Joel Kim Booster on how Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice inspired gay rom-com Fire Island

American comedian Joel Kim Booster reveals how he buried his gay shame to make Fire Island, a trailblazing new gay rom-com based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Joel Kim Booster, writer and star of new gay rom-com Fire Island. Picture: Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for Vulture

American actor, writer and comedian Joel Kim Booster still vividly remembers the first time he visited Fire Island.

The Korean-born funny man, a regular visitor to Australia for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, was adopted by an American couple as an infant. He was raised and homeschooled by extremely conservative parents but realised he was gay from a young age, forcing him to live a lie for years. So, when he took his first trip with his friend Bowen Yang to the small island off the coast of New York, well known as a gay enclave and tourist destination, the experience was “transformative”.

“To me it means freedom,” he says of Fire Island, which is also the name of his new gay romantic comedy, which he wrote and stars in opposite Yang, and premieres at the Sydney Film Festival this week, and will stream on Disney+ from June 17.

“I grew up in a very evangelical Christian household, very repressed, with lots of shame, so for me, Fire Island has always represented freedom from that shame.

“Being gay was the worst thing that could have happened to me for many, many years. And being able to go to a place where everyone is gay and everyone is happy … it’s so freeing to be surrounded by people – especially my chosen family – and it’s healing after a lifetime of being ashamed of being gay.”

Joel Kim Booster and Bowen Yang in a scene from the movie Fire Island.

As chance would have it, Booster also had a copy of Jane Austen’s literary classic Pride and Prejudice with him on that first trip, having grown up a huge fan of the 1990s BBC version that starred Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. He saw parallels between the author’s arch and incisive commentary on wealth and class in 18th century England and some of the behaviour of the almost exclusively gay population of the island. He observed that in the absence of anyone else to oppress them, gay men found other ways to oppress each other, such as singling out race, body image and masculinity and social status.

“I remember reading it there and observing that the way Jane Austen observed social mores and the ways people communicate to each other and can be so awful to each other with plausible deniability,” Booster says with a laugh. “And I thought ‘well, that’s how gay men communicate’. That’s shade. We can be awful to each other with a smile on our face and that’s something that really struck me.”

As a homeschooled kid and a “sappy romantic” who got most of his early ideas of love from watching Norah Ephron and Julia Roberts movies, the germ of an idea was born for Booster – a gay rom-com adaptation of Pride and Prejudice based on his experiences on Fire Island. And as an added bonus, he would be able to work alongside his friend Yang, who was born in Brisbane to Chinese parents before moving to Canada and then America. As gay, Asian comedians from conservative families, Booster says, the pair “checked the same boxes” for studios, meaning they were unlikely to be cast in the same project unless they made it happen themselves.

Joel Kim Booster was a huge fan of the Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle version of Pride and Prejudice.

“When we first met, early in our careers, a lot of people wanted to either compare us a lot or pit us against each other professionally,” Booster says. “Many news outlets have used my picture instead of his and vice versa – it happens all the time. It’s a really stressful thing to have one of your best friends and then have the industry writ large kind of flatten you.”

Fire Island, which is sometimes frank and explicit about same-sex attraction and the hard-partying shenanigans that take place in the holiday spot, is something of a trailblazing film, coming from a major studio and with gay, Asian lead actors.

Booster says he’s feeling the weight of expectation, particularly from the gay community, and he knows he can’t please everyone. His film will release a few months ahead of another gay rom-com from a major studio – Parks and Recreation star Billy Eichner’s Bros – and while Booster says while neither can be expected to represent the entire gay community, he hopes there will be many more to follow.

“I always reiterate that this is not meant to represent some universal gay experience, this is supposed to represent my experience and Bowen’s experience and that friendship,” Booster says. “Hopefully, if people don’t see themselves in it, then they will have Billy’s movie or any number of the other movies that will hopefully come out because of the success of our movies.”

Trailblazing romantic comedy Fire Island has a predominantly gay cast.

While Booster and director Andrew Anh didn’t specifically set out to only cast gay actors, the fact that it turned out that way was a blessing for Fire Island and its authenticity.

“I am very much of the mind that the best actor should get the role and it just so happens that 99 per cent of the time a gay actor is the best for a gay role,” says Booster. “And with this there needed to be a shorthand because there was a lot of improvising on set and there was a lot of bonding that needed to happen immediately and having an entirely gay cast really expedited that process.

“Thematically this movie can appeal to everyone – the stories of friendship and love – but I also think there is a lot of stuff that really is only for gay people and only gay people will understand and it’s OK that not every joke is for every person. It’s a feature, not a bug.”

And what would the heavily corsetted and skirted Austen make of the steamy shirtless scenes and bacchanalian night clubs of Fire Island the location and the movie?

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“It would be a little bit much for her,” says Booster, laughing. “I think ‘deviant behaviour’ is probably something she would describe it as. But I hope that the same sort of incisive critique and observational humour about the ways in which we interact with each other and with people outside of our class and within our class, I hope she would appreciate that and see it for the homage that it is.”

Fire Island streams on Disney+ from June 17.

Originally published as Joel Kim Booster on how Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice inspired gay rom-com Fire Island