Jack Parlett Interviewed by Matthew Stadlen

Poet and scholar Jack Parlett tells the story of Fire Island, a slim strip of land off New York that became a place famed for hedonism, reinvention, and liberation.

Parlett arrived on Fire Island after a break-up in England and says he was beguiled by the area’s history and the tales of Frank O’Hara’s poetry, the bars where Patricia Highsmith and James Baldwin drank, the cruising sites David Hockney photographed, and the sun-kissed beaches populated by lovers. Parlett looks at the history of the island from its days as a sanctuary for same-sex love, through the wild parties of the post-Stonewall era, to the AIDS epidemic and the challenges it faces today.

Parlett, a junior research fellow in the English faculty at University College, Oxford, has a Cambridge PhD in poetics of cruising in queer American poetry. His debut poetry pamphlet was published in 2020 and his writing has appeared in Poetry London, Cambridge Humanities Review and Literary Hub.

This event is part of the festival’s programme of gay history and literature.