(Or some mixture of those elements: It was while visiting the Pines last month that Samson went topless at the beach for the first time in her life.) On the bayside, German lawyer and curator Pati Hertling likes to windsurf alongside the choppy wake from the incoming ferries. Strolling along the island’s winding, car-less boardwalks under the towering bamboo and clusters of Japanese black pines, one might bump into JD Samson, the androgynous artist and DJ from the legendary electro-punk band Le Tigre, in a tank top and short men’s swim trunks.
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Although Fire Island’s gay communities (namely the Pines, a modernist real-estate paradise, and Cherry Grove, its SNL-skewered quirkier sister neighborhood about a half mile down the beach) have obtained near-mythological status in popular culture as playpens for muscled-up gay men, there is a less discussed yet no less thriving scene of LGBTQIA women drawn to the area’s intoxicating mix of rest and relaxation, remoteness and revelry. It’s okay to be glamorous there and outrageous and everything like that.” “I don’t want to be at a ‘straight’ place,” she said. It’s a gay haven for hedonism, artistic expression, and female autonomy that feels protected from an increasingly uncertain world.
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For K8 Hardy, a conceptual artist known in the art and style worlds for her cerebral pastiche of feminist theory and kaleidoscopic fashion sense ( The New York Times once described her yellow-hued hair as “lending her some resemblance to a fertilized egg”), Fire Island-that narrow 32-mile sliver of sand and sun off the southern coast of Long Island-is much more than a mere summer getaway.