Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America's First Gay and Lesbian Town

Thoroughly engrossing, and incredibly in depth, Esther Newton's "Cherry Grove Fire Island" is a meticulously accounted history of America's first gay and lesbian town. A compilation of stories from over forty members of the Grove community, "Fire Island" reads more as a novel than an anthropological ethnography, leaving the reader wanting to turn page after page. Newton has lived part time in Cherry Grove since 1985 and her passion for the Grove is clear. This passion not only gives the reader a sense of the Grove community and how the members feel towards it, but also leaves the reader wishing they were sitting beach side in Cherry Grove. Filled with tales of lavish parties, elegant costumes, and endearing characters, Newton balances the struggle and the beauty that went into creating Americans first gay and lesbian town off the coast of New York. Contemporary youth may take for granted the strides the generation before made in regards to gay rights, but "Cherry Grove" reminds its audiences of the hardships homosexuals endured in the face of homophobia. Not only were Grovers (as Newton calls them) facing constant harassment from the mainland, but within Cherry Grove they were faced with sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, day-trippers and the AIDS epidemic. Through interviews, and detailed accounts of life in the Grove between the 1930's and 1980's Newton explores these themes and paints a picture of life in Cherry Grove. Although a predominantly gay male town, Newton does a great job incorporating lesbian history into her ethnography, and balances the hardships of not only homosexuals, but homosexual minorities who faced hatred within the Cherry Grove community. As Newton writes in her book, "For Grovers, the very existence of Cherry Grove was proof that, however badly gays have been mistreated, the American promise of freedom for all had some substance (284)." By the end of this book it is impossible not to feel the hope, love, and pride that distinguish Cherry Grove as a place of freedom for a group of American minorities.

Esther Newton's account of "America's First Gay and Lesbian Town" provides a thorough and personal image of the vacation island. Having vacationed there herself several summers, Newton introduces a cast of characters that are referred to time and again throughout the book, as though she is inviting the reader to also become familiar with the local crowd and their antics. Cherry Grove began formulating its identity as a vacation destination for the gay theater crowd in the 1930s. Newton writes, "gay theater people's migration to Cherry Grove is one of the clearest proofs we have that sexual preference was becoming the basis for a complete social identity" (21). This claim is clearly supported at the beginning of the book; the reader gets a good sense of the importance that members of the gay community find and carve out a space of their own on the island. No longer a marginal group to a society in which they were hardly accepted, the Cherry Grove crowd now were the majority. Camp culture was not simply a pastime, it was typical, expected behavior on the island. Later in the book, however, the initial claim that "sexual preference" could form a "social identity" seems to change, as Newton begins to emphasizes class and race disparities on the island. African-Americans were accepted conditionally and individually, as friends to those who were already embedded in the culture of the island. Collectively, however, they seemed to be feared by other Grovers, rather than being accepted into the larger island community on the basis of their sexualities. While the detailed descriptions of personal interactions and relationships are informative, I felt that Newton was providing more of a historical account than an ethnographic one. She writes about the traditions that formed on the island somewhat matter-of-factly: the reader remains well-informed about who attended which party, as well as the extravagant planning and preparation that went into the campier theme parties, in which attendees would spend weeks ahead of time on their costumes. Her examination of the traditions that emerged on the island usually do not go far beyond the fact that they did emerge. She does however provide a few interesting analyses of cultures that emerged, such as her description of the popular cruising location called the Rack: "In every way but its vulnerability to venereal disease transmission I see far less social and personal harm, and more potential good in it than in the repressive double-standard monogamy preached by the dominant heterosexual culture." (181) Newton goes on to assert that "group sex in the Rack [...] was a powerful factor in the creation of gay nationalism" (184). In this claim, Newton's view of the island as proof that a community can be united on the basis of sexuality is fully supported. The practice of seeking sex in the darkness of the night with numerous strangers at the rack engendered a "cross-class, cross-race definition based on one principle"--

Esther Newton's "Cherry Grove, Fire Island" is an extremely informative and thoroughly engrossing anthropological account of a unique gay resort community. Newton lived in Cherry Grove for the four years she wrote the book, and her immersion in the community is evident: while the book is clearly meticulously researched and highly informative, it is most compelling in its ability to convey a real sense of the Grove community and atmosphere. Newton's page-turning writing style and her detailed descriptions of people, places, and events allow the reader to become wholly absorbed in Cherry Grove's rich history. She imparts a concrete sense of the tensions that helped forge such a cohesive community, such that I felt personally invested in that community myself. Newton's engaging style is highly effective, especially for queer readers, as it recounts an often-overlooked yet extremely important area of gay history. Newton begins in the late 30's, and describes the rise of the Grove community as a resort for gay men and women, particularly from the NYC theater scene. During this era, these men and women often had trouble negotiating a place in American society, and the Grove became the one place they could finally be themselves. I fell in love with the vibrant individuals and the cohesive and unique community they helped forge. Newton goes on to discuss the rise of commercialism, and the ways in which post-Stonewall gays and lesbians brought new attitudes to Fire Island, which often stood in conflict with those of the Grove "old guard." Here, the book shifts from an engaging historical account to a more analytical anthropological one, as Newton discusses class and race conflicts. Then, although the Grove was historically dominated by white male gays, Newton's obvious personal motivation as a lesbian herself proves immensely helpful, as she devotes a sizable portion of the book gay women, which she notes are usually overlooked or tacked on. Throughout, Newton emphasizes the Grove as a unique community, created by and for gay men and women, and shows the tensions between Grovers and mainlanders as well as gays and straights. I was assigned this book in my Gay and Lesbian Ethnographies Class at Pomona College, but I must say, this is absolutely a book I would have read for pleasure, ideally over the course of a lazy weekend on a beach at Cherry Grove.

