“I texted my friend saying, ‘Isn’t Fire Island going to look like this? And instead of four hours at the beach, it’s going to be a week of my life.’ I went anyway and I’m so glad I did.”īut then there was his first underwear party, a weekly party – perfectly recreated in the film – where a crowd of mostly gay men strip down to their briefs for a night of dancing at a nightclub. “I was bullied very publicly for keeping my shirt on a number of times,” he recalls. He was nervous about making the first trip after spending a day at the gay-friendly section of Will Rogers State Beach – nicknamed Ginger Rogers – in Santa Monica. Scully first visited Fire Island just before they shot the film. It takes place at the titular Getaway, a vacation spot outside of New York City that has been a haven for the LGBTQ community since the 1920s. The all-queer cast also includes Matt Rogers, Margaret Cho, Conrad Ricamora, Tomás Matos, Torian Miller, Nick Adams and Zane Phillips.
“Remember when you thought you just had to find a really patient woman and marry her and just do your best to make it work?”įire Island is an LGBTQ version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. “I had these out of body moments where I think, remember, when you thought you had to pretend you had to be straight for the rest of your life?” Scully tells me. Press work for Fire Island was quite an emotional experience for James Scully, who plays Bowen Yang’s love interest in director Andrew Ahn’s new queer rom-com, written by and starring Joel Kim Booster.