Jack Parlett on Fire Island: A Century in the Life of an American Paradise: Nonfiction

Jack Parlett is a writer, poet, and professor. He completed a Ph.D. at Cambridge University on gay cruising in New York poetry. His poems have appeared in Hotel, Blackbox Manifold, and the BFI Flare zine, and his essays and reviews have appeared in Poetry London, the Cambridge Humanities Review, on Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Fire Island, a thin strip of beach off New York’s Long Island coast, has long been a vital space in the queer history of America. Both utopian and exclusionary, healing and destructive, the island is a locus of contradictions, all of which coalesce against a stunning ocean backdrop. In Fire Island: A Century in the Life of an American Paradise (Hanover Square Press), Parlett tells the story of this iconic destination – its history, meaning, and cultural significance – through the lens of the artists and creators who sought refuge there. Figures as divergent as Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Patricia Highsmith, and Jeremy O. Harris relay a tale of a queer space in constant evolution. Fire Island is the definitive book on an iconic American destination and an essential contribution to queer history.

Julio Capó Jr. is an associate professor of history and the deputy director of the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab at Florida International University. He is the award-winning author of Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 and was curator of the Queer Miami: A History of LGBTQ Communities exhibition at HistoryMiami Museum. He serves as an associate editor of the Made by History section of The Washington Post and has held fellowships at Yale University and the University of Sydney.