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FIRE_ISLAND

                                                   May  1, 2015

Long Island is a gigantic flat land beginning
with Brooklyn and Queens, but quickly devolving        MAULED
into rather dull suburban sprawl without much          SUNY
to recommend it.                                       SUCKING_VORTEX

On the North Shore, one faces Long Island                      LONG_ISLAND
Sound, with Conneticut beyond-- this was once
Great Gatsby territory.  The beaches there are
largely just narrow strips of sand with tiny     As I got older, I developed
one foot waves, and we mostly regarded them      some affection for these loser
with contempt.                                   "little kid" beaches...  if
                                                 you went to them during the
The real deal was the ocean-facing beaches       off-season, it was anarchy
on the long, skinny barrier islands              beach: no one charged for
stretching along the south shore.  One of        parking, and rules-- and East
them is the very urban Rockaway Beach            Coast beaches have many-- went
(immortalized by the Ramones) but the next       unenforced.
barrier island further out from the city,
is Fire Island, and it was the place we
would go to whenever we could from my
region of Long Island (an hour out from the
city, closer to the north shore than the
south).

The usual destination was Robert Moses                  POWER_BROKE
State Park, which, appropriately enough,
had it's own highway running to it,
crossing over a bridge that provided car
access to some massive parking fields.

Much more interesting, though, are the
small towns further out to the west that
you can reach by ferry.  These are towns
without cars where the main mode of             A few of these towns had
transit is little red wagons wheeled along      reputations as queer hang-outs,
on elevated wooden board walks.                 and in the way of these things,
                                                that's apparently what Fire
                                                Island meant to people in New
                                                York City: the place with the
                                                queers.






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