Paradise by the Patchogue Ferry: A Hundred Years on Fire Island
FIRE ISLAND: A Century in the Life of an American Paradise, by Jack Parlett The few times that I — bespectacled and pale — visited Fire Island, I felt out of place.
The poet Jack Parlett, who describes himself as an “‘otter,’ or maybe a ‘bear’ in training,” and who has mixed feelings, too, about paradise, hugs his ambivalence and makes good literature out of it.
His concise, meticulously researched, century-spanning chronicle of queer life on Fire Island captures, with a plain-spoken yet lyric touch, the locale’s power to stun and shame, to give pleasure and symbolize evanescence.
Fire Island, a 9.6-mile barrier island off Long Island’s south shore, less than two hours from Manhattan, can claim centuries of indigenous habitation and “around seventeen different vacation communities,” including Cherry Grove and the Pines, where the queer plot thickens. “Wallflower sensibility” authorizes Parlett to be a skeptical yet definitive narrator of Fire Island’s carnival, a diorama he embellishes with autobiographical asides: “Ever since I came to know myself as a gay man, I made the unconscious assumption that my own heavy drinking habits were linked to my sexuality.” Quick personal vistas turn his book into a hybrid act, a place-based memoir sketching the evolution of a community animated by sexual arrangements.