As a student of the natural sciences growing up in an era in which most Americans have already learned the lessons of AIDS and Stonewall is becoming a distant recollection of the founding moments of a move that is today alive and strong, I have had little opportunity to learn about the history of the gay and lesbian rights movement in America. Thus, in anthropological texts on this subject, such as Newton's, I seek a book which is easy to read from a lay-person's perspective (having no training in anthropology myself) and capable of providing a well-balanced look at how significant historical events have shaped the movement with which I am familiar today. Cherry Grove, Fire Island performs superbly on both of these points.The book focuses on the small queer community of Cherry Grove which managed to develop in the mid-1930's on the remote sand bar of Fire Island, just off the coast of New York. Newton notes that perhaps it was in such a remote place that the first development of gay community in America happened because this was the only place it could happen-removed from mainstream life. Newton's book follows this community through the major eras in its development, carefully noting the important roles of major events both on the island and the mainland. Changing economic structures on the island (including the introduction of mafia-owned discos!), the developing gay rights movement on the mainland, the AIDS pandemic, sexism and racism in The Grove, day-tripping visitors, public sex, and competition with other Fire Island communities are only a few of the topics Newton explores in her comprehensive study. Newton based her book on interviews of forty-six informants that she gathered while spending five years in The Grove during the 80's. She formulates the text as the story of a community with a focus on some key characters and places throughout. At times, it reads much like a novel with charming characters and situations almost too enchanting too believe. Indeed, Newton's book may be an anthropological record, but it reads like anything but the dry, sterile picture that such classification invokes. Nonetheless, Newton has done a careful job of keeping the "big picture" of gay rights and identity in mind while telling her story and it is not difficult to see how most of what she recounts is historically important in this scope as well. Finally, it is notable that one shortcoming of anthropological work in general is that much of it seems generally lacking in a balance between focus on gay men and lesbians. Despite the fact that The Grove was primarily a gay male community throughout most of its early years (something that has slowly been changing), Newton manages to do an admirable job of maintaining a sense of balance, even managing to draw extensively from interviews of some of the lesbians who did manage to visit Cherry Grove in its early years.If there is one shortcoming of Newton's book, it is perhaps that the subsection of the gay community

As a lesbian anthropologist who spent several years summering in Cherry Grove and getting to know the then-aging members of its first gay pioneers, Esther Newton was uniquely placed to write the history of America's first (and for long, only) predominantly gay and lesbian community. The documentation and the historical depth are impressive; what struck me more, however, was the extent to which gay and lesbian life existed in the United States before Stonewall (1969), even if it was often constrained by a combination of public disapproval and intermittent enforcement of oppressive laws. As someone born after Stonewall, the pre-1960s history of marginalized groups, like homosexuals, is largely unknown. This book goes a long way to redressing that gap in American social history.Newton organizes her book into three main eras. The "country-club" time of the first gay, lesbian, and sexually ambiguous individuals who came out from the New York theatre and artistic circles, began in the 1930s and continued through WW II and into the anti-gay witch hunts of the McCarthy era. The second period, beginning in the 1960s, saw the expansion of the upper-class WASP definition of gay identity to include new perspectives from "ethnic" whites, mainly Jews and Italians of middle- and working-class backgrounds. Finally, the 1970s and 1980s saw a transformation of the Grove, post-Stonewall, post-advent of AIDS, in which a newly militant gay identity was forged nationwide through the rhetoric of civil rights and in response to the devastation of HIV. Each era has seen conflicts between straights and gays, between owners, renters, and day-trippers, between men and women, and along lines of class and ethnicity. Often these factions have aligned in unexpected ways, and as an older renter, a woman, and a person of Jewish heritage, Newton is unusually placed to see the shifting fault lines.The weakness of the book lies in a certain lack of analysis, on the one hand, and a certain political positioning on the other. Newton is an anthropologist by profession, but the analysis of social groupings in this book rarely goes beneath a simple description of what happened, in which factors of class, gender, and ethnic identity largely determine the political history of Cherry Grove. One could hope for a bit more analysis -- for instance, camp culture and drag (both of which changed substantially in conception with the changes of generations) are rather central to her description of Cherry Grove's history. Yet there is little attempt to analyze the psychology or motivations for either. The second issue is that Newton very strongly identifies herself as a politically liberal lesbian of a certain generation; this is both an advantage and a disadvantage. On the one hand, she sees and describes what might be invisible to someone who accepted the class identity of the first generation, to someone who accepted the assumed whiteness of the