Cherry Grove Stories

Cherry Grove Stories (2017) is a documentary directed by Michael Fisher. It's about the Cherry Grove community on Fire Island, a tiny piece of land off the coast of Long Island.

Houses in Cherry Grove were bought by gays and lesbians in the 1950's. We have to remind ourselves of how hard life was for gays and lesbians 60 years ago. It's still not an easy life, but it's far better than it was then.

Cherry Grove was a location where lesbians and gays were in the majority. It must have been almost magical to be openly gay or lesbian in that community. How many other places were there, even in New York City, where you could feel comfortable with displaying your sexuality?

Cherry Grove served that purpose, and still does. However, then, as now, society could and would intrude. Police would raid the community, and still do. Cherry Grove wasn't exactly heaven on earth, especially in the 1980's when the HIV/AIDS epidemic struck. Still, even then, if you were gay or lesbian, it was better to be in Cherry Grove than almost anywhere else.

The documentary consists mostly of talking heads, but what the people want to tell us is interesting. There's some archival footage that's interesting as well. However, even at just 77 minutes, the movie appeared too long to me. How many shots do we need of waves rolling onto the beach?

We saw this movie in the Little Theatre, as part of Rochester's excellent ImageOut, the LGBT Film Festival. It will work well enough on the small screen.

This documentary, is very well put together, based off of our historical event that took place at a time when things were extremely different based off of laws. This is a type of film that you see about every 5 to 10 years and they're always relatively good like your sports movies. Very creative and entertaining this one dives deep into historical points. That leads one to believe they are meant for a bigger purpose on this planet. Do you listen to the messages or do you ignore them? That's a question that you ask if you ever faced with having to fulfill a destiny. This is the kind of film that really right itself but overall the cast and crew did an amazing job with the acting, and it was a very well written project. Two thumbs up. I would Recommend to all, great job.