Fire Island Artist Residency

 MEETING ESTHER: A HISTORY OF LESBIAN PRESENCE IN CHERRY GROVE

a commissioned essay for FIAR’s Fire Island Histories Project

by Ksenia M. Soboleva, Ph.D

I always tell my students that knowledge should never negate emotion. In academia, there is a tendency to believe that thinking and feeling are mutually exclusive acts, that one cannot think with feelings. Yet for many queer scholars, emotion is critical in their pursuit of knowledge; I count myself among them. After all, our field of scholarship is rooted in desire. When Esther Newton decided to write a cultural history of Fire Island and Cherry Grove in 1986, it was because she had fallen in love with the place and its inhabitants. She wanted to understand queer people’s deep attachment to Fire Island, having just discovered it herself: that thin strip of land, almost like a brushstroke, that has functioned as a secret safe haven for the LGBTQ+ community since the 1930s. At a time when auto-theory did not yet exist as a genre, Esther interwove historical research with a personal narrative that spoke to the intimate process of truly immersing oneself in one’s subject of study. Her 1993 publication, Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town, became the most in-depth account of Fire Island’s queer history, and remains so to this day.

Sara Ahmed once wrote that “spaces are like a second skin that unfolds in the folds of the body.”[1] As a lesbian whose childhood was marked by violence, as many queer childhoods are, the search for a safe space has always held much urgency for me. Yet somehow, largely due to a combination of financial constraints and an ambivalence towards day trips that involve three trains and a ferry each way—Fire Island had remained a mystery during my nine years in New York. When the Fire Island Artist Residency asked whether I’d be interested in writing about the lesbian history of Cherry Grove, I had to admit that I had never been. I had heard many stories, of course, and still remember a dyke in her sixties disclosing to me that her first time having lesbian sex was on the beach in Cherry Grove. “Sand everywhere,” she added.

I was born in Russia, where, as Virginia Woolf once wrote, “the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences are often left unfinished out of doubt as to how best end them.” My sense of displacement has been one of the more constant threads throughout my life, something shared by queers across the globe. Many fantasies revolve around imagining ourselves in different landscapes; elsewhere utopias still to be discovered by our touch. I have dedicated my career to studying lesbian identity and the ways in which it has shifted over time; what it has meant to different people across class, race, and place; how it has offered an escape for some, while proving to be a constraint for others. I have been invested in both its failure and its success to function as a meaningful index of experience, at the same time challenging the structures that create such dichotomies.

Rather than rushing to Fire Island, I offered to begin this writing project from a place of imagination, a place where emotion and knowledge meet. I wanted to highlight my admiration for Esther’s work, and the intergenerational kinship that would smoothly transition into a friendship throughout the duration of this project. If I was able to write a dissertation on lesbian identity in 2021, it’s because Esther was courageous enough to write a dissertation on drag culture in the late 1960s. While her book Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (1972) received little attention or recognition at the time, it opened the field of anthropology up to queer horizons, and was one of the foundational texts for early Gay and Lesbian Studies. Too often these days, however, the debts owed to prior generations are discounted in favor of new generations wanting to reinvent the wheel. As Heather Love has recently articulated in Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (2021), queer theory emerged with a bad habit of erasing its scholarly roots, which lay primarily in deviancy studies. The first faculty member at Purchase College to come out professionally in 1974 (after receiving tenure in 1973), Esther helped pioneer what we know as queer scholarship today.

When Esther rolled up in her grey minivan to pick me up from my hotel in Ann Arbor, where I had traveled for our first meeting, I instantly knew that this was the beginning of friendship. Behind the wheel sat the charming butch scholar I had imagined, and she felt utterly familiar. Though we were born in different years (1940 vs 1991), different places (New York vs Moscow), and to different parents (Jewish-American vs Russian-Tatar), Esther and I have both pursued academia and lesbian identity as two sides of the same coin. We have used scholarship to better make sense of our sexuality, and we have let our sexuality inform our scholarship. As we sat down in Esther’s backyard, her dog children running around us, the questions I had prepared went out of the window. It turned out that we did not need a script.

