For readers who won't be celebrating Memorial Day weekend in the Pines, there are two new books 1) about the gay architect who gave the island its look with houses like the one above, Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction
New York magazine writes:
Gifford’s was a gay architectural vernacular that eschewed camp—“butch,” Rawlins calls it. “But in its muscular austerity,” he writes, “a hypermasculine form of drag could also be discerned.” As time went on, the houses became more elaborate, with conversation pits and make-out lofts—a form of sexed-up cocaine modernism. Gifford, a fixture in the community, embodied this pre-AIDS boundarylessness.
The NYT also covered the book with this doozy from the Department of Oh, Please:
“My line to people is that the Pines is to gay people what Israel is to Jews,” Andrew Kirtzman, a longtime Pines resident and real estate developer, said recently. “It’s the spiritual homeland. There’s just a sense of history in the air, almost tangible but not quite. You just feel like you’re part of some kind of grand creation meant solely for gays.”
It's unfair of the NYT to saddle a good book with that quote, yet its ridiculousness is outdone by the article's 60+ author Guy Trebay who offers: "And what once looked like licentiousness, flamboyance and bacchanalian behavior seems tame in an era of adolescent sexting and phones with downloadable hookup apps." An orgy at the meatrack was "tame" compared to a downloadable app? bro srs gafc
Please focus instead on Paul Goldberger saying Fire Island Modernist is an "important book, at once a work of architectural and social history." And Charles Kaiser: "Rawlins deftly melds biography, architectural criticism and social history to provide a rich portrait of Horace Gifford, and a vivid explanation of how the architect’s design aesthetic contributed to the formation of modern gay culture."
Next week also sees the release of Tom Bianchi's collection Fire Island Pines, Polaroids 1975-1983. He said the island seemed like "a gay Brigadoon" at the time:
“I was the young, lonely gay boy in the Midwest who had no idea paradise existed,” Mr. Bianchi said. “Everything about the Pines was new, the very idea of a place where you could play on the beach and hold hands with a guy and be with like-minded people and dance all night with a man.”
Difficult to remember in an era of marriage equality and widespread social acceptance of gay people, Mr. Bianchi added, is the social and political tenor of those decades when in many places it remained illegal for two men to dance together in public, when stereotypes of gay men as “sick deviants, weak and ineffectual and involved in sterile, unimportant relationships” still held sway.
...
In the Pines, Mr. Bianchi said, “We as gay men were finally able to let go of the judgments we’d internalized, to take each other’s hands and help each other explore.”
Sexual desire, like gravity, he added, is an irresistible “force holding us to the planet.” The period his book documents, in the last moments before a random virus laid waste to a generation of gay men, “was a very sexy and a very sexual time.”
“But it wasn’t a shallow experience whatsoever,” he said. “I met some pretty incredible people. We certainly loved.”
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