“I want the romance bullshit, I like the rom-com stuff,” says the perpetually unlucky-in-love Howie, played by Bowen Yang, as his best friend Noah (Joel Kim Booster) tries to convince him to spend his week on Fire Island sleeping with the many attractive men on the famous gay haven.

Fire Island is a tiny sliver of coast off the southern shore of New York, in which a small part – the Fire Island Pines – is referred to as America’s first gay and lesbian town, and has served since the 1920s as a refuge for the queer community.

Conrad Ricamora and Joel Kim Booster in the film Fire Island, an unapologetic, modern day romantic comedy.Credit:Jeong Park/Searchlight Pictures

It’s also the setting of a new film of the same name, written by actor and comedian Booster.

“For generations it’s been an enclave and a safe haven for queer people to go to and I think release the baggage of having to navigate a heterosexual world day after day, go to a place where there are no cars, there’s no phone service and there’s no straight people,” Booster explains.

He says that while there are queer enclaves all around the world, there’s a particular magic to Fire Island that he wanted to capture in writing.

It makes sense why a deliberately queer rom-com would take place there. Fire Island gives us the rom-com stuff, taking the bare-bones structure of the Jane Austen classic Pride and Prejudice, and reimagining it for a modern audience, shifting it from the stately manors of Austen-era countryside to the hyper-queer shores of Fire Island.

“The genesis of the whole movie is basically me reading Pride and Prejudice on Fire Island and sort of like realising slowly, oh my God, like what Jane Austen is writing about in terms of how people communicate across class lines was so relevant to what we were experiencing on the island that week,” Booster says.

Fire Island captures the week of the annual trip of a close group of friends, a diverse cast of comedic figures (including veteran comedian Margaret Cho as a delightful lesbian den-mother figure), and their interactions with the complicated gay microcosm of society that exists on the island. While the film is primarily comedy oriented, full of hijinks and gorgeous choreographed karaoke performances, and some extremely funny dialogue, it also touches on issues within the gay community such as racism, class, wealth, and toxic body image.

“That’s something that’s happened to me twice on the island, entering a party and having some white gay guy tell me I was at the wrong house,” Booster admits, after asked about his inspiration for one of the film’s recurring jokes.

Matt Rogers, Bowen Yang and Tomas Matos in a scene from the movie.Credit:Jeong Park/Searchlight Pictures

“What drew me to the movie was that Joel had really perfectly conceived this reimagining of a story that people love, which is Pride and Prejudice,” says actor Bowen Yang, who plays Howie, and is a current Saturday Night Live cast member, “and mapped it on to this place and this location and this sense of chosen family that was very, very important to me.”

While unafraid to pull apart the flaws of the queer community, there’s a real sense of celebration and joy about the concept of queer romance in the film, that feels specifically queer and recognisable.

“That was paramount for me while I was writing the movie, because so much of the media that is targeted at our community is about our trauma. And those are all valid stories to be told, I just think that there’s kind of an imbalance. And I really wanted to write a movie that celebrated not only chosen family, but queer joy.”

That feeling comes through – the film is bright and funny and enjoyable for any audience, but it feels like there’s no move to make it more “palatable” to the straight audience, with depictions of what feels like specifically queer experiences and ideas. It made me wonder if a rom-com could be specifically queer, and if so, how to do that?

“I think for me it’s about acknowledging that we operate sort of instinctually and intrinsically on a different level than a lot of heterosexual people do,” answers Booster. “I didn’t want to just make When Harry Met Sally, but replace the women with men, you know, because we date differently, we interact differently. There are different rules for us. I think I wanted to craft a story that like felt like it was specifically built from the ground up around the queerness of our dating experiences and not just trying to map on, you know, like this is how straight people fall in love in movies, so let’s just replace the genders and it’ll all be the same, you know?”

Fire Island is streaming on Disney+ under the Star banner from June 17. It airs as part of the Sydney Film Festival on Friday, June 10 and will be opening the Pride on Screen film festival at Melbourne’s Cinema Nova on the same day.

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