Given the strict and vexing hierarchies of Fire Island, Kim Booster’s choice of template is an apt one. Directed by Andrew Ahn and written by Joel Kim Booster, who also stars, Fire Island is a romantic comedy of manners based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Which is just what the new Hulu film Fire Island (June 3) offers to both Fire Island veteran and virgin. It’s a lot easier to return there in virtual form, confronting an idea of the place from a digital distance rather than experiencing the real, vodka-soaked thing. I had tried to make Fire Island work for me, but I’d failed, time and time again. At the end of my time there, I got on the ferry back to Long Island and decided I’d finally had enough. Such is the peril of going to a place like that-a gay retreat that promises the comforts and excitements of familiar company, but also holds the potential for dire jags of self-doubt. My last trip to Fire Island was in 2019, a buggy, fraught week during which I felt woefully alienated from my housemates (by my own doing, not theirs) and altogether lonely and old and gross and tired.
