Sip-N-Twirl

Sip-N-Twirl is not a venue but an event — the Sunday afternoon tea dance at Fire Island Pines that has been running as a weekly institution since the 1980s and has shaped the social vocabulary of the American gay summer to a degree that few individual events can claim. The format is the classic tea dance: an afternoon dance event, starting in the early afternoon and running to the early evening, at the Pines Pavilion harbour complex, with a DJ playing the kind of music that is designed to move bodies in the afternoon rather than the night. The crowd is the full spectrum of the Fire Island Pines summer community — the share house groups who have arrived on Friday afternoon ferries, the day visitors who have come over from Bay Shore specifically for the Sunday dance, the homeowners who have been coming to the Pines for decades, and the first-timers who have heard about Sip-N-Twirl from friends in New York and wanted to see what the fuss was about. The name — a reference to the cocktail in hand (sip) and the dancing (twirl) — captures the event's essential character: unpretentious, joyful, and absolutely specific to the Fire Island tradition. Sip-N-Twirl is the event that most precisely encapsulates what makes the Fire Island Pines summer unique.