The Literature and Film of Fire Island

The Literature and Film of Fire Island

Drifting, Cruising, Worlding

von Jacob Sunter

This book charts Fire Island, America’s first gay and lesbian town, as a site of precarious literary and cinematic encounter. Tracing the “situations” of an Island dérive, it contends that Fire Island represents a deferred utopia, where claims to queer togetherness are ultimately usurped by the archipelagic entanglement between the beach and the city. Theoretically promiscuous, this study navigates the Island’s ambivalences through the motional framework of „drifting“ – as both proper and improper noun, adjective, and verb – attentive to the material drifts of queer bodies and places, and the aesthetic drifts of queer (non)narration. Suggesting that “queer” and “drift” beguile their readers as terms of shared pliability, the author imagines “queer” as “drifty” and “drift” as “queer” to navigate the temporal and material exchanges between the Island-proper and its literary and cinematic narratives. As the first extended literary and cinematic investigation of Island-located works, Sunter argues that Fire Island’s concentrated queerness, an experiment in gay collectivity, provides generative and mobile ground upon which to test theories of queer sociality, and queer cinematic and literary production. Neither separate from nor central to the metropolis as a convergent zone of industry and individualism, it is argued that Fire Island unsettles the dichotomy between rural and urban scripts of queer sociality. With Fire Island as its drifty home-ground, the book concludes with the “New York Archipelago” as a figure through which to read the narrative exchanges of North America’s Eastern coast. Attentive to the islands that cannot be read, insofar that they remain ostensibly un-storied, he asks how drifting might occasion channels of reading that span across and askew the geographic, motional, and narrative asymmetries of the New York archipelago.

This book charts Fire Island, America’s first gay and lesbian town, as a site of precarious literary and cinematic encounter. Tracing the “situations” of an Island dérive, it contends that Fire Island represents a deferred utopia, where claims to queer togetherness are ultimately usurped by the archipelagic entanglement between the beach and the city. Theoretically promiscuous, this study navigates the Island’s ambivalences through the motional framework of „drifting“ – as both proper and improper noun, adjective, and verb – attentive to the material drifts of queer bodies and places, and the aesthetic drifts of queer (non)narration. Suggesting that “queer” and “drift” beguile their readers as terms of shared pliability, the author imagines “queer” as “drifty” and “drift” as “queer” to navigate the temporal and material exchanges between the Island-proper and its literary and cinematic narratives. As the first extended literary and cinematic investigation of Island-located works, Sunter argues that Fire Island’s concentrated queerness, an experiment in gay collectivity, provides generative and mobile ground upon which to test theories of queer sociality, and queer cinematic and literary production. Neither separate from nor central to the metropolis as a convergent zone of industry and individualism, it is argued that Fire Island unsettles the dichotomy between rural and urban scripts of queer sociality. With Fire Island as its drifty home-ground, the book concludes with the “New York Archipelago” as a figure through which to read the narrative exchanges of North America’s Eastern coast. Attentive to the islands that cannot be read, insofar that they remain ostensibly un-storied, he asks how drifting might occasion channels of reading that span across and askew the geographic, motional, and narrative asymmetries of the New York archipelago.

Jacob Sunter is a Visiting Research Fellow and John Howard Clark Scholar at Adelaide University, Australia, situated on unceded Kaurna land. He completed his PhD in English in 2023 and his creative and critical work has appeared in Porn Studies  and  The Saltbush Review. 

Highlights

• The first scholarly analysis of Fire Island film and literature Offers novel ways of spatialising American film and literature, through queer studies and eco-criticism Unsettles the dichotomy of urban/rural as a means to organise queer life and queer cultural objects

Über den Autor

Jacob Sunter is a Visiting Research Fellow and John Howard Clark Scholar at Adelaide University, Australia, situated on unceded Kaurna land. He completed his PhD in English in 2023 and his creative and critical work has appeared in Porn Studies  and  The Saltbush Review.