A trip to Fire Island, New York’s sandy LGBTQ sanctuary and long-time font of inspiration, where simplicity meets fantasy
- Located off New York’s Long Island, Fire Island has been an LGBTQ refuge since the 1950s. Truman Capote, W.H. Auden and Tennessee Williams spent time there
- Little has changed, with boardwalks connecting the beaches and gay bars. Although plush houses give off an air of exclusivity, many host pool parties open to all
Powder-white sand and palm trees do not spring to mind when you imagine New York. But then again, Fire Island is not your conventional beach getaway: as our ferry pulls into the Fire Island Pines terminal, a drag queen curled around a part of the wooden jetty, dangling over the ocean, yells into a microphone, “Welcome, welcome.”
It is barely midday.
On Fire Island you soon learn to expect fabulous distractions.
Since the 1950s, creatives – and particularly the LGBTQ crowd – have made pilgrimages to this strip of land 51km (30 miles) long off the southern shore of Long Island, to find inspiration, but often for more than that: to feel safe.
It was here, in Carrington House, a wooden beach bungalow and one of only five sites on the United States National Register of Historic Places recognised for a role in LBGTQ history, that Truman Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and Frank O’Hara partied with fellow poets John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch – experiences reflected in seminal poems such as A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.
