Head back to The Pines in 1970 with this rare, voyeuristic look at a summer on Fire Island

Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, we revisit 1970’s Sticks And Stones, a micro-budget indie that depicts a slice of gay life one Fire Island summer.

To say that authentic gay representation has been lacking for most of the past hundred-something years of cinema history is a gross understatement.

But if the landscape looks thin today—when strides have slowly but steadily been made toward more accurate and diverse LGBTQ+ stories and characters—it was obviously much worse mid-Century; particularly in the immediate pre and post-Stonewall years, when the gay rights movement was barely even starting to make a dent in the cultural conversation. 

However, once in a blue moon, the rare movie came along that not only featured gay characters, but centered them. That not only alluded to their queerness in the plot, but the plot revolved around it. That didn’t shy away from the thorniness of our personal relationships, or our open sexuality, or the unique ways in which we move through life.

Yes, these films had to be done outside the studio system, for minimal budget, and generally attracted meager audiences and critical attention. But they did exist. And this week we’re diving into one of them.

The Set-Up

Sticks And Stones is a very low-budget, very independent, barely remembered film directed by Stan Lopresto in 1970, just barely months after the Stonewall riots—too soon for its effects to be felt in entertainment.

It follows couple Peter (Craig Dudley) and Buddy (Jesse Deane) as they plan to throw a Fourth of July party at their Fire Island house, their various friends that make their trip there, and the tensions that arise between all of them.

Their friends all embody a different archetype within the gay community. There’s the nervous young man on his first trip to the island and his much older leather daddy, a mental health guru that is imposing his lifestyle on others and his muscle jock boyfriend without much depth to him. There’s even a lesbian couple!

Fire Island Voyeur

As far as the plot goes, there really isn’t much. We follow these friends over a couple of days as they arrive at the island, wander through it during the day, and attend the party at night. We get to know their friendships, listen to their conversations, and watch the sex they are having. It’s almost voyeuristic in the way we observe them, and the community they are walking into for the holiday weekend.

However, Sticks and Stones is a fascinating and almost immersive look at the gay culture of the time—particularly how Fire Island works as a microcosm for it—and the way things have changed (or haven’t!) since it was filmed.

The movie was entirely shot on-location at the island in a documentary-like style. The camera moves through crowds of barely-clothed men and into rooms of couples arguing in the morning. It listens into conversations that may sound familiar to anyone that has ever taken a vacation trip with friends: making plans to go to the Meat Rack (the cruising wooded area between the neighboring queer towns of Cherry Grove and The Pines), complaining about their jobs, and what insecurities they have about their partners and themselves.

It’s both a postcard coming from decades ago, and a reminder that so many of these ways we relate to one another have remained the same.

The Other Boys In The Band

At the time, the movie was likened to a “low-budget version” of The Boys In The Band, the seminal play by Mort Crowley that had premiered off-Broadway two years prior, with a film adaptation hitting theaters that very same year. It’s a fascinating, though not totally apt comparison: These narratives are definitely in conversation with one another, but more as two-sides-of-the-same-coin rather than high-quality/low-quality versions of the same story.

The Boys in the Band is a biting (often relentless) satire and criticism of gay life; the bitterness hiding underneath the snark, the loneliness underneath the endless sexual encounters, the crushing weight of society’s judgment and expectations. But Sticks And Stones is to be more of an objective depiction of it.

There’s no deeper commentary—the film is simply happy to showcase gay friendship, romance, and life as it was (and still is) without the layers of irony and artifice. Sure, one can still read the tensions that exist between the characters and how that speaks about the community as a whole. But the film plays out more like a vacation recording than a narrative text, giving us the highlights from a group of friends having fun and getting intimate with each other.

Related:

WATCH: Director Joe Mantello on the controversial legacy of ‘The Boys in the Band’

50 years later, does the story hold up?

Endless Summer

It’s still surprising that this movie was able to be made at the time it was, even with the minor budget and limited scope that it had. And it’s even more surprising how relevant so much of it still is—how modern these characters feel like talking with one another, going on this ritualistic trip that thousands of other gay men continue to do every year.

The lack of a straight-forward narrative or true conflict make it feel even more timeless somehow, as there were no production codes, studio executives, or censors to respond to. It could just depict these people as they naturally would be.

However, it also serves as a reminder that authentic queer representation in media has long existed in some way or another—it’s just has been buried or hidden, like some dusty VHS tape in the back of the closet, waiting to be rediscovered.

Sticks And Stones is (and looks like) that tape, bringing us back to a time where things were so different, but—at the same time—looked exactly the same.

Sticks And Stones is available to stream for free via Plex.

Related:

WATCH: The comedy short that skewered over-sexed Fire Island gays—20 years ago!

The ’03 short “Fire Island Pines On $0 A Day” feels just as fresh and funny today.