Blair Fell's Delicious New Novel "Disco Witches Of Fire Island" Got Us Talking About EVERYTHING
Fire Island, Ptown, being a twink, being a daddy, the gay A-list, the AIDS era, the Trump 2.0 era, Jerry Herman, relationships, sex, drugs, sobriety...what DIDN'T we talk about?
Happy Monday, Caftaners! How was your weekend? The highlight of mine was sitting in Ft. Green Park Saturday on a lovely afternoon chatting with my friend Ravi. I was supposed to go out later that night but ended up taking a friend who’s experiencing extreme anxiety and insomnia to the ER, so I didn’t get to bed until 1:30am. Oh well…life happens!
I want to highlight a cool Substack I just learned about from my queer podcaster friend Dennis Hensley. It’s called Brent and Michael Are Going Places, created by two older gay men who live nomadically. A lot of the writing is about whether or not, and how, to leave the U.S. in the Trump 2.0 era. It’s very well done. I’m just getting familiar with their posts myself, but I wanted to share it with you as well.
I want to get right on to the main event. The NYC writer/ASL interpreter Blair Fell (that’s his Instagram) and I have been friends since the 1990s, when we would sit at the round back table together with our late-90s-era laptops (no Wifi!) at the late, great Chelsea queer cafe Big Cup…
…and work together, along with our fellow writer friends James Hannaham and Cathay Che. (If we needed to be in touch with people, we’d tell them to call us on the Big Cup pay phone!) We called it our own little queer Chelsea Algonquin table à la H.L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, etc. (Yes, we were pretentious little queens…at least I was!)
In the same decade, Blair wrote a serialized gay soap opera that would perform live weekly at the (also late, great!) East Village gay hole in the wall Crowbar. It was called “Burning Habits,” in part because it was about nuns (LOL), and it introduced me early on to Blair’s comic and narrative genius. Which is on FULL DISPLAY in his new novel Disco Witches of Fire Island, which I can say with confidence (and not a trace of fakery just because he’s a friend) you should make your summer read, if you read nothing else.
Because it’s delightful! It’s funny and touching and fast-paced and suspenseful and everything else. Based on Blair’s own experience one youthful summer being a bartender on Fire Island, it’s about a young man, Joe, who goes out there seeking work early in the season in 1989, just after the loss from AIDS of his first great love, and everything that happens to him. But— oh! It has witches! Kind of like if Dancer from the Dance or Faggots met Bewitched or The Wizard of Oz. It has ALL the magic, both black and white. It also has bitchy (even downright villainous) gay class politics, tons of sex and love and friendship and disco and drugs and sobriety and loss and hope. And it builds to a thrilling, multisite climax! So please please buy it. And if you love it, check out Blair’s last novel, The Sign From Home…
…a very sweet story that draws heavily from his years of experience as an ASL interpreter, which has been his longtime bread-and-butter job amid all his great writing projects, which includes having worked on the U.S. version of the Queer As Folk TV show.
Disco Witches of Fire Island is packed with so many ideas about gay life and gay intergenerationality that it sparked for us an amazing two-hour conversation. Was I surprised it was so good? No. Blair is very smart and funny with a head bursting with ideas and a big heart. And though I don’t often do a Caftan convo with a decades-long friend, it’s still nice!
So get into it and enjoy. I love that we talk so much about different subgroups of gays in this interview. That was fun. Again, I loved this book. I haven’t had such a fun trip of a read since I read my friend Mike Albo’s Another Dimension of Us, which is technically young adult but so trippy-twisty and so queer that you should read it anyway!
Have a good week, Caftaners. Please keep resisting! (The site 50501 is asking us to hold the date of June 14…intriguing!) And (here she goes again, that shameless tin-cup-shaker!) PLEASE consider becoming a paying subscriber to Caftan if you’re enjoying it.
If you already are a paid subscriber, OH MY GOD THANK YOU YOU’RE THE BEST! With every paid subscription, I inch closer and closer to being able to make Caftan my main thing—that’s my dream.
Now here’s Blair.
