Weather 
The sixth episode of Finding Fire Island Season 2, “Broadway on the Beach,” has been released. Created, executive-produced, and narrated by Jess Rothschild, and co-produced with the Fire Island Pines Historical Society, the GLAAD-nominated documentary series traces how the HIV/AIDS crisis reshaped Fire Island Pines — and how the community’s grief was channeled into some of the most enduring fundraising institutions in Broadway history. Check out the video here!
The episode opens in the early 1980s, when news of the epidemic first broke on the front page of The New York Times. Activist Larry Kramer, who would go on to found Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), used the Pines as a staging ground for early activism, handing out pamphlets at the ferry dock to a community not yet ready to listen.
“We all just assumed that we were gonna live to 35,” recalls Guy Smith, who helped transform the Pines Party into the institution it is today, “because everybody who I worked for or with in the nightlife community were dead around 35.”
Emmy and Tony winner Billy Porter, who is HIV-positive, reflects candidly on reaching an age he never expected to see: “I’m still gagged that I’m four years away from 60, and I’m proud of my age. I lived. I’m here. That was not a foregone conclusion.”
Beginning in 1983, the community’s grief helped launch the Morning Party, an annual GMHC fundraiser that, by its final year in 1998, raised over $450,000 in a single weekend. The crisis also forged a lasting bond between the Pines and Broadway, giving rise to two of the theater world’s most beloved fundraising institutions.
The episode also revisits a lighter side of that era: the night Joan Rivers, reeling from the loss of her husband Edgar Rosenberg, performed at a 1988 Pines benefit for God’s Love We Deliver. Longtime Pines security staffer Chris Lovito recalls walking her to the stage as she surveyed the crowd for the first time: “Oh my God, I’ve never seen so many gorgeous shirtless men in my life,” she told him. “Do you think they’re gonna like me?” Lovito describes watching her transform the instant she stepped into the light: “I’ll never forget the spark that came off of her when the light hit her, and she became Joan Rivers, the comedian.” She brought the house down, later joined the board of God’s Love We Deliver, and eventually won $500,000 for the organization on The Celebrity Apprentice.
Later, the episode traces how Tony-winning director and choreographer Jerry Mitchell created Broadway Bares in 1992 — a one-night striptease fundraiser at Splash Bar in Manhattan, born from a joking suggestion by his Will Rogers Follies dressing roommate, the late Jason Opsahl. “We did the first show, and there was a line around the block,” Mitchell recalls. Broadway Bares has since raised more than $30 million for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, grown from a single bar to the Hammerstein Ballroom, and drawn stars including Idina Menzel, Kristin Chenoweth, Rosie O’Donnell, Nathan Lane, and Lillias White. Mitchell, who owns a home in the Pines, has even staged an intimate Fire Island edition of the show.
The episode also documents the origins of the Fire Island Dance Festival, which brings dancers from the American Ballet Theatre, the Joffrey Ballet, New York City Ballet, and other leading companies to perform on stages built above pools overlooking the bay — raising funds for Broadway Cares’ Dancers Responding to AIDS program. “Everybody wants to be on that stage on that water,” says Jerry Mitchell.
Longtime Pines resident Ron Martin, reflecting on why he survived the epidemic when so many friends did not, offers the episode’s closing thought: “I think there needed to be some survivors who would pass along the history and the culture… to make certain our history didn’t disappear.”
Finding Fire Island is created, executive produced, and narrated by Jess Rothschild, features rare archival footage, and is co-produced with The Fire Island Pines Historical Society. It is distributed via the Broadway Podcast Network and available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SiriusXM, and Amazon Music.
