Queer Movies That Made Me Queer: Fire Island

This week is the 3rd entry of the Queer Movies that Made Me Queerer series, where I am celebrating Pride Month by writing about queer movies and their importance to my development as a queer person. For this week, I will be diving into Fire Island (2022), directed by Andrew Ahn.

An adaptation of the classic Jane Austen novel Pride & Prejudice, Fire Island concerns a family of queer folks who are spending their last annual summer vacation together on Fire Island, a gay haven off the coast of Long Island, New York. Written by and starring Joel Kim Booster, this movie centers around Booster’s Noah and Howie (Bowen Yang) as they each discover, through trial and error, romance in their own ways. Featuring an ensemble based on the Austen characters including Mr. Darcy, Mr. Bennet, Charles Bingley, and the Bennet sisters, Fire Island tells us a story of genuine connection in a modern world despite ongoing prejudice for queer people and people of color. While many aspects of this story are appealing (found family, self-reflection and honesty, queer liberation, etc.), one feature of this story is so refreshingly integral: letting yourself be happy.

Fire Island’s conflict isn’t largely that serious, at least in the grand scheme of the world. There isn’t a subplot about AIDS, racism and body discrimination are largely used for contextualization, and they aren’t fighting homophobia. Instead, with the exception of non-consensual pornography, the film’s conflict is about infighting in the queer community and butting personalities. Of course, these themes can have major effects on mental health, but ultimately the action arises from internal issues and character flaws. Noah is happy to continue fucking around, without any need for love, while Howie is willing to accept his loneliness instead of pursuing what he wants. Among the opposed group of gay men, Charlie (James Scully) has to decide between Howie and his ex Rhys (Michael Graceffa), while Will (Conrad Ricamora) has to decide whether to be willing to accept his feelings for Noah. And surrounding these relatively minor conflicts are a bunch of hot men of all shapes and colors in speedos and underwear and singlets. Yet despite it being an undeniably hot movie with a nice ending, it is still significant because it shows us what we can strive for: queer joy.

Sometimes it feels like queer joy is so fleeting. We live in a terrible world full of genocide, hunger, poverty, climate change, and constant attacks on our rights and lives by the pseudo-fascists and actual fascists who control our governments. And so, sometimes, when we finally get the chance to be in a space that is unapologetically queer, we often forget to allow ourselves to be happy. There is guilt in it, for sure (why do I get to be happy, when people in Palestine/Congo/Sudan are dying; what did I do to earn the ability to be happy when so many who came before me died of violence or disease; and so on), but part of it is protective too. Why are we suddenly safe here? So many of us spend our lives hiding our true selves. Sometimes we get brave and wear nail polish to work, or we hold our partner’s hand in a public place, but it’s always with that thought in the back of our mind: “What if today’s the day someone gets violent?” and you remember why you started carrying a way to protect yourself.

What’s so significant about Fire Island is that it redefines what a happy ending is for a romantic comedy, beyond just recontextualizing it into a queer retelling. When the movie ends, we don’t have a strict definition of what the relationships now look like. We don’t know what the future looks like for either Noah and Will or Howie and Charlie. It might be that Noah and Will fizzle out and that Howie and Charlie eventually break up, or maybe both couples end up getting married and growing old together. But it doesn’t matter. What does matter, in that moment, as the sun is setting and they dance on the pier, is that they are happy. They are happy in their lives as they are then and there. They are not worried about the future or overcoming the trauma of their past; they are living in the moment and basking in every second of it.

Accepting the joy in my own life has been hard. I never was one to accept my own emotions, positive or negative. I didn’t realize what true happiness was until I was willing to accept my queerness, be open to my emotions, and the life that could entail, including the incredible joy I get from being in the relationship I have with my fiance. Before I met him, I hadn’t ever really sought a relationship, at least not in earnest. I slept around with a lot of different guys, and that experience was important to my development as a gay man. But I never really found the emotional connection that I didn’t realize I needed after moving back to the suburbs of Atlanta after graduating from a university in New Jersey. All of my friends, who all lived in the Northeast Corridor, were almost a thousand miles away, and I was living at home again. And, honestly, I coped by looking for hookups. But it took my now-fiance to slow me down and ask me to consider a relationship before I stopped and realized that I was closing myself off. As our relationship continued, I was slow to accept this positive change in my life. I wasn’t allowing myself to feel joy. Ultimately, I was able to open myself up to my feelings and to the happiness that my relationship was giving me. And my life couldn’t be better as a result.

One of the challenges of consuming queer media is how much of it is so heartbreaking. The queer community has faced so many hardships in our history: rampant and state-sanctioned homophobia and transphobia, lack of support from our families and societal institutions, epidemics and violence, poverty, and so much more. We have had to rely on one another as we have been abandoned by those around us. And in all of that, finding the joy in life often feels impossible. Even though queer folks have become more and more accepted in society, it lowers these hardships but does not erase them. So joy still feels unattainable for many. Likewise, our stories reflect this. Many pieces of queer media are tied to the conflicts we face instead of what we desire in our lives. Not having really seen queer folk happy in the media made it hard to believe that I was allowed to feel that way. But Fire Island does what so many of us need: shows us that we can live a happy life with those we love authentically. It is possible to find joy after all.