Being in effect a hamlet, with provisions and services in miniature, the Pines had only a small, volunteer-run fire department. True to its name, fires are not uncommon on the island due to a combination of factors, including vicious winds and the precarious timber construction of the oceanfront. Numerous establishments on the island have burned down in suspected arson attacks, like Duffy’s in Cherry Grove in 1956, but a similar number have been razed by freakish accidents and spontaneous fires.
It was evident in the late 1970s that the Pines needed a new fire truck, but it lacked the funds to buy one. When the idea for an all-night fundraising party came up at a department meeting in the summer of 1978, plans quickly developed, and the mostly straight members of the fire department began to collaborate with the gay men who had already developed quite a reputation for throwing elaborate summer bashes.
The party, simply named “Beach”, was scheduled for the following summer. It was an ambitious event, ten months in the making, and required an unprecedented level of trust and collaboration from different parts of the community. Longtime Pines resident and “Beach” co-organizer Ron Martin, who began serving on the Fire Island Property Owners’ Association in 1978, the youngest gay man on a mostly straight board, remembers the divisions that needed addressing, or at least papering over, if the party was to be a success. The relations between gay and straight residents were the community’s most obvious fissure, but as in the Grove, there were also concerns about the influx of day-trippers who came to enjoy the tea dance and other island rituals, something that even led owner John Whyte to cancel tea at the Blue Whale for several years.
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The aim to raise money for the fire truck was a cause that spoke widely to the whole community, and though it was attended by movers and shakers of numerous persuasions, in execution, the beach party was truly a victory for the gay disco contingent. Paying $20 for a ticket to what promised to be the party of the year was the kind of political gesture that everyone, even those gay men less endeared to the presence of activist causes during their summer vacations, could get behind. Some younger gay men were equally at home on the frontlines of a march and the fringes of the Pines, frustrated by the political indolence of the moneyed homeowners and older men, as well those, of a similar age, who were left cold by the day’s dominant causes.
In his 1980 novel The Confessions of Danny Slocum, the writer George Whitmore observed how activists behaved off duty on Fire Island. The narrator spots one of his political friends one night on the Sandpiper dance floor, shorn of his usual activist getup, and wearing “lemon-colored painter’s pants and a shocking-pink athletic shirt, a plastic belt and blue suede dancing shoes.” This admittedly horrific-sounding outfit illustrates how strange it was to see the man “consorting so enthusiastically with the very milieu he’s always seemed to resent so—as exemplifying all the ills of gay life: ingrown, artificial, hedonistic, uncharitable, moneyed.” Whitmore also pokes fun at the apoliticism of the Pines in his 1980 play The Rights, set on the deck of a Fire Island beach house one August. Larry, a classically doomed queen in his late forties, arrives at the holiday home of his ex-boyfriend, who is now a successful screenwriter and has a handsome younger boyfriend named Buddy, who lives off Paul’s wealth and is completely unmoved by gay politics. In Terry Miller’s Pines 79, another Fire Island play staged in New York the year after Whitmore’s, men in their mid-twenties and early thirties are no less damning about the bore of political engagement, and describe an Advocate fundraising party in the Pines as a “seminar” and “all a bunch of nonsense.” “Most people would be better off taking a course in irresponsibility,” one quips.
Felice Picano, another of the Violet Quill writers, remembers the island in the 1970s, when he was in his thirties, as a more charitable place. “No matter how ‘out’ you were among family and at work,” Picano recalls of his immediate social circle, “we were staunchly supportive of gay rights and gay politics. Benefits for various gay causes were hosted at the Pines every other summer weekend, considered chic, and well attended.” Perhaps this was the ultimate Pines formula—give back, but make it fashion. It is a hallmark of a given social class and milieu that fundraising takes place in the form of benefit galas, the kinds of events to which guests are drawn by factors beyond mere altruism, even if the outcome is ultimately the same. These events were different in style from the fundraising dances at the GAA Firehouse, but not in essence. “Beach”, which was raising money for the fire truck, and thus was a different kind of firehouse party, was a successful composite of local positive, grassroots collaboration, and unbridled glamour, which was provided as much by the musical guests and aesthetic arrangements as by the natural beauty of the setting.
Not since the urban gay subcultures of the 1920s had there been a space for the queer community to move communally together, in a public sphere within a public sphere, and with such style. The ’70s dance floor seemed to offer something hopeful and novel. This spirit of possibility was there at the start of the decade, in 1971, when Marvin Gaye’s antiwar soul anthem “What’s Going On” was the song of the summer, the same year that the New York law prohibiting same-sex dancing was relaxed. Dancers in the Sandpiper “began to feel comfortable dancing in one another’s arms,” and hugged and swayed to “the warmth of the music, the romantic sounds,” as one Pines-goer remembers it. And it was there too at the end of the decade, this time not in the Sandpiper but in the sand itself, at the party to end all parties, a celebration of Fire Island’s primary ritual of togetherness on an unprecedented scale.
Picture a beach at midnight. Colored mosquito nets, red, white and blue in the moonlight, draped over large tent poles in the form of eight scattered pavilions, are gently billowing in the wind. Archive images of the Pines are being projected onto a screen. Fine cheese, charcuterie and cookies are being served at various stands. Wine and champagne, and perhaps additional forms of chemical encouragement, are on offer. Artworks are being auctioned in one tent. In another, there is a casino, where people are playing blackjack and roulette. Calvin Klein is in line for entry. There are so many people, dressed, or rather undressed, to the nines. An exposed and toned abdomen is the chosen outfit for men tonight.
