neither praise nor blame will be freely given” (106). For Mordden, Holleran is trying to use resentment and resistance as a means of finding a middle ground between the swank and the drab—those extremes of gay life. But that middle ground—no matter how life-preserving it may be in the Age of AIDS– cannot be built on the shifting sands of Fire Island regardless of how much beach grass is sown in the dunes or how deeply the foundations of the houses have been sunk.
The most damning and most powerful portrait of Fire Island gay life to emerge since AIDS is Allen Barnett’s “The Times as It Knows Us,” a work modeled on Joyce’s “The Dead.” Before his own death from AIDS, Barnett interviewed the remaining members of the Violet Quill for an article he never wrote, and his work quite self-consciously continues the line of their work. Noah, Perry, Stark, Enzo, Horst, and the narrator Robert all share a house for the summer. Robert’s lover, Samuel, has died of AIDS. Perry has spoken to a reporter from the New York Times for an article, “New Rituals Ease Grief as AIDS Toll Increases,” a story that features these friends and their cold response to the pain of others. Yet “The Times as It Knows Us” does not repudiate the article—Enzo’s attack of fever is ignored by nearly everyone, including Enzo’s lover, an AIDS activist. Only Robert and Stark spend the night trying to lower Enzo’s temperature until he can be transported to a hospital. “Since the deaths began,” Robert comments, “the certified social workers have quoted Shakespeare at us: ‘Give sorrow words.’ But the words we used now reek of old air in churches, taste of the dust that has gathered in the crevices of the Nativity and the Passion” (105). The old words do not help, and the old places where those words were spoken do not help either. Some new style is required—some new mode of speech, or living; some new community must be constructed now that Death is not merely to be found there but has taken over the place, dominating every vista, flitting through all the rooms.
Yet for Barnett, this new language will come not by denying or erasing what came before, but by transforming what was most valuable from the past. “Think of him, the one you loved,” Robert asks us to imagine, “on his knees, on his elbows, his face turned up to look back in yours, his mouth dark in his dark beard.
He was smiling because of you. … You had brought him, and he you, to that point where you are most your mind and most your body. His prostate pulsed against your fingers like a heart in a cave, mind, body, body, mind, over and over. Looking down at him, he who is dead and gone, then lying across the broken bridge of his spine, the beachhead of his back, you would gladly change places with him. Let your weeping be bitter and your wailing fervent; then be comforted for your sorrow. Find in grief the abandon you used to find in love; grieve the way you used to fuck. (“The Times as It Knows Us,” 106)
The sexual is not for Barnett a denial of our deepest humanity but the portal to it, the passage to that new language, that new style of being which we must create in the wake of AIDS.
Yet sex is not necessarily a pathway to new insight—it can only become so, it seems, when it accompanies other griefs and other understandings. In two stories Andrew Holleran includes in In September, the Light Changes, Fire Island returns as an important scene. Both stories deal with Morgan, a man who in the 1970s was one of the great beauties of Fire Island, but whose life came apart in the 1980s: he moved to New Orleans, his lover died of AIDS, he became an alcoholic, lost his job and all his money. Now sober and middle-aged, he has returned to Fire Island to manage a restaurant and start putting his life together. The first of these stories, “Petunias,” is the more optimistic one. Morgan falls in love with Ryan, a young waiter at the restaurant, who seems to return his affection. Things at the restaurant flourish, and this vitality is symbolized by the two barrels of petunias, which have grown and flourished under Morgan’s care, his nightly pinching back of spent blooms as he talks to Ryan. But at the end of the season, Ryan tells Morgan they should stop seeing one another, “a blow [Morgan] had always expected, but recently thought he might be spared” (126). Almost immediately a storm comes up, and before Morgan can wheel the barrels under the protective awning, the petunias are ruined in the wind. Yet this rejection doesn’t devastate Morgan; to the contrary, it rejuvenates him. The next morning he awakens early to discover “the most beautiful day of the season.” He then “puts his shoulders back” and concludes: “He felt alive again” (127). Before returning to Fire Island, he had given up any hope of ever again feeling such intensity of emotion, believing that he was better off with all passion spent. But his love for Ryan has transformed him by giving him hope of the future. He no longer is merely a survivor—even though that in itself is a rare enough category in which to find oneself—but alive to new experiences.
“The House Sitter” is a more sober story. The season is over at Fire Island, and Morgan must find a way to get through the winter. He goes from one house to another taking care of pets while the owners are away. It is a life fraught with uncertainty as well as strange comforts since the homeowners tend to be wealthy, and he lives—albeit temporarily—in quite elegant surroundings. Yet he possesses a world-weary contentedness. “Life simplifies itself as we get older,” he tells the narrator in this plotless character study. “Fewer and fewer things become important to you, but the things that do become very important” (247). Fire Island has lost its appeal. It’s all become so predictable. Self-conscious and bourgeois. He complains that the gay Fire Island crowd is only “concerned with the right résumé, the right dog, the right amount of body fat—it’s like the whole generation is art-directed. There’s no craziness anymore, no character, no spontaneity or sense that things are being done for the first time.” Yet Morgan concludes, “Of course nothing changes. Because sex doesn’t! Because being young and beautiful doesn’t” (253). Sex remains an important experience, but the experience changes at different stages of one’s life. For the young it is a means for asserting one’s power, declaring one’s desirability, and exercising one’s youth. For Morgan it is a means of expressing tenderness, survivorship, and spontaneity. Sex doesn’t change, but those who have sex do. They have grown closer to death. They have seen it, touched it, felt it in their bones. “The House Sitter” is not a pessimistic story; it is filled with rueful regret and the sober understanding of what is important in a life that has been stripped of most illusions.
Nights on Fire Island are dark. Only the heart of a forest is darker. The ocean stretches out, cloaked in its thick mist. On Fire Island no cars prowl the street nor shoot headlights into the far ends of a room, like two hands feeling for the wall or fingering the furniture. On a clear night stars might shimmer, the foam on the crest of the waves might glimmer, but most of the light comes from the interiors of the cottages—the rooms of light—that go off when the inhabitants go to sleep. Perhaps that is why people stay up so late on Fire Island—to keep the lights on as long as they can. They force themselves to stay up, to squeeze out a few more words before descending into their inevitable sleep. They fight the dryness of their lips, the weight of their eyelids, because they know that darkness is at the door ready to pronounce its final verdict. Et in Arcadia ego. Even in Arcadia, I am.