These are not sanitized queers or cute teens designed to make suburban moms comfortable: they’re honest, raw, adult characters with messy and realistic lives. Characters drink a lot, have a lot of casual sex, and are consistently sloppy, rowdy and delightfully debaucherous. Part of the joy of Fire Island comes from its willingness to embrace the glory of queer messiness. Fire Island is not interested in holding straight people’s hands it is unapologetically queer, and it doesn’t waste time trying to explain or soften itself for viewers. While sweeter stories like Heartstopper or Love, Simon can be truly fantastic, they also tend to create queer images in a way that is very palatable and easily assimilable to heteronormative values and audiences. What makes Fire Island so different from the bulk of queer stories in recent mainstream cinema is that it was clearly written with a queer audience in mind, and it doesn’t make any concessions for heteronormative viewers. A lot of the film’s scenes are focused on the contrast between Howie’s family – who are less wealthy and more racially diverse, and who represent a broad range of different body types – and the much more homogeneous, muscular rich gays. Quirky romantic Howey (played brilliantly by rising star Bowen Yang) meets handsome doctor Charlie (James Scully), and Howey’s chosen family ends up entangled with a group of extremely wealthy, mostly-white, muscular, conventionally attractive men. However, Erin ends up losing all of her money because of a bad investment in Quibi (a nod to the film’s history as a canceled Quibi series), and the family discovers that this will be their last year on Fire Island. The only reason they can afford to vacation on the very expensive Fire Island is because their lesbian mother figure Erin (Margaret Cho) once won a lawsuit after a mishap at a restaurant, allowing her to buy a house there. The men are mostly working-class, and they are all far from financially affluent. The film follows the story of a chosen family of gay men (and one lesbian) who spends one week every year vacationing on Fire Island. The film is an honest, messy, mature, and undeniably funny homage to the good, the bad, and the ugly of contemporary gay life. Andrew Ahn’s Fire Island is the perfect antidote for anyone who is tired of the endless sea of cutesy feel-good coming out stories, agonizingly slow period dramas, and depressing trauma porn that has recently characterized much of queer cinema.