Just outside, people are congregating by the snow fence to get a vicarious slice of the action. They may not be inside, but they will be close enough to hear the sound emanating from the party’s centerpiece, a makeshift wooden dance floor that has just opened. It is thrumming with activity, flanked on all sides by enormous speakers. The crowd anticipates the next act to come on stage, their eager faces illuminated by light towers surrounding them. The stage is elevated above the dancers, equipped with a robust DJ booth. The entertainment is about to begin. Over the course of the night, three of New York’s best-known DJs on the gay scene, fixtures on the island and in the city, will spin records together. Breakout stars, like the sixteen-year-old French-Canadian singer France Joli, whose single “Come to Me” will become a huge hit in New York in the weeks following the party, share the bill with bigger disco stars, like The Ritchie Family, who fill the headline slot at 3:00 a.m., and Bonnie Pointer, who follows at 5:00 a.m., when the party shows no signs of abating. There was once a dream of getting Donna Summer, Queen of Disco, as the headline act, but scheduling conflicts meant that it was not to be.
In the makeshift casino-cum-piano-bar, you encounter a handsome man tinkling on the keys, smartly dressed and curly-haired, with deep brown eyes and a striking face, the image of a crooner with notes of feyness. It is Paul Jabara, the Lebanese-American singer, songwriter, actor, island regular and key figure in disco history. In 1978 he won an Oscar and a Grammy for his song “Last Dance,” which Summer performed in the endearingly naff 1978 disco film Thank God It’s Friday. That same year he released his own record, whose track list included an eleven-minute song about Fire Island life called “Pleasure Island,” which builds from tropical, languorous verses to a futuristic and ecstatic end section, complete with male moans of pleasure. Unlike Auden’s poem of the same name, published exactly thirty years previously, this out-and-out ode celebrates the island’s licentiousness, its status as a carnal paradise where “no one cares about your vice”; where you can “find just what you need / no matter who or what you are.” Surrounding Jabara that night were thousands of people putting that principle joyfully into practice.
To imagine entry to “Beach” today is to engage some private fantasy of the best night of your life, organized around a configuration and a culture now irrecoverable. The real thing was a resounding success, a product of the hard work and diplomacy of numerous parties. On July 8, 1979, the stars aligned and the tide stayed out. There were men and women, gay and straight people, old-timers and newcomers; people from the Pines and from the Grove. If hedonism had proved a dividing line between factions and communities, it was through some perfect and miraculous iteration of the wild ways of the decade that provided some harmony, if only for one night. That the party felt era-defining is not merely an invention of the historical gaze. Its dancers knew that a special epoch of new freedoms, sparked by riots that took place just ten summers earlier, was being toasted. Such a simple fact about parties—that they are, in their excesses, a way of marking time: blowout as climax. To the people there that night, “Beach” was not the end point of a culture that had exhausted itself, like the morbid and sometimes surreal climactic parties we find in fiction. Holleran’s Dancer, for example, ends with a climactic pink-and-green-themed party at a Pines beach house, a lavish and literary signal of an era coming to end. Characters skulk at the fringes of this glamorous spectacle with an “odd sensation of death” as they look at all the old faces, struck by the realization that they “had all been new faces once.” At the end of this party, both of the novel’s main characters will be dead or missing. Like Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, their demises also signal to those around them the end of an era.
The larger atmosphere of “Beach” in 1979 was not one of morbidity, like the party in Dancer, but unprecedented festivity. False utopias are all too easily made out of the calm that precedes a storm, and although the world that hung gloriously in the balance that night was not a perfect communal dream, there were still many aspects worth celebrating. For one, the party offered an implicit reprieve from the Anita Bryants of the world, and the backlash against gay liberation that fomented throughout the country at this time. But it was also an anathema to the larger cultural backlash against disco that had taken hold. Debates raged among gay leftists about whether the musical form was consumerist and heteronormative. And the increasingly racist and homophobic prevalence of the slogan “Disco Sucks” was gaining momentum in the wider culture. The infamous Disco Demolition Night, a promotional theme launched at a baseball game in Chicago just four days after Beach, on July 12, 1979, saw a stunt where a crate of disco records was blown up live on the field.
In the Pines, more fun-loving fires were burning. No one at that party could have predicted what awaited them in the next decade. That many of those in attendance would be gone just ten years later would have seemed unthinkable. For that reason, it resonates today as a singular moment in time, a tipping point. “Our freewheeling lifestyles would slowly turn somber,” Martin remembers, “and our hedonism on Fire Island would dissipate as we struggled valiantly but unsuccessfully to keep each other alive.” But for now, or then, on that night as it turned into morning, proceedings were governed by the jubilant ethos of disco, by songs like “The Main Event,” the Jabara-written Barbra Streisand hit that played as the sun came up after a night of revelry. “I gotta celebrate!” Streisand shouts, in that inimitable, theatrical voice, and “thank my lucky stars above.” Love, indeed, was the main event. That summer, it was the hottest ticket in town. You had to be there.
Excerpted from FIRE ISLAND: A Century in the Life of an American Paradise (on sale: June 14; Hanover Square Press) by Jack Parlett © 2022 by Jack Parlett, used with permission from Hanover Square Press/HarperCollins.
