Guy Smith is the Pines Party producer, and he described himself as having the soul of a Cherry Grove gay who just wound up in the Pines.

my personality i if there wasn't so much production in the pines i would have been a grove person kind of like kind of a dirty hippie burner sort of person and i definitely felt comfortable in the grove less wealthy more integrated more lesbians more i don't know more kind of like radical fairy vibe to it whereas i when i got to the pines it was very male very masculine oriented i was probably One of the youngest people in the Pines when I went.

The Pines had been aging out.

It was just at the end of the AIDS crisis, as it were, when now there were drugs.

But a lot of the people in the Pines were survivors of AZT and AIDS.

And I had survivors of a lot of emotional trauma that I didn't necessarily relate to exactly because I kind of came out right in the middle of it.

I was 19 when I came out in Nashville, Tennessee.

How did they teach you how to be a good gay?

It also paved the way for the Fire Island Dance Festival, the island's longest-running charitable event and a lasting partnership between dance, Broadway, and AIDS activism.

We all just assumed that we were gonna live to 35 because everybody who I worked for or with in the nightlife community, they were dead around 35.

But in the Pines, he'll always be remembered for helping transform the Pines Party into the institution it is today.

When I was 21 and getting into nightlife, I had a whole plan.

I had a degree in psychology.

I was a family therapist.

And I had a whole trajectory that I was going to get my PhD and hang out a shingle and, like, I don't know, move to the Upper West Side and have my own private practice.

And then...

What can't you control aside from weather?

Listen, there's 3,500 people on the beach, and there are people who have kind of outlier personalities and people who get too high.

We have a medical team that really, really takes good care of people, but sometimes people just get crazy.

And luckily, I have a degree in psychology, and I have to sit them down.

And sometimes they are people who are my employees.

And they have like a total meltdown, an anxiety attack.

They're triggered by some trauma.

What else have you had to deal with?