“Fire Island is a very special place, especially for queer people,” Jimi Urquiaga, a.k.a. Missleidy Rodriguez, told me. While that might seem like a statement of the obvious, Urquiaga has experienced the island from an atypical vantage point: for the past two summers, they’ve been packing up their life in New York City as a costume designer, producer, creative director and drag queen to come work at the Pines’ plant shop, CAMP. Urquiaga called me on their break, sitting behind a desk at the plant shop, with a view overlooking the bay. “So that’s the fantasy,” they said with a laugh after describing their surroundings.
For the most part, though, Fire Island has been a fantasy for the whitest, wealthiest, and fittest members of the LGBTQ+ community. And in looking back through archival photos, Urquiaga said they’ve rarely spotted people of color, with the exception of legendary DJ Lina Bradford. While an exclusionary environment on Fire Island certainly exists, Urquiaga estimates that 95% of their coworkers are people of color (per their own estimate). And after a particularly special season working on the island, which they described as “adult summer camp,” they wanted to attempt to correct that archival erasure. The resulting photo essay, “The Pines Summer of ‘23,” exists as a time capsule of a magical summer shared with their coworkers-turned-second family.
