Thank You for the Music: Queer Elders’ Memories of Fire Island

Today, Scotland’s queer scene tends to be a pop-up affair, with the likes of Femmergy and Hot Mess making waves across the central belt, but there was once a gay nightclub slap bang in the middle of Edinburgh’s Princes Street. Opening its doors to the public while homosexuality was still illegal in Scotland, Fire Island saw queer clubbing through the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality and the height of the AIDS pandemic, a second home to many members of the community. While it occupied one of the most visible spaces on Princes Street – the building now owned by Waterstones, with coveted views of the castle – clubbers entered via an anonymous plywood door adjacent to a ‘Watches of Switzerland’ sign. Discreet as hell. With the surge of far-right political views and a global crackdown on human rights, it’s all the more pressing to preserve the memories of those who partied, built communities and advocated for LGBTQ+ wellbeing under Fire Island’s leaky roof. With this in mind, we speak to our queer elders who once found refuge in Scotland’s beloved first regular gay nightclub.

Two years after Fire Island opened its doors, the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1980 came into force, legalising private, consensual acts between men over the age of 21. Despite the slight advance in gay rights, homophobia, of course, remained rife, with police raids of queer spaces a constant threat to the community. Glasgow resident Criz McCormick travelled through to Edinburgh to party at Fire Island, noting that the challenge was to secure an overnight hook-up – otherwise, you’d be waiting at Waverley station for the first train home. “Police were still doing their best to make being gay as unpalatable as they possibly could,” McCormick recalls, adding that the 21 license legitimised raids as police sought out to ID young clubbers. “You could easily lose your job and be thrown out of your home if you happened to be caught in one of the raids,” he says. It was common practice for men to adopt a “completely separate identity” inside Fire Island, styling their outfits and hair differently for the night before changing back into a straight-presenting garb and stepping out onto Princes Street.

From overnight hookups to lifelong love, Bob Orr met his husband on Fire Island’s dance floor. Along with the indomitable Sigrid Nielsen, Orr co-founded Lavender Menace, Scotland’s first Lesbian and Gay Community Bookshop, in 1982. Colluding with Fire Island’s manager, Bill Grainger, Orr and Nielsen sold romance novels in the cloakroom, establishing their brand as gay and lesbian booksellers before opening the legendary bookshop-turned-archive. On a quiet Thursday in April 1982, Orr chanced leaving the cloakroom for a moment on the dance floor: there, he asked Raymond Rose for a dance, and the rest is history. With disco music so central to LGBTQ+ expression in the 80s, Grainger invited some of the most celebrated acts in the business. Orr reels off a list of the memorable DJs and singers, including Eartha Kitt, the Village People and Sylvester. Most fondly, he remembers meeting his American crush, the moustached singer Paul Parker, with “jelly legs.”

While Fire Island was first and foremost a space for queer men, in the words of Sigrid Nielsen, it didn’t stop women “getting [their] foot in the door.” Sexual activity between women has never been criminalised in Scotland, yet, as Nielsen observes, “the law [cast a] very long shadow and it extended to us, too, even though technically we weren’t illegal.”  Attending the weekly lesbian discos held on the third floor, Nielsen remembers that the space was so cold during the winter that the ceiling would ice over. But as they danced, the ice would melt. “One of the songs from those days was It’s Raining Men. But in the lesbian disco, it was just raining. When the chorus came up, everyone would shout ‘WOMEN!’ over the top of ‘men.’” Nielsen reflects that as the music was so loud, any “conversation [meant] leaning up to somebody’s ear. If you were leaning up to somebody’s ear, you were getting closer to them than you were likely to do at any time during the rest of the week. That changed the way we were thinking and feeling.” She adds something that will likely resonate with readers today: “the lesbian scene was a village.” Some things never change.

Image: Joe Munsey.

As Nielsen suggests, the lesbian disco wove together “a huge tapestry of people’s lives,” and within that tapestry was Kate Fearnley, a founding member of the Edinburgh Bisexual Group. Checking her diary from her university days, Fearnley notes that she was 18 when she first went to Fire Island in 1979, heading there with her friends from Gay Soc. “Politically, it was really excellent to have a space right in the centre of Edinburgh... It was a prestigious location. It didn’t particularly feel prestigious inside,” Fearnley laughs. It’s near impossible to find photographs of Fire Island from the inside, as cameras were actively discouraged to protect clubbers’ identities. Fire Island’s ramshackle exterior lives on in the interviewees’ memories. For Fearnley, the women’s toilets in the attic – complete with nesting pigeons and broken windows – hammered home that it was predominantly a male space.

“They’re lucky they [women] had a toilet at all. In many gay bars, there are men shagging,” says Edward Kingsley, with a smile in his voice. Kingsley talks about his old gay haunts with nostalgia: “If we go back to the early 1980s, you had the Laughing Duck and Key West,” on Howe St and Jamaica St respectively. Whereas Fire Island was a weekly hotspot, Laughing Duck “was there all the time, all day, every day.” Hopping between bars “on a Saturday evening would be quite buzzy. And it was nice. It was very nice indeed.” Before the first reported case of AIDS in the UK in 1981, Kingsley observes that “there was a certain invincibility,” motivated by an impulse to “live up to the precedent set in cities like New York and San Francisco” – and indeed by the club’s namesake island, revered for its LGBTQ+ culture. And while Scotland didn’t boast a queer nightclub on the scale of Heaven in London, for instance, Fire Island “was a source of pride in the gay community,” Kinglsey explains. He elaborates: “When you’re in your late teens or early twenties, going to a club like that with a mixture of defiance and pride... there’s a certain ‘fuck you’ feeling to it... The threat of harassment or intimidation when you were in [Fire Island] became a badge of honour,” but on re-entering the outside world and walking home alone, the fear returned. Kingsley’s time on Scotland’s gay scene spanned from September 1977, the moment he came out, to early 1988, when he left for London. By that time, he had lost many of his friends to AIDS.

Through the music and the hookups, what repeatedly emerges from the conversations with our queer elders is a shared sense of resilience and defiance that Fire Island nurtured. The club stepped up to protect the community during the outbreak of the AIDS crisis, notably with activists Derek Ogg and Sandy McMillan delivering awareness lectures to crowds of clubbers. Misinformation was rife, motivated by structural homophobia, and Lavender Menace also did much to dispel myths and raise funds for Scottish AIDS Monitor, an awareness organisation founded by Ogg. As Nielsen reflects, “AIDS changed the community. Everything had run on only saying as much as you needed to say. And, suddenly, you realised a person’s life had a whole other dimension, and that dimension might affect you. Relationships changed after that point.” Her words underscore how much of LGBTQ+ culture has been unevenly shaped by the need for discretion and protection. 

Fire Island closed its doors in September 1988, to the sound of ABBA’s Thank You For the Music. Thank you to the queer elders whose advocacy and activism carved out space for us to live and speak more freely.

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With huge thanks to OurStory Scotland, a charity dedicated to preserving LGBTQ+ stories, for connecting us to Fire Island clubbers