Messy queer rhetorics: homonationalism and gay Asian American triad in Fire Island

Abstract

Fire Island (2022) represents how three gay Asian American men (Noah, Howie, and Will) navigate tensions of whiteness, homonationalism, classism, and gay sexual desirability while on vacation with their friends. What begins as a narrative of gay Asian American men’s queer friendships becomes an intraracial romance of sticky rice–an Asian man dating another Asian man. Through use of a queer, Asian American rhetorical methodology informed by a queer of color critique, which challenges reliance upon citizenship, we analyze the messiness inherent in Fire Island. Our queer rhetorical analysis locates two themes present in Fire Island. First, Fire Island portrays an Asian American triad (or a narrative centering on three Asian American men) which ultimately succumbs to whiteness. Not without its shortcomings, homonationalism impacts both Fire Island and the film’s namesake. Second, the representation of three gay Asian American leading men comes with a cost, as an invisibility of romantic relations between Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Asian American men, that reify the white-Asian binary. Simultaneously influenced by and disrupting homonationalism, Fire Island demonstrates the queer (im)possibilities of optimism, pessimism, and failure.