NO MAN ISAN ISLAND, as the English poet John Donne famously put it, and certainly not when he’s on Fire Island. None other than Oscar Wilde visited the gayfriendly vacation spot, specifically Cherry Grove, during his lecture tour of 1882. Roughly a century later, Andrew Holleran, author of Dancer from the Dance, grouped together the “revelries” taking place on Manhattan, Long Island, and Fire Island, but singled out the last as “nothing but a sandbar, as slim as a parenthesis,” the “very last fringe of soil on which a man might put up his house and leave behind him all—absolutely all—of that huge continent to the west.” Joel Kim Booster, the writer of Fire Island, is clearly not ready to leave this last fringe of soil behind. “It’s like a gay Disney World,” he tells us, “fun for the whole family”—except that his definition of family is not the traditional one. Booster’s Fire Islandis not only a light-hearted love letter to its eponymous locale but a randy reimagining of Pride and Prejudice. In the role of Noah (a corollary of Jane Austen’s feisty heroine, Elizabeth Bennet), Booster speaks directly to the audience and helps to translate terms that an “outsider” may not understand. For example, when a bitchy outsider describes his friend circle as “cute little friends,” Noah explains that this is code for “not a fuckable one in the bunch.” What Noah doesn’t decode is that the plot of Fire Islandis based on Austen’s novel of 1813, though he told Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, cohosts of the reigning gay podcast Las Culturistas, who are also his costars in Fire Island, that “we’ve got our gay Darcy!” The friend group at the heart of this entertaining comedy, perfectly timed for summer, mirrors the members of the Bennet family in Austen’s classic novel. Booster told the Late Show’s Stephen Colbert that, long after he watched BBC adaptations of Austen’s novel with his mom as a kid, he didn’t fully identify with Austen’s characters until he took a copy of Pride and Prejudice with him on a trip to Fire Island. “It wasn’t until I went to Fire Island for the first time that I actually brought the book with me to read for the first time, and I was so struck by how relevant it actually felt to my experience ... navigating these weird class systems that gay men created for themselves.” What does Booster mean by “weird class systems,” and how does he represent his journey as an openly gay Asian-American man? Booster was adopted and raised in a Southern Baptist household, which gave him a fiercely critical eye when it comes to the conventions, or “systems,” that rule social life. He has been an outspoken critic of the Grindr profile line “No fats, no fems, no Asians” as particularly toxic. InFire Island, he puts a pair of Asian friends, Noah and Howie (played by Bowen Yang of Saturday Night Live fame), front and center. They lovingly bicker just as Elizabeth and her older sister Jane do, and in the opening scene Noah rightfully takes aim at Austen’s opener. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in a want of a wife.” Those 23 words constitute the hastiest generalization in English literature, but it’s a sentence that Austen, with her characteristic irony, endeavors to undermine and ultimately undo as “universally” true. Spoiler alert: Mr. Darcy is one of the richest commoners in 19th-century England, but he has towork for Elizabeth’s affection and ultimately her hand in marriage, rather than simply accepting Gay Pride (and Prejudice) COLINCARMAN FIRE ISLAND Directed by Andrew Ahn Jax Media, Searchlight Pictures Colin Carman, author of The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys and a former fellow of the International Jane Austen Society, teaches British literature at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, CO. Matt Rogers, Bowen Yang, and Tomas Matos inFire Island. 50 The G&LR Continued on page 49
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