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"path": "/issues/2026-5-23/fire-island-time",
"publishedAt": "2026-05-23T00:00:00.000Z",
"site": "https://airmail.news",
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"textContent": "\n\n\n\n##### A new coffee-table book looks beyond the island’s reputation as a queer summer utopia, revealing it, for the first time, as a creative hub that influenced artists from Richard Avedon to Wolfgang Tillmans\n\nBy Jeanne Malle\n\nF _ire Island Art: 100 Years_ is “only masquerading as a coffee-table book,” its editor, John Dempsey, said at the launch party in late March. On the top floor of the Nine Orchard hotel, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a group of men, young and old, and some women sprinkled in, gathered to celebrate the publication. As Dempsey explained, the book is more than a collection of images. It holds the story of Fire Island, a history that hasn’t been fully told until now.\n\nBuilt up in the 1870s as a resort for nuclear families, Fire Island was destroyed by a hurricane in the 1930s, which quickly chased away its upper-class vacationers. In their absence, a queer utopia was born. Just a 90-minute drive from READ ON",
"title": "Fire Island Time"
}