Blair, it's so good to talk to you. Congrats on Disco Witches of Fire Island. I tore through it—it is a delight and the perfect sparkling yet touching read for the beaches of Fire Island or anywhere, really.
Thanks. You see its roots in that thing I wrote for you years ago, right?
Wait, what? It was evoking some long-ago vague memory of something you wrote, yes. About the hot young Pines ferry worker who is secretly gay. I kept wondering where that was from.
When you were an editor at HX in 1995-6, you asked me to come up with a serialized novel, so I wrote this thing called The Fires of Hieronymous Dunne, which was based on my own summer on Fire Island working as a bartender and living in the attic of three older gay men who would cook ketamine on the stove and regale me with stories of their seventies disco youth. They'd have disco playing 24-7 and Frank, the alpha queen of the house, was this older guy who would create these gigantic hats with lights and feathers on them and then go out at four in the morning to dance.
Oh yes, I am remembering that delightful serial you wrote for me briefly. So how did the rest of the idea for Disco Witches evolve?
When I stopped writing for TV and moved back to New York, I was trying to figure out what kind of writer I'd be. I didn't want to write plays or TV anymore because I don't like working with people in the creative process. The piece isn't done until there's actors, directors and designers. But I had this idea for a play that I realized could be a novel, but I didn't know how to write novels. So I got into the MFA program at City College and took one class a semester while writing my last novel, The Sign for Home. Three quarters of the way through, I thought, "Blair, you shouldn't be writing this way—it's not your style."
So I thought about that thing I wrote for you. But I also wanted to capture that moment I had coming of age as a Fire Island bartender at a time where you might fall in love with someone who was going to die. Which is what happened to me for my first great love, Brian.
Oh, yes, the guy you mention in the acknowledgments of the book.
Yeah. Also, discovering ACT UP at that time was a huge saving grace for me, because with Brian, who dumped me and then died, I felt very helpless—in those years when there was no drug that would prolong anyone's life. I saw them marching in my first Gay Pride parade. I couldn't believe people were being vocal about AIDS and fighting the government, so I joined them right then and there. And as we were marching, I saw Brian sitting on a mailbox in Sheridan Square and I thought, "Good, I want him to see that I'm doing something to fight the virus." I circled back to find him, and he was gone, and that was the last time I ever saw him. The guy who introduced me to him called to tell me he'd died. I went to Central Park and cried my eyes out.
A while after that, I was unemployed and decided to move to Fire Island, where I'd never been. So I took a suitcase and went out there in April and got a job as a bartender at this shabby little bar called Cruise Quarters, which was where Sip 'n' Twirl is now. And I met these three older gay men who lived on Pickety Ruff and cleaned houses for a living, just like in the book, and I moved in with them. Of the three of them, one is still alive. He must be close to 80.
How did you work out the plot? Especially the thrilling climax that cuts between two different settings on the island?
I'm not a plotter. I go by the seats of my pants. I'll write an outline and create characters and do the first scene, and then the outline is out the window and the characters take me on the journey. I always write two books' length and then have to cut later. But about a third of the way through or sooner, I'll know what the ending is and then aim toward that.
In this book, I was interested in the class differences of the gay resort. If you're an island worker, the rich locals may fuck you but they don't want to date you. The first draft of the novel actually had a lot more magic in it and a very different climax.
A big inspiration for the book was Stephen Gendin [the HIV/AIDS activist and Poz magazine cofounder who died in 2000 of AIDS complications at age 34].
You knew him, right?
No, it's so funny, he was just a few years ahead of me in college, from which we had so many mutual friends, and then when I started working at Poz in 2001, he'd died only the year before. So I feel like he's been this ghost in my life who I actually never knew.
He was the first person who introduced me to hard drugs and The Black Party. He confided in me that he wanted to start a religion based on his experiences on the dance floor, and that was a big motivator for this book—to create this magical, spiritual approach to what happens on the dance floor.
I loved one of the dance floor scenes—so magical and moving yet also funny and a bit campy.
Which is exactly what we are.
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