Experiencing Pride: Insights from Fire Island
Immersing into the Stories, Spaces, and Celebrations of the LGBTQIA+ Community
Greetings from one of my favorite locations on the planet, Fire Island Pines, where each June, Pride Month, I come to visit from wherever I am in the world and reconnect with friends. It’s a place I call home. The Pines is one of two legendary queer beach communities on Fire Island (the other being Cherry Grove), a beautiful barrier island just off of Long Island a couple of hours outside Manhattan. Its idyllic shores have been a haven to bohemians, artists, designers, musicians, activists, writers, and poets since its beginning, and its unique place in culture is indelible. I couldn’t be prouder to be a part of its story…and am grateful that it’s a formative part of my story…
Before the world caught onto what we now call “immersive experiences”, I started my career as a music theatre performer/acrobat while also writing creative theatrical treatments and coming up with concepts events, parties, and rituals for LGBTQIA+ audiences (e.g., Love Ball, Black Party, Velvet Gloves Boxing, etc.). I discovered the magic of the Pines during my first year in New York and uncovered the richness of Fire Island’s culture through on-going direct experiences: first as a wide-eyed day-tripper, then as a renter in a share, then as a dancer performing in the annual Pines Party, then as a bartender serving a season at the famous Pavilion nightclub (“the birthplace of disco”) and the Blue Whale (“home of the Tea Dance”), and ultimately as the Entertainment Director for a season, overseeing the social itinerary as a steward of the celebrations and rituals that define Fire Island Pines culture. This is where I experienced the transformational power of being a part of community - how to be in a house and share space with others while being myself and seeing them for their true selves. This is where I learned how to create a dance and witness how shared experiences are the building blocks for cultivating community. This is where I first experienced that when you can joyfully and peacefully bring people together, you can change the world…or if not the whole world, the part of the world you touch.
Fire Island’s LGBTQIA+ communities have a long history of embracing the power of collective joy weekend after weekend, season after season, each generation passing their knowledge to the next. Even in the face of plagues, Fire Islanders have found resilience in the art of revelry and fearless expression - through music, costume, dance, grand spectacle, and a sense of drama that’s delivered with originality, generosity, humor, and love, a legacy of that unites Fire Islanders. It was right here in the Pines that I learned firsthand the tricks of the trade - embracing joy and using theatre techniques to craft experiences that allow people to connect with something bigger than themselves and to feel alive. That’s magic. This is where I discovered what I want to do for the rest of my life.
Immediately after my stint as the Pines’ Entertainment Director, I was invited to be one of the founding team members of Sleep No More for its New York launch - in part because of my connections to the gay community and knowledge of how we celebrate and experience life - and the rest is immersive history. I carried the knowledge I gleaned from Fire Island into that creative chapter, and it remains at the foundation of what I know to be true about the shared live experience. And as my career has evolved, so has society’s needs for communion, connection, and how to peacefully share space with one another. Modern society is battling collective isolation, anxiety, depression, and rage like never before. Our need for shared, joyful experiences has never been more important and the knowledge of how to craft them has never been more valuable. We also need embodied fun. I thank Fire Island for showing me what it means to have a great live experience, instilling in me an appreciation for the art form, for providing me a training ground for how to create them for my community and others…and for all the fun.
I’m now back in the Pines as a visitor and am staying with dear friends I met here over twenty years ago when I was bartending at the Blue Whale. The’ve become chosen family. I love spending time with them and seeing so many familiar faces of the community walking along the boardwalks, playing with their dogs on the beach, and laughing at tea. I love hearing DJs who played when I worked here continue to play their sets, mixing Fire Island classics with contemporary dance tracks. It’s also invigorating to see new faces arrive with each ferry, another generation ready to explore and join in the dance, and hear new DJs try their hand at tea. Beyond setting the stage for my career, this beach community has also provided me with an enduring sense of belonging. Many years since I first visited, I still feel like I’m home here and have something to contribute - maybe more than ever - and I’m now able to see how the Pine’s unique culture has informed my practice and become part of my creative DNA. Every time I visit, I pick up some new insight that reaffirms my belief that joyful connection leads to expansive transformation. And, to me, that’s the hallmark of a great immersive experience: it’s when the participant becomes a part of the play, when content and context harmoniously conjoin, and when the dancer is the dance. As one of my hosts for this visit was just musing the other night, one of the great Fire Island stories is, in fact, Dancer from the Dance, a novel by Andrew Holleran with a title borrowed from William Butler Yeats’ poem Among School Children. Let me share an excerpt of Yeats’ poem here:
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
So how can we know the dancer from the dance? How can we know what constitutes a great transformative experience? The more I learn about the craft of creating them, the more curious I become about the exact conditions that allow for wonder, awe, connection, transformation, and expansion. I’m experienced enough, however, to know it’s hard to hone in on any one singular magical formula to create them - let alone nearly impossible to describe them - without some poetry. In honor of Pride Month and in celebration of Fire Island, let me share with you this former mixologist’s mix of some practical and fantastical learnings and observations I’ve gleaned from the poets and dancers I’ve met, watched, served, worked with, and connected with on Fire Island over the years. This is a partial checklist of some of the questions and considerations I run through each time I’m creating an experience. Much of what I learned in and about the Pines holds true for other incredible experiences and environments. As you read through the list of the things I’ve picked up at the beach, I hope you find something here that you can bring into your craft of creating and experiencing beauty…or however you experience community, chosen family, and belonging. Happy Pride.