Esther first came to the Grove in the 1960s, through an invitation by the art critic John Richardson, a friend of her dissertation advisor Julian Pitt Rivers. Though she doesn’t recall encountering any lesbians on that first visit, she remembers the atmosphere to have been genial and welcoming. It’s the memory of this atmosphere that brought her back in 1986, after she and her then partner Amber Hollibaugh (who would inherit a house in the Grove some years later, which she owns to this day) had been harassed during their getaway in the Catskills. Struggling to conform to the standards of femininity, Esther had navigated the looming threat of violence her entire life. While she “came out” into the lesbian bar scene in 1959 (at the age of 18), she actively resisted her desire for women, and tried to be a “heterosexual” well into her twenties. Internalized homophobia played some part in this, but most of all, Esther felt an overwhelming fear that her sexual identity could (and did) negatively impact her academic career. In her journey through the pearls and perils of lesbianism (which she beautifully describes in her 2018 memoir, My Butch Career), Esther discovered that her sense of self was deeply rooted in the intersection between her butch identity and her academic career.

It was during that visit with Hollibaugh in 1986 that Esther fell in love with the Grove, and decided to make it the subject of serious anthropological study. Not only was this an opportunity to learn more about a place she had become greatly attached to, it was also a way of giving back; documenting the history of a community that had been intentionally left out of history. After the 1986 visit, Esther would return to the Grove for five consecutive summers, immersing herself in its landscape and interviewing long term residents, also known as “old timers.” At the heart of Esther’s research was Kay Guinness, an iconic figure in Cherry Grove’s history whose “powers of seduction were legendary.”[2] Kay was part of the first wave of lesbian presence in Cherry Grove: wealthy ladies who started coming out to the island in the 1930s to escape their closeted lives in the city. After extensive hours spent together, Esther developed romantic feelings for Kay, eighty-three years old at the time of their meeting. Intergenerational kinship, then, informed Esther’s project as much as it informs mine. Though their relationship remained platonic, Esther confesses that her love for Kay structured how she thought about the book. “When I kiss her, I feel like I’m kissing 1903,” she writes.[3]

The history of lesbian presence in Cherry Grove is marked by otherness. Esther confirms that even in the queer beach town, lesbians were overshadowed by the predominance of gay men. As she writes in her book: “In every era in the Grove’s gay history, gay “girls” have been drawn to the resort despite the fact that men have always predominated because of their greater economic and social power.”[4] Thanks to their status in society, the ladies that constituted the first wave of lesbian presence, such as Kay, could cohabitate with gay men without too many qualms. In the 1960s, however, a second wave of lesbian presence followed. With more opportunities having opened up for women after WWII, working class lesbians of more modest means started coming out to the island, as they could now afford to rent something. Contrary to the earlier “ladies,” these “dykes” (a pejorative slur they would later reclaim) were strongly committed to butch/femme identities. With the advent of the women’s movement, lesbians began exploring how their sexual identity related to, but also differed from, feminism. While many Grovers did not feel too comfortable with the Gay Liberation Movement’s insistence on being “openly out,” the 1970s allowed for lesbian identity to become more tangible, less anonymous, and less secretive. The sex wars of the 1980s pushed this exploration even further, as heated debates arose around porn, s/m, and butch/femme culture. The more lesbians started to assert their presence, the more resistance their presence faced. The younger lesbian generations that came to the Grove had to navigate a space that was safe, but not always friendly. In the 1980s, as Esther recalls, some landlords wouldn’t rent to lesbians because they considered them “too violent,” a common “angry dyke” trope that would culminate in the 1990s. For most lesbians, however, these were minor inconveniences that were not reason enough not to frequent the Grove. “Even if there wasn’t a single lesbian, I still wanted to be there,” Esther tells me, “because I knew we wouldn’t be harassed.” Yet not everyone had the privilege of this security. For people of color, Cherry Grove was a place of overwhelming white privilege – even if queer. They visited the Grove as day trippers, but never in groups so as not to make the residents feel threatened. Esther writes: “Above all, perhaps, my love for Cherry Grove was tempered when I judged it against the ideals of inclusiveness, tolerance, and social justice which inform my post-1960s vision of what America should be. Cherry Grove was too white, too affluent, too East Coast to represent a microcosm of twentieth-century gay and lesbian life.”[5]

