Noah (Joel Kim Booster) is the group’s de facto leader, cute and smart and slutty in a way that earns him affectionate jabs from his friends. And this is exactly what it means to the group of friends who arrive by ferry to join the party at the start of director Andrew Ahn’s romantic comedy Fire Island, buzzing with horny anticipation as they continue their tradition of an annual group getaway. Indeed, Fire Island has for decades represented the idea of escape and renewal for members of the queer community who continue to fill its beaches and dance floors every summer-a means of gleefully abandoning both the pressures of the city and the prying eyes of heterosexual society.
Andrew Holleran describes Fire Island’s geography in his exquisitely provocative 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance as “nothing but a sandbar, as slim as a parenthesis, enclosing the Atlantic, 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.”
