Andrew Holleran describes Fire Island’s geography in his exquisitely provocative 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance as “nothing but a sandbar, as slim as a parenthesis, enclosing the Atlantic, the very last fringe of soil on which a man might put up his house, and leave behind him all—absolutely all—of that huge continent to the west.”
Indeed, Fire Island has for decades represented the idea of escape and renewal for members of the queer community who continue to fill its beaches and dance floors every summer—a means of gleefully abandoning both the pressures of the city and the prying eyes of heterosexual society. And this is exactly what it means to the group of friends who arrive by ferry to join the party at the start of director Andrew Ahn’s romantic comedy Fire Island, buzzing with horny anticipation as they continue their tradition of an annual group getaway.
Noah (Joel Kim Booster) is the group’s de facto leader, cute and smart and slutty in a way that earns him affectionate jabs from his friends. And while Noah certainly looks forward to the trip each year with his eyes firmly on the prize—one that briefly emerges here in the form of the hunky and ruggedly handsome Dex (Zane Phillips), whose intentions ultimately prove dubious—his primary goal for the week is to get his nerdy and somewhat curmudgeonly best friend, Howie (SNL’s Bowen Yang), laid, by whatever means necessary.
After an encouraging smile aimed Howie’s way during the group’s first foray to the tea dance from Charlie (James Scully), who’s standing nearby with his own friends, the two groups begin to begrudgingly endure each other for the sake of the budding romance. And the antics that follow—flirtations gone awry, drug- and booze-fueled mishaps to spare, and sweetly satisfying conclusions to the intertwined Austenesque romantic plots—delightfully meet audience expectations without straying too far from convention, sticking instead to the tried and true.
The pleasures on offer by a vacation narrative are based on the fantasy that we can become someone different for the duration of our time away from home, and the same promise of temporary escape is made by the rom-com, which serves up a reality carefully constructed to elide many of our darker truths. This writer couldn’t help but recall the scene in Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart when the unbridled joy of a colorful and sweeping shot of raucous Fire Island partygoers in skimpy bathing suits is cut short by the spectacle of a young man coughing and then collapsing on the beach.
That scene signals the arrival of HIV and the end of a particularly decadent era of gay life that Fire Island had come to represent. But the ghosts of our past are silent for the duration of Ahn’s heartwarming romp, almost as if they’re standing back to allow for some uncomplicated joy to set up shop in the same places where we once experienced some of our greatest sorrows.
The group of friends at the heart of Fire Island, which was written by Booster and based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and his trips to the titular resort town, are already nostalgic for a past that they’re still living through, quite literally in the form of the impending loss of their friend Erin’s (Margaret Cho) vacation house, where this found family has been making memories together every summer for years. But there’s also a subtextual nostalgia for a fleeting youth and the urgency of figuring things out before it’s too late.
“What do you want?” Noah asks Will (Conrad Ricamora), a friend of Charlie’s who by the end of Fire Island has become Noah’s erstwhile romantic interest. The two of them are sitting side by side on a pier at sunset contemplating what comes next after the vacation inevitably ends, and Noah has just answered the same question in a roundabout way, realizing that he has so much more to learn about himself and what he wants from the world. In response, Will just turns to glance lovingly at an elderly gay couple he’s noticed dancing slowly together just a few feet away, staring into each other’s eyes as they sway to music only they can hear. “I want that,” he says—both the possibility of love and the possibility of a future.
“Who can waste a summer on the Island?” quips a character early in Dancer from the Dance, responding to another man who’s just expressed his weariness about coming back every year to do just that, being shuttled by taxi toward the ferry like a prisoner through pastoral Long Island suburbia and wondering aloud how summer on the island had become such a magnet for himself and others like him. “Why, it’s the only antidote to death we have.” Fire Island then, both as destination and idea, comes to represent the evolving nature of queer life and all the possible forms it can take, and Ahn’s film, however light-hearted and easily digestible, still adds value to the cultural history of an island that for many people over the years has represented the only place where they could really be—and sometimes find—their true selves.
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