Fire Island is a narrow barrier island off the south shore of Long Island, New York — and for queer Americans, it has always been something more than a destination. Since the mid-twentieth century, Fire Island Pines and Cherry Grove have served as sanctuaries: places where queer people could live openly, love freely, and build community on their own terms, long before the rest of the world was ready to let them.

Cherry Grove holds the distinction of being one of the oldest and most enduring queer communities in the United States. It was home to artists, writers, and activists who shaped LGBTQIA+ culture at a time when visibility elsewhere came at great personal cost. The Pines, just a short stretch of beach away, developed its own identity — glamorous, creative, fiercely communal — and together the two communities became inseparable from the story of queer American life.

That history lives in the architecture, the shoreline, the people who return year after year, and the ones who came before them. Grove & Pines Film Festival exists in conversation with all of it.