The Literature and Film of Fire Island: Drifting, Cruising, Worlding (Palgrave Studies in Queer Literary, Visual and Material Cultures)

This book charts Fire Island, America’s first gay and lesbian town, as a site of precarious literary and cinematic encounter.Tracing the “situations” of an Island dérive, it contends that Fire Island represents a deferred utopia, where claims to queer togetherness are ultimately usurped by the archipelagic entanglement between the beach and the city.Theoretically promiscuous, this study navigates the Island’s ambivalences through the motional framework of "drifting" - as both proper and improper noun, adjective, and verb - attentive to the material drifts of queer bodies and places, and the aesthetic drifts of queer (non)narration.Suggesting that “queer” and “drift” beguile their readers as terms of shared pliability, the author imagines “queer” as “drifty” and “drift” as “queer” to navigate the temporal and material exchanges between the Island-proper and its literary and cinematic narratives.As the first extended literary and cinematic investigation of Island-located works, Sunter ar