Fire Island

- Tom  Bianchi SX 70 photographs from the book "Fire Island Pines Polaroids 1975-1963"

                                     Fire Island

 Now solitary footprints on the sand, another season dissolves to dreams of those preceding.  80 years ago it began,

our beachhead strand of dunes fronting
shore heather and scrub pine. Boardwalks and stick- built cottages defined community.
 

Onslaught that stormed the beaches carried armaments of beach umbrellas, Radio Flyers , and the resolve to claim place.

Weekend trippers came in brightest Jantzen briefs
while seasoned residents wore faded Abercrombie swim trunks.

The Pines and Cherry Grove grew personalities.

Ferries docked packed with gym-honed bodies.  Looks and physique trumped all, mingling hairdressers, stockbrokers actors, professors, waiters, painters, mechanics , doctors and nurses, into a sweaty Coppertoned fleshy ménage .

 Behind dunes in the black cherry and bayberry thickets, many came of age , most retread many times over a season.  Boardwalk sideshows tested weekday repressions . Freedom found itself in sun and shade. 

 Bianchi and his SX70  immortalized frenetic daytime occupation.    Furlough followed for the beach volleyball weary.  Disco and Donna Summer held court . Low tea drinks before sunset  then high tea 3D – drinks, dinner, and dancing. Dawn marked that night’s bed relinquished for our own.

Plague hit in the 80’s.  We still came, but talk turned to who wasn’t there and what the world was going to do to us. Reagan cast us adrift. We had only each other for support.  Quiet dinners supplanted dances at Yacht Club and Botel. Music was more Simone than Sylvester. Quilted pieces monumented our losses.  The scene became more about support than recreation.

Hurricanes and mockery couldn’t dislodge us from our beachhead.  We endured ,  Homes became permanent- even luxurious.  

Two-daddy kids summer in harmony with breeder families .
Meatrack is still here, more historic site than rendezvous now. 
The island has become respectable.  Accepted. “Gentrified,” yours call it.

But it remains Ours. This dream became real.  Our home away from home .  You can all come into our world  as long as you respect our tradition.   Accept our ways.

 Waves washing away thousands of seasonal soldier’s footprints almost echo now in the winds.  The whispered conviction of the tribe can almost be heard,  “We belong here. We earned this place.”      
    
    -Jerry Wendt    2014                                                                                               

 

 

photograph by James Gavin 2014

This photograph taken end-of-season at Fire Island by friend James Gavin

inspired me to look into the history of this iconic gay resort and, in finding

the Polaroid history captured over  a eight year span by Chicagoan Tom

 Bianchi, in turn motivated me to write a prose piece that I distilled down to

this poem trying to capture what this place is. - JPW