Luckily, things do have changed since the point where Esther’s book leaves off. Amidst the massive losses of the AIDS crisis, gay men and lesbians joined forces like never before in gestures of activism and caretaking. Through mourning and militancy, a new sense of community emerged from a time of great adversity. Over the past two decades, Fire Island has drawn a more diverse crowd – despite still being an expensive place to vacation. While lesbians are by no means a dominant presence, Cherry Grove reflects the ways in which the gender spectrum itself has expanded. This includes the impressive cohort of FIAR’s residents, who I had the pleasure of meeting when I ventured out to Cherry Grove, for the very first time, upon FIAR’s kind invitation. I barely made it off the ferry before feeling that I had arrived in paradise, and being reminded quite how palpable the physical removal of heteronormativity can be (though it is increasingly creeping into the Grove, but that’s a topic for another essay). Walking along the beach, I ran into various friends from my queer community in New York; just enough to have a sense of community, without feeling like the city has been transplanted to the Grove. When Esther and I gave a talk at the historic Cherry Grove community theater, I was sincerely moved by the intergenerational crowd that packed the audience. As Esther and I began our conversation, reminiscing on her memories of Cherry Grove then and now, it felt as if we had never stopped talking since FIAR first asked me to participate in this project, a year prior. And when I see the photographs that my brilliant friend, the photographer Allison Michael Orenstein, took of me and Esther for her “Women of the Grove: A Lesbian Portrait” series, I am astonished that we look almost related. Then again, I guess in many ways we are. A different kind of bloodline.  

Looking back now at a time when Cherry Grove was only something I imagined, it seems unimaginable, to ever not have known it. To not have known the soothing sounds of the waves crashing into sand as days bleed into nights; not have immersed my naked body in those waters without worrying who might be watching; not have walked the wooden boardwalks in complete darkness and the deep comfort of my lover’s hand in mine, hearing the hushed hums of others in the distance. And as I am finishing this essay back in the sweltering heat of New York City, I wonder how it is possible for a small speck of land to have stolen my cold Russian heart quite so quickly. But, of course, I already know the answer.

[1] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Other (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 9.

[2] Esther Newton, Cherry Grove, Fire Island: sixty years in America’s first gay and lesbian town (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014; originally Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 4.

[3] Ibid, 7.

[4] Ibid, 203.

[5] Ibid, 9.

Banner photo at top of page: Ksenia M. Soboleva and Esther Newton in Cherry Grove, 2022 by Allison Michael Orenstein, from the artist’s on-going photo series “Women of the Grove: A Lesbian Portrait.”

ABOUT KSENIA M. SOBOLEVA, Ph.D.

Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva is a New York based writer and art historian specializing in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a dissertation titled "Fragments: Art, AIDS, and Lesbian Identity in the United States." Her writings have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Artforum, and Hyperallergic among many other publications. She is in the process of co-editing (with Svetlana Kitto) the first monograph on the 1990s lesbian gallery and project space TRIAL BALLOON. Soboleva was the 2020-2021 Vilcek Curatorial Fellow at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and LGBTQ+ History at the New York Historical Society.

ABOUT THE FIRE ISLAND HISTORIES PROJECT

In 2021 the Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR) launched the Fire Island Histories Project, an on-going series of commissions by artists, historians, scholars and writers, whose mission is to mine the many complex histories of the place, peoples and communities who have populated Fire Island, from the original stewards of the land to the present day. The first commissions include an indigenous histories project with artist Jeremy Dennis, a lesbian histories project with Esther Newton and Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva in 2022, and forthcoming histories of the Fire Island Blackout Weekend and of trans presence in Fire Island hamlets.