This year's Fire Island Pines Party is going strong, and 'the message is self-love'

Thousands of people have once again descended upon a stretch of sand on a barrier island in the Great South Bay, an approximately 700-home community with an enormously outsized cultural influence: The Fire Island Pines.

Since 1999, the annual Fire Island Pines Party has been what its executive producer Guy Smith describes as “the biggest, queerest all-night dance party on a beach in America.”

“Every single bed, every braided rug, every deck chair, every blow-up floaty has got somebody sleeping on it during Pines Party Week,” said Smith, known as “Disco Daddy” to those reaching him on a walkie talkie this weekend during the party.

It’s what Stonewall Community Foundation — the beneficiary of more than $1.5 million in donations over the party’s 26 years — calls “one of the longest-running annual queer parties in the world.” But for many in the community, it’s about more than just a chance to dance on the sand.

“The message is self-love,” Pines Party production manager Adam “Papa Bear” Klesh said.

And for some attendees, it’s also a symbol of resistance in a year when the Trump administration is trying to scale back avenues for gender-affirming care, LGBTQ-specific crisis services are vanishing, and the federal government stripped references to trans and queer people from the Stonewall National Monument's webpage.

“Especially this year, when our community is being targeted with escalating attacks on LGBTQ rights and dignity, our gathering becomes more than joyful – it becomes essential,” Henry Robin, president of the Fire Island Pines Homeowners Association, wrote in the event’s annual phonebook-sized Pines Party Community Journal. “To dance freely, to express ourselves openly and to celebrate one another without fear is a radical affirmation of our pride, our unity and our resilience.”

This year, the theme is Dreamscape, inspiring a vast variety of surrealist homemade costumes – disco ball hats among other innovative headgear creations, barely there hallucinogenic prints, and clocks galore — and plenty of gauzy, ephemeral decor to pair with the thumping dance music. The party started Friday and continues through Sunday.

The Community Journal also includes shows of support from many local officials — congratulatory letters from Gov. Kathy Hochul, Rep. Andrew R. Garbarino, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, and ads from Macy’s, local businesses and various yearbook-like portraits of Pines pets.

Raf Kuhn, a co-chair for the Pines Party Committee, said the party is “all about coming together and giving people the opportunity to express themselves in an environment where they can feel comfortable and feel themselves.”

“It's empowering and I think that it has ripple effects as people kind of reenter the world and cross back over the Bay and go back to their daily lives,” Kuhn said.

To Elijah Batchelor, executive producer of the Pines Party’s pool and closing parties, resistance has always been part and parcel to the community.

“ I think that that's something that anybody who's spent any time in the Pines, and anybody who's gay, queer — any part of the LGBTQIA+ community — knows: That we've always existed. We've always resisted, and regardless of who's in power and what the situation is in any part of the world, we were going to have a good fricking time,” Batchelor said.

Organizers expect it to be the biggest yet, in part thanks to the badly eroded beach getting a recent restoration and expansion from the Army Corps of Engineers (the beach’s health affects not just the immediate Pines community but also the whole dynamic of Long Island’s Great South Bay).

“The last couple years, we’ve had to constrain the number of attendees and design the event for a narrower beach” due to the erosion, Kuhn said. But no more: The beach is now more than 100 feet wide.

Although technically 26 years old, the event’s origins trace back to the Morning Party, an annual weekend fundraiser and rager thrown by AIDS service organization the Gay Men’s Health Crisis from the 1980s through 1998.

And the Morning Party was inspired by an even earlier event, 1979’s Beach, described by the Fire Island News at the time as “the most ambitious event undertaken in the history of the barrier beach community of Fire Island.” It was attended by the likes of Andy Warhol, the Village People, Farrah Fawcett, her then-husband Lee Majors and some 4,000 other revelers. Tony Curtis, the Fire Island News noted, wished to land his helicopter in the middle of the beach activities but was denied permission.

Beach succeeded in its charitable goal of raising enough money to purchase a truck for the Pines Fire Department.

“I was the last person to drive the firetruck, a 1966 Ford we called Big Red that I used to build [the first Pines Parties] originally,” Smith, the event’s executive producer, said, adding
“It rusted out and they put a dump truck on the back. This has always been a very, very bootstrap party.”

The scrappiness is key to the vibe, Smith added.

Running the event is no easy feat, especially considering how challenging it is to put on a multi-day extravaganza miles out from the mainland on an island accessible almost exclusively by ferry, with extremely limited vehicular access.

“ We are a remote island off the coast. The logistics of getting everything built onto the beach … the manpower that it takes, it’s grueling,” Pines Party creative director Roberto “Cheryl” Montenegro said.

Last year, it took a paid and volunteer staff of well more than 500 people to execute the event.

Despite being something of a logistical nightmare to produce, many who become even peripherally involved have been deeply inspired by the experience over the years.

“ I drastically changed my life for this party. It's a life-changing party,” said Pines Party Committee co-chair Nicholas “Naughty Pine” Ammaturo, who has been volunteering at the party for the last six years, co-chairing it for the last four.

He said he truly feels at home in The Pines.

“We were throwing a party, and now we’ve become family,” he said.