In Reckoning: Ten Seasons in Fire Island Pines (Sunstone Press), the reader follows an extended period in the life of a gay man, Miles Cigolle. The book, written and narrated by Cigolle as its central character, covers the years from 1988 to 2000. Reckoning is thus an individual, personal story, but one that also reveals a critical moment of social history, highlighting how a supportive communal structure that was engaged in the early responses to AIDS had many roots in a place synonymous with sybaritic hedonism.
Miles Cigolle grew up in a classic adobe house near Albuquerque's historic Old Town with his parents and three siblings. Cigolle studied architecture at Cornell University and went on to practice architecture for twenty-five years with New York City firms including Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and Richard Meier & Partners. He met his future husband Abbey on Memorial Day in 1982 in a leather bar in New York's Meat Packing District. Abbey was a Stonewall baby. The couple returned to Ithaca, New York in 2000. Cigolle's first memoir, Miles's World, was published by Secord Books in 2021. Three subsequent memoirs, Reckoning, Upon Arrival and Places and Faces were published by Sunstone Press.
Cigolle calls Reckoning a “fictionalized memoir” (“Fictionalized Memoir” is in the subtitle), indicating that no real names have been used except that of the author and his partner; some episodes have been reimagined beyond how they occurred.
The specific setting is New York’s Fire Island Pines (known familiarly as “the Pines”), a gay-dominated seasonal hamlet of conspicuous wealth and style. In the era of Reckoning, perhaps less so today, the Pines was a unique sanctuary for gay men. I suppose I am as qualified as anyone to try to explain the emotions evoked by this particular place and time, having been myself a character in Cigolle’s account of his first years in the Pines. In my closeness to the author and his partner, Abbey Chernela, I may not be a disinterested observer, but I will nevertheless submit that the book is a potent read, animated by Cigolle’s droll take on the world, his depth of feeling and his well-justified anxieties. The individual portraits of housemates are also thoughtfully drawn, with affection balancing the effort to find truth.
In those days, one would leave Manhattan on a sweltering summer Friday, and then, arriving by train at Sayville, Long Island, proceed to the Pines in a state of excited anticipation on the ferry ride across the Sound. The Pines was regarded as a kind of “Sugar Mountain,” a dream-world where gay sex was on offer seemingly everywhere, day and night, at least to those of our own age and younger. It did feel rather like a sugar rush: thrilling, addicting and ephemeral. But fraternal friendship was also to be had, and that mattered a great deal. One felt accepted in an almost tribal sense.
In 1988, a gay man could feel even more comfortable and at ease in this summer haven than in a progressive milieu like New York City, where those who were “out” might still not know how much of their lives it would be prudent to reveal to co-workers or neighbors. The Pines seemed altogether to be a privileged retreat from the straight-dominated world, a place where we could be unguarded and freely ourselves. Women were then rare in the Pines, trans individuals not evident at all. For better or worse, non-diverse enclaves of cis-gay men, such as the Pines had been in Cigolle’s time, are far less frequent today.
In the pages of Reckoning, readers will track the experiences of Miles and Abbey for ten summer seasons in the Pines. This was a milieu in which gay sex, even its semi-anonymous variants, was not necessarily “casual.” At least at times it appeared to include a level of consideration between participants, a warmth and mutuality beneath the then-current gay trends for leather and exaggerated masculinity. These fashions were only caricatures, corrective fantasies that reversed the images of gay men as effeminate that many of our age had absorbed as children in the 1950s; and after all, even the briefest sexual encounters involve the vulnerability of physical and emotional exposure, therefore having the potential to reverberate in memory. Granted that such memories have been romanticized by the passage of time, loving relationships did emerge from impromptu trysts remarkably often, even from twilight couplings in the storied Meat Rack (aka “The Rack”), the secluded woods between the Pines and its closest neighbor, Cherry Grove.
I thought of the Pines as our gay Woodstock. One of the most gratifying aspects of being part of the enormous postwar baby-boom generation was how social movements such as ours could spring up spontaneously and involve large numbers of people, elevating life with an air of possibility and an antidote to loneliness. We understood that we were a sizable, collectively influential force within the wider young-generational nation; by the late 1980s that confidence was already beginning to galvanize a national response to AIDS. Those of us who survived those years are now aging together.
