Ron Martin has been in the pines since the early 70s.

There were always house parties through the 70s in Fire Island.

But all of the music in the houses, we all had reel-to-reel tape decks.

You would have like a three-hour tape that would play continuously that some DJ had made for you.

And in 19... 1978, we said, why don't we have a live DJ? A friend of ours named Howard Merritt was one of the top DJs back then, and we wanted Howard to play live, but you couldn't play live in the houses then because the turntable with people dancing on those houses on the the way they were constructed on the stilts, the houses would move and the turntables wouldn't stay steady and they would skip.

So in order to do that, we built DJ's platform separate from our main house off of the back deck.

so that the turntables could stay stationary.

Ron Martin worked those buses, and it was there that he first met Cherry Grove legend Pansy, the original ringleader of the Fourth of July invasion of the Pines.

Why do you think you survived?

Wow.

That's...

I think one reason I survived is probably why I'm sitting here today talking about the history of the Pines.

I think that there needed to be some survivors who would pass along the history and the culture.

I had, like I think most people, a kind of survivor's guilt.

And I started thinking, but why me? Why did I survive? And I think those of us who did probably sought some kind of more deeper purpose in life.

He told me the story of an arsonist loose in the Pines.

I think it was 1984, October.

It was late in the season.

We just had started dinner at my house and the fire alarm went off.

So I went ahead and went down to the fire department.

And as it turned out, there was an arsonist that was loose in the community that night.

And he was setting fires.

They did their job, and the gays did theirs, making the magic.

One of the designers and a good friend of ours lived in a loft on Lower Broadway in Soho at a time where not many people were living in lofts except artists.

And so we hosted the fire department crowd on Saturday night at his loft, which for them was like something that was beyond anything they had ever experienced to come into Manhattan and go to a loft party in early 1979 down in Soho.

There was a culture clash for sure.

But in the course of those, having those meetings, working together, we started realizing that they were having fun with us and we were appreciating them in a new kind of way.

Pretty amazing, actually.

And then we had Bonnie Poynter, who ended up closing the part.

She had left the Poynter sisters behind.