“It was really powerful and helpful, in solidifying who I was as a gay man,” Kim Booster says. It was one big party.” (Of course, Kramer also famously derided the region’s homo-hedonism in his book Faggots and play The Normal Heart.)īut for thousands of queers over the last 80 years, Fire Island has been a welcome respite from a straight world. AIDS activist Larry Kramer, once a frequent visitor, described the Fire Island he discovered in the 1970s to a 2011 audience this way: “Everyone was gorgeous. Truman Capote, Patricia Highsmith, Carson McCullers, and other queer literati were drawn to the same milieu, where ordinary folks experienced sexual liberation (at least on the weekends). It’s always been a place for sexual exploration, beginning when same-sex coupling could still land you in prison for life in some states. That’s the allure of Fire Island, of course. We could all just sort of be ourselves in a real, sort of primal way, for the very first time.” “It was, for me as a young gay man, to go for the very first time in my life to a place where there were no straight people, and you were just sort of able to be free, and, unencumbered - and this is me coming from New York City, which isn’t exactly a red state when it comes to gay issues - but even still, it was really powerful for me to be with some of my closest gay friends in a place where there were no straight people. Though it can be “an economically impenetrable island” with a “lot of positives and negatives,” it was a game changer for Kim Booster, the writer and star of the upcoming film Fire Island. “I think back in those days, we would shove about 16 people into a four-bedroom house.” “Back then, I was pretty poor,” he laughs. But in 2015, actor Joel Kim Booster probably knew very little of this (he was homeschooled after all, and jokes of his sheltered upbringing), when he landed in the gay mecca with a bunch of friends.