As a respected architect, Cigolle was delighted by the predominantly Modernist design of the houses in the Pines and by the natural beauty that surrounded them. Putting his scholarly, perfectionistic proclivities in abeyance, he set about adapting himself to the rewards and trials of sharing a house with others, a challenging enterprise at any age but especially so by one’s thirties. For some years he enjoyed the companionable aspects of weekend living with others, but in time tired of the effort such participation requires. Overall, Cigolle was able to establish lasting friendships while remaining protective of his loving relationship with Abbey—a relationship that survived the many temptations and distractions of those years. Then, approaching middle age, the couple found a cooperative apartment of their own on the Island, an arrangement that neatly combined elements of privacy and community.
Throughout these years, lurking as a counterweight to the pleasure-seeking, there was an ominous portent—the increasing awareness of AIDS. AZT had been approved by the FDA in 1987, but seropositivity was a still regarded as a death sentence, and a terrible death at that—especially when juxtaposed against the joyful intensity of life at the Pines.
Many gay men in those first years of the health crisis followed developments closely and had started to embrace safer sex but still clung to a state of cognitive avoidance; this was a stance that entailed a mental walling-off, or a temporary willful forgetting, of the otherwise starkly obvious threat. Describing the events of one evening, Cigolle writes: “Nobody dared to even think of AIDS. At least not until the next morning when guilt rose to the surface and everyone looked a little anxious.” Sexual couplings in the Pines began to be preceded by whispered expressions of unease, even if the fuller confrontation with reality would emerge slowly.
However, the epidemic did not pause for psychological adjustments, and by the mid-nineties, nearly every Pines share house had a member who was HIV-positive or manifestly ill. Community leaders had always been summer residents of the Pines, and those with wealth or celebrity status contributed generously to the cause of clinical research. One shareholder in Cigolle’s house was an attorney, himself afflicted with advanced AIDS, who was a prominent national voice in the movement demanding the swifter development and release of antiretroviral drugs.
By this time, a more general “reckoning” was long overdue. A series of telephone calls announcing the AIDS-related deaths of friends ensued, some having succumbed to depression, alcoholism or suicide. In Reckoning, each one of the calls is documented briefly but dramatically, accorded the dignity of a separate chapter. Eventually Cigolle seeks to discover his own status. By all appearances in robust health, he suddenly learns that he is HIV-positive himself, at the time a distinct threat to survival. Abbey tests negative, adding to the complexity of their situation as a couple.
Approaching their 50s, grateful for Cigolle’s continued good health but fatigued by worry, the couple determine they have gleaned everything they could from the Fire Island Pines experience and from Manhattan itself. They withdraw to a quieter, less fraught environment in Ithaca, New York.
In reading this book I found it difficult to get through Cigolle’s cringe-inducing descriptions of some of my own less-than-mature doings in our shared time in the earlier years. But the Pines was always a setting that stimulated the antithetical extremes of regressive behavior and unselfish acts of compassion. For each of its main characters, Reckoning is, in the end, a story of self-acceptance and personal evolution, and ultimately a journey directed toward the capacity to love. Written from the edifying perspective of distance, Cigolle distills the essence of the Pines experience in the book’s Preface: “The Pines was where we grew up, where we found our community, where we broke down and bared our bravest hearts.”—Robert C. Abrams
Robert C. Abrams, MD, is Professor of Psychiatry in the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. At Weill Cornell he maintains a clinical practice devoted to psychiatric conditions in older adult patients, and at the affiliated medical college he is engaged in research in old-age depression, psychoses and dementia, as well as elder abuse. Since 2016 Dr. Abrams has been a frequent contributor of film reviews and other essays to the Arts and Media blog of the British Medical Journal/Medical Humanities. He is also the author of Staring Night: Queen Victoria’s Late-Life Depression, published by International Psychoanalytic Books, Inc., New York, 2020.