Fire on the island: Chester Weinberg and the first generation lost to AIDS

This article looks at the forgotten fashion designer Chester Weinberg, once very famous during his heyday, but then, as one of the first we lost to AIDS, he was stricken from the fashion history books. Through the case of Weinberg, the article examines the effects of AIDS on the fashion industry in the 1980s and early 1990s and consequently on gay culture as a whole during that era. It also uses Fire Island as a microcosmic metonymic of what was happening all across North America. That lush and hedonistic safe haven where ‘people who had felt like outcasts [found] community’ proved to be no match for the onslaught of the virus. As all of the hard-wrought gains of 1970s gay liberation imploded, AIDS devastated the lives of the first generation of truly liberated and free gay men. This article not only eulogizes and returns Weinberg to his deserved place within fashion history but also brings some of those lost pioneering men from Weinberg’s era back into focus again as well, alive again in memory, so that none of them will ever be forgotten.