Thirty minutes into Fire Island, Joel Kim Booster’s character Noah playfully stresses to his best friend Howie (Bowen Yang) that getting his “pink little hole” penetrated is of extreme importance during their yearly respite to the gay mecca. Luke (Matt Rogers) and Keegan (Tomás Matos) reprimand Will (Conrad Ricamora) less than 10 minutes later for his lack of knowledge on Academy Award winner Marisa Tomei and her classic courtroom testimony as automobile expert Mona Lisa Vito in 1992’s My Cousin Vinny, while the other characters observe the debacle in (gay) shock. “That’s actually the problem with Hollywood,” Rogers’ character heatedly tells him, “it’s people who like you who forget about Marisa Tomei but they remember Alicia Vikander. Flop!” The Hulu comedy, directed by Andrew Ahn and written by Booster, is saturated with more moments like this that capture the unequivocal joy that comes with being a member of the “rainbow mafia”-instead of the constant strife that’s historically been depicted in mainstream media. “I grew up in what I call the height of The Laramie Project era of gay media. I love The Laramie Project, so no shade, but when I was a teenager, everything I was consuming from major studios was about tragedy,” Booster tells me over Zoom in his first official junket for Fire Island. “It was about death and homophobia and the trauma of coming out, which resonated with me at the time as a person who was coming out and experiencing a lot of that stuff myself. But now, in my 30s, I’ve had the privilege of living in Chicago, New York and now LA, where life has been fairly happy-especially the more gay people I met. I really wanted to show people that there is joy in the experience of being gay.”
Also starring Margaret Cho, James
