If you’ve heard of it, then you probably already hate it. You’ve groaned and eye-rolled about it. So has the Provincetown Business Guild: in an Instagram post, the Guild wrote, “If you want to invest in a place devoid of culture, diversity, history that celebrates gentrification — by all means invest in New Fire Island.”
The New Fire Island, according to its promotional materials, is here to solve a problem: gay vacation spots like Provincetown aren’t as fun as they used to be, partly because they’ve become too expensive. “So, my friends and I got to thinking,” says cofounder Nigel Smith, strolling a remote beach in a video on the project’s website, “why not build a new gay paradise, a New Fire Island?”
Smith invites the viewer to “join a community of gay men” to help create this paradise. “This time it’ll be in the sunny Mediterranean and for a new era,” he declares as four shirtless men with six-packs embrace one another in the background. The implication is that these are the kind of men who will fill New Fire Island.
How this “paradise” will come to be is unclear. At this point, New Fire Island feels more half-baked than legitimate. According to the website, you can “join a waitlist” to help “pick an island.” You can “make other key decisions” and, if you join the waitlist early enough, purchase a “four-bedroom free standing house with a pool” for $500,000. If it feels like a few steps have been skipped there, that’s only because “everyone knows that when gays get together to build a village, magic happens.”
Where the website is scant on details, it’s crammed with big promises: New Fire Island will feature a “favorable tax environment” along with a “feeling of insulation,” “dramatic topography,” “the best café, coolest bistro, sexiest gym, tastiest pizza, and most thumping nightclub.”
As ridiculously fantastical as New Fire Island sounds, the people behind it are completely serious. They’re a team of high-achieving professionals who skew toward the top of a certain kind of gay pecking order. Smith is an architect from Melbourne, Australia. The other two founders are Brett Fraser, a three-time Olympic swimmer turned real estate entrepreneur, and Aron D’Souza, the lawyer who helped the libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel sue Gawker out of existence. D’Souza also serves as president of something called the Enhanced Olympics, which champions the use of performance-enhancing drugs as an important contribution to “human flourishing.” If there’s a link between that project and New Fire Island, it’s a slick kind of shamelessness about optimizing output.
Nowhere is that shamelessness on clearer display than in New Fire Island’s claim that “gay men have been responsible for iconic neighborhood gentrification across the world” and that the time has come for them to “benefit from gentrification, not suffer through it.”
This is low-hanging fruit. Part of New Fire Island’s strategy for getting attention is to court controversy. It’s rage bait. And it seems to have struck a nerve here in Provincetown: when someone pulled up the promotional video at a recent dinner party, the whole room joined in on reading it to filth.
But the groaning about New Fire Island also seems to be a kind of flinching away from it. If you roll your eyes at something, you don’t really have to look at it. If you stop and look squarely at it, however, you might find that the thing that upsets you is your own reflection.
New Fire Island, in creating a warped caricature of vacation towns like Provincetown, becomes an unflattering funhouse mirror for these places. It shows us aspects of life here we’d rather not see. Moving to the New Fire Island, even if it doesn’t exist yet, is perhaps no more of a pipe dream than moving to Provincetown. And there are weeks in the summer when it can feel unbearable and impossible to be in Provincetown if you’re anyone but a white, built, masculine, and affluent gay guy, the kind of man for whom so many paradises already exist.
In her recent book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein writes that, for every person and everything in the world, there exists “the evil twin, the shadow self, the anti-self, the Hyde to our Jekyll.” This evil twin revels in the parts of ourselves we are ashamed of. He likes exclusivity. He welcomes gentrification. He’ll let you know it, too. The opposite of shame, after all, is that deadly sin we’re so keen on celebrating: pride.
The website for New Fire Island claims that the project is designed “using the proven Fire Island formula,” as if a community develops not through people and culture but through business strategies and algorithms. If the New Fire Island provides a doppelganger for Provincetown, it’s one that’s been run through an Instagram filter, airbrushed and scrubbed free of the imperfections of life here: the smell of fishing boats and fried food and mildewy old houses; the potholes on the road and cracks in the sidewalk; the sounds of bickering and late-night laughter and not-so-whispered gossip; the bar floors that have been sticky since 1798; that stubborn grain of sand in your shoe. All the inconveniences and fussiness. These are the things that make Provincetown not a paradise but a place.
