Yang is his first and closest gay Asian friend, and both have “felt like outsiders in the gay community to varying degrees - feeling out of place no matter where we were,” he said. In the Penguin Random House blog, Booster referred to Yang as “the gay Chinese Jane to my gay Korean Lizzy,” and now he’s brought those characters to life in this gay spin on Pride and Prejudice: Noah is our Elizabeth, proud and quick to judge, gossipping with his sister Howie/Jane “about all the ways we were somehow above all this, just as everyone else considered us below it.”įinding each other “made the other person feel seen in a really visceral way,” Booster said.
The movie stars Booster as Noah, gay, broke, and proudly single, who, during an annual weeklong friends trip to the island, tries to get his best friend, Howie (played by his IRL best friend, Bowen Yang), to stop fantasizing about traditional romance and just have fun and get laid.
The seeds of Fire Island, the delightful Andrew Ahn–directed romantic comedy that Booster wrote, executive produced, and stars in, out now on Hulu, were officially planted. “Austen may not have realized it at the time,” he wrote, “but her novels are covered in wall-to-wall shade, the modern homosexual’s secret language that involves stealthily insulting each other with enough plausible deniability to keep the party going.” She may have been writing about five middle-class sisters during the Regency period, but “she was also writing about my experience as a gay man in the 21st century.”īooster’s agent suggested he expand on the essay’s ideas into a fictional project. When he got home, Booster reflected on Austen and the island in an essay for Penguin Random House. Though they had a great time, Booster said, “there were moments when it became clear: There are no straight people around to oppress us, but gay men find a way.” During their vacation to the historic Long Island gay resort, Booster was rereading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the first time since he was a teenager, and “it really struck me while I was there how relevant its observations about class are, specifically ways in which people communicate across class lines.” As great as Fire Island and other spaces for gay men can be, there’s also “a lot of toxicity,” and Booster realized that Austen’s comedy of manners “could so easily be mapped onto our experience.” He knew he wasn’t your “typical Fire Island boy” (white, rich, well connected), Booster told me in a recent interview - but he and his friend SNL star Bowen Yang went anyway. When writer and comedian Joel Kim Booster decided to go to Fire Island for the first time eight years ago, he initially had some reservations.