Early in the film, Noah (Joel Kim Booster) drops his phone in his friend Erin’s (Margaret Cho) pool, which means a week without Grindr during what may be the last of he and his chosen family’s annual visits to the gay destination. But Noah’s more focused on finding hookups for his bestie Howie (“Saturday Night Live” breakout Bowen Yang) anyway, despite Howie’s protests that the kind of intimacy he’s looking for is less physical than emotional.
“Fire Island,” now streaming on Hulu, is a love story made by hopeless romantics. Booster, who also wrote the movie, grew up partially home-schooled in the Chicago suburbs “worshiping at the altar of Nora Ephron.” He watched the 1995 “Pride & Prejudice” miniseries starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth every year with his adoptive mother, and is a fan of the 2005 film adaptation with Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen (also a favorite of director Andrew Ahn). Loving rom-coms as a boy gave Booster “really outsized expectations for what love would look like,” he told The Washington Post. “That’s probably why I was single until I was 33.”
In the film (as in real life), Fire Island can be a gay utopia — or a walled-off fortress. Noah, Howie and their friends (Matt Rogers, Tomás Matos and Torian Miller) are at its outskirts, marked as Others in a social hierarchy that once proudly proclaimed “No fats, no femmes, no Asians.” “Fire Island” may well be the first mainstream movie to explore anti-Asian bias within gay circles — as well as its inverse, the fetishizing “rice queens.” So prevalent is the sexual…
