Proposal for a History of the Fire Island Pines

OutHistory.org, the educational, not-for-profit lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer history website, is now seeking a scholar to research and write a documented, illustrated history of the Fire Island Pines, to be published on the site.

Founded and co-directed by noted gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz in 2007, OutHistory.org is now being produced under the co-direction of John D'Emilio at the University of Illinois, in Chicago.

OutHistory.org is pioneering a unique way of doing history, including features by named scholars as well as content produced anonymously by interested members of the public.

It also includes featured articles on a variety of topics in LGBTQ history, a growing archive of primary documents and source materials. The receives almost 10,000 unique views every month, with over 30,000 page views.

OutHistory.org has sponsored a number of exhibits on the histories of specific LGBTQ communities, including Polk Street in San Francisco, Bronzeville in Chicago, and Philadelphia, as well as the post-Stonewall queer histories of communities in locales as varied as Atlanta, GA, Bloomington, IN, Iowa City, Corvallis, OR, and Seattle, WA.

The proposed article on the large and vibrant gay communities of the Fire Island Pines will fill an important gap in knowledge, both for OutHistory.org and for queer historiography more generally. Cherry Grove and Provincetown are each subjects of scholarly studies, but there is little published research on the Pines.

One researcher collecting materials on the history of the Pines is Robert Bonanno, who has set up a FaceBook page on the Pines and its past. Bonanno is interested in collaborating with with historians in disseminating his findings, and his online archive will be a major resource for any scholars who take on this project for OutHistory.

Projected Outcomes

This article is intended to be comprehensive, and will cover at the very least the following topics:

• the history of police surveillance of homosexual men in the Pines

• the development of the Pines as an identifiable gay community

• changing relations between queer and nonqueer Pines residents

• gender, class, and race as dynamics in the Pines community

• the impact of AIDS on the Pines

• relations between summer home owners and year-round owners

• how major real estate and business development, and tourism have impacted the Pines

• changing cultural relations between Cherry Grove and the Pines

The research and writing of the article will be supervised by historian Jonathan Ned Katz, Co-Director of OutHistory.org.

To jumpstart this research OutHistory.org has already initiated a Bibliography and a Timeline on the History of the Fire Island Pines at:

Bibliography: History of the Fire Island Pines

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