They were no longer to be mocked in public entertainments. Homosexuals were no longer to be called “fags,” “queers,” “pansies,” or (how archaic the word seemed even then) “fairies.” They were to be called “gays”-a term implying admission of the unrecognized and unconfessed envy throbbing in the heart of every anxious heterosexual. Whatever the remedy held to be most essential for overcoming this state of affairs, from revolution down to the simple recognition of the homosexual’s legitimacy as an alternative human possibility, the homosexual community was serving notice that it would no longer sit still for what had become its accustomed treatment from straight society. He was discriminated against in such areas as housing and employment he was held up to ridicule, treated as an object of loathing he was frequently the victim of violence at the hands of the police and other rough customers and possibly worst of all, he was made an outcast and pariah by his own family. This was that for an altogether private preference for sexual partners of his own gender, the homosexual had been hounded from pillar to post. Nevertheless, through all the variations there ran the same general assertion about the status of the homosexual in American society.
Like every movement inspired by the political culture of the 60’s, Gay Lib had its radicals, its moderates, and its fellow travelers, each group speaking at a separate decibel level and in a slightly different tone of voice and each addressing itself to a seemingly different set of demands, ranging from the radicals’ vision of nothing less than a complete rewriting of the sexual and social constitution to the fellow travelers’ plea for nothing more than a new spirit of toleration. What must have been astonishing some years later to the straights of Fire Island Pines was not so much that the homosexual community had given birth to a Gay Lib movement-by the 70’s movements were after all a commonplace everyone was professing to be roused to action about something-as the particular claims this movement was making about the condition of its constituency. Since included in the estimate that put the heterosexuals at forty percent were hordes of young children and a large number of husbands who remained in the city and commuted to the beach on weekends, the dominance of the homosexuals over the general atmosphere was even greater than the numbers imply. And its denizens, homosexual and heterosexual alike, were predominantly professionals and people in soft, marginal businesses-lawyers, advertising executives, psychotherapists, actors, editors, writers, publishers, gallery owners, designers, decorators, etc.
The snobbery of the place, which was considerable, had to do not with old notions of class but with the relative distribution of up-to-the-minute high taste in dress, decor, and opinion. Most of the houses there-they were high-grade beach shacks really-were informally well-appointed and by the standards of the day expensive.
Though we didn’t yet have a name for the phenomenon, the community was distinctly a “new-class” enclave: on the whole young, affluent, enlightened, and breezy in both its styles and attitudes. In the years that we all summered there, Fire Island Pines was, at a rough count, about sixty percent homosexual. These were the heterosexuals (in the current parlance of homosexual/heterosexual relations, the “straights”) who, along with me and my family, used to spend summers in a seaside resort community called Fire Island Pines. When the homosexual-rights movement first burst upon the scene a little more than a decade ago, a number of people I used to know must have been-as I was myself-more than a little astonished.