Free Onle Library: Pleasure island. by "The Advote (The natnal gay & lbian newsmagaze)"; News, opn and mentary Televisn programs Televisn program reviews
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BT GAY-IENDLY BAR AT PLEASURE ISLAND
We're not an exclively 'gay/queer' party nor are we a 'straight uple swap' type party. ) It feels ftg, if not historilly felico, to image Wil as the patron sat of the island’s later eratns, cuttg a flamboyant figure on s gay beach avant la lettre. Many years later, the perd jt prr to Stonewall, the Mattache Society activist Craig Rodwell worked a summer bartendg on Fire Island to raise money for New York’s first gay and lbian bookstore, which opened 1967 and was ftgly named the Osr Wil Memorial Bookshop.
For Aun, the problem wh this burgeong gay beach culture was not only that was a distractn. But the were still the years before the rabow was an explicly polil symbol for gay liberatn.
Some of the bt-known gay novelists of the 1970s, cludg Edmund Whe, Andrew Holleran and Felice Pino, wrers who later formed the Vlet Quill llective 1980-81, ed as a settg. The readily available arc of Fire Island’s lerary history follows an all too faiar pattern, prised as is of whe gay male thors.