My Fire Island takeaways on transformative experiences:
The journey from Manhattan to Fire Island is just that: a journey. For most, it entails taking a subway, the Long Island Rail Road (likely with a couple of transfers), a jitney, and ultimately a twenty-minute ferry ride across the bay. Once in that final stretch, you can literally feel travelers leave their ordinary time worries behind back on the mainland and open up to what’s ahead. The transformation is palpable. Never underestimate the importance of transitions into extraordinary spaces - the portals - and how they set the tone and establish the rules of play for everything that follows. A carefully crafted entrance into a space and story can allow curiosity-seekers to suspend old ways of being and create the possibility of seeing the world anew…and feeling renewed or becoming a new version of themselves.
When I walk down the boardwalks of the Pines or arrive at one of the tea dances, I inevitably see familiar faces, greet old friends, and am called out by name by people who recognize me from different life chapters. I’m seen. I belong. This sense of belonging in a community of people over time allows me to witness how others carry me with them and vice versa. I’m more aware that I’m not one fixed thing and experience how we’re all bigger than this moment and ourselves. Connection, belonging, and collective joy* expands our experience of being alive. It’s a version of transcendence. How do participants at an experience know they belong there? How do they know they’re seen and not alone?
The environment of Fire Island is truly the main character in any experience of the Pines. Witnessing the beauty of the pristine beaches, the dunes, the wooded boardwalk, and the wildlife are enough to make it worth the trip from the city. The natural beauty, sounds of the ocean, and sea breeze literally envelop the senses and carry your worries away. And once visitors relax and drink in the sensations of the environment, there’s an acute awareness of the fragility of the entire ecosystem there. (If the sandpipers can’t nest in the dunes, the whole place washes away.) The threat of global warming and climate change is existential. The call to action to care for the environment is loud. Extraordinary environments give birth to extraordinary experiences. Creators of extraordinary experiences must understand how to care for the environment and how to allow audiences to engage with the setting. When designing an experience, is the environment given proper importance? Is the chosen environment, setting, or location strong enough and cared for enough to allow for an extraordinary experience? Will the guest be able to trust and want to reciprocally engage with it?
Fun is important, but a blackout night out at the club is just that - an isolated, if not isolating, night. Nothing’s more fun than the playful feeling of adventure and possibility - not the end of story. If the story of a fun experience ends here, it’s just an act of escapism. How does this experience provide a bridge across time and/or to others’ stories? Is there a sense of history or the future that supports and strengthens the experience of the importance now? Will attendees feel more connected and alive or less? Where’s the love?
Pass your knowledge along. If you want to create and be a part of something that outlasts you, make sure those who can carry the torch forward are given all the knowledge, tools, and support they need to do so.
Other quick Fire Island-inspired questions/considerations (esp. practical ones):
Where’s room for spontaneity, possibility, adventure, and the unknown? What’s a healthy amount of the unknown, the unscripted, and a perception of danger?
Is the space safe enough (on a physical and emotional level) to support a healthy amount of adventure? Who are the police and medic contacts?
Why does someone need to come to the experience right now? Where’s the sense of ritual and importance? Why would someone need to come back?
How does music and lighting hold the collective experience together? How does the design appeal to the senses?
Is the experience about unifying the collective or about allowing everyone to have their own story? Or both? If there are performers, do they direct attention for the audience or model how to engage with one another?
How do we model to newcomers how to experience the event, the space, and other people? How do we communicate the rules of play? Have we communicated enough information before and at the top of the experience to put expectations and headspace in the proper place?
If your DJ misses the ferry, who else on the island can spin?
More on these questions and more insights to come, but now it’s time for me to experience the beach and share in the experience with my community…
For more on the stories of Fire Island Pines, please visit the Fire Island Pines Historical Society.
*One of my favorite texts on the topic of communal celebration is Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets: The History of Collective Joy. She catalogues how humans across cultures and time have communed through dancing, music, ecstatic ritual, and spectacle. This is required reading for anyone who endeavors to bring people together and/or to create an immersive experience.
You make me misty-eyed with joy 🥲
We are very lucky to have this enchanted place and our shared history ❤️