The New Yorker:

Plotting the next gay utopia—less expensive than Long Island, with fewer children—an architect scours Europe for a site, and searches for Speedo-friendly investors.

By Michael Schulman

Nigel Smith, an Australian architect, first went to Fire Island Pines in 2004, when he was twenty-eight and newly out of the closet. “It was heaven,” he said, not long ago. He spent days in a Speedo and met people at “tea,” the roving party where gaggles of gay men dance, drink, and flirt. He started visiting every summer. One time, a friend took him to see the drag queen Porsche in Cherry Grove, and along the way Smith got so drunk (screwdrivers) that he lay down in the ocean and his friend had to yank him out. “I remember Porsche singing, and she’s, like, ‘Who’s that hot guy in the back?’ ” he said. “As everyone turned around and looked at me, I just started quietly vomiting.”

More recently, Smith and some friends considered buying their own property in the Pines, but they were priced out. “One of my friends was moving to London, and he was, like, ‘Why don’t we just make a new place?’ ” Smith said. The friend, a venture capitalist named Aron D’Souza, joined Smith and Brett Fraser, a real-estate entrepreneur, to devise New Fire Island, a “new gay paradise” that will materialize somewhere in the Mediterranean. (D’Souza, who spearheaded the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that killed Gawker, has since left the project to work with the gay billionaire Peter Thiel on the Enhanced Games, a doping-friendly Olympics.)

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