Fire Island has spent a century as a stage, a refuge and an occasional movie set. What it has never had is a film festival of its own. That changes Friday, when the first Grove and Pines Film Festival opens a three-day run across Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines, September 18 through 20, with 42 short films and four features spread over two of the most storied rooms on the Atlantic coast.

The lineup leans wide rather than narrow: comedy, horror, documentary and animation, all of it centered on queer stories from independent and emerging filmmakers. The features include work with familiar faces, among them Alan Cumming, Cheyenne Jackson and the drag performer Miss Peppermint, the subject of a documentary in the program. Panel discussions with filmmakers are included with a festival pass rather than sold separately.

The screens are the story

Plenty of first-year festivals rent whatever room is available. This one gets to project onto history. In Cherry Grove, screenings run in the Cherry Grove Community House and Theatre, a building the community assembled in 1946 by floating a carriage house across the Great South Bay and adding a theater wing three years later. That stage became the first American venue to present productions by gay performers for both gay and straight audiences, and it has never stopped: it is the oldest continuously operating gay summer theater in the United States, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013 and counted among the small group of national landmark sites recognized for their place in LGBTQ civil rights history.

In the Pines, the festival takes over Whyte Hall, whose site has been a gathering point since 1854, first as a life-saving station in what was then called Lone Hill, later a Coast Guard post and a wartime patrol headquarters. The hall is named for John B. Whyte, the real estate figure who did more than almost anyone to shape the Pines into what it became, and the rebuilt 2007 building holds the 172-seat Brandon Fradd Theater, where the festival's Pines programming will screen.

Why a festival, and why now

The festival is the project of a community-led nonprofit, organized by people with long personal histories on the island, including the comedian Brad Loekle, who performed in Cherry Grove early in his career and now sits on the board. Their stated ambition runs past one weekend: to spotlight queer filmmakers, to give the island a marquee cultural event outside peak beach season, and to put Cherry Grove and the Pines on the same circuit as Provincetown and Palm Springs, queer communities that have long had festivals of their own.

The organizers have also said plainly that they built the event partly as an answer to the moment, at a time when funding and institutional support for queer art have been shrinking elsewhere in the country. The festival backs that up with money as well as programming: it awards the Erin Carine Grant, a 5,000 dollar prize for queer creatives named for a figure whose belief in queer artistry shaped the festival's mission.

If you go

The festival runs Friday, September 18 through Sunday, September 20, with programming scheduled throughout Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines. Passes are on sale now through the festival's website, groveandpinesfilmfestival.com, and each event carries an age recommendation, since some screenings are open to all ages while others carry mature content.

Getting there is half the ritual. Take the LIRR to Sayville, catch the shuttle bus that runs to the ferry dock, and ride the Sayville Ferry across the Great South Bay to Cherry Grove or the Pines. Once on the island, the Fire Island Water Taxi is the easiest way to hop between the two communities, and the ride along the bay side is its own argument for going.

Mid-September is the island's quiet gift. The summer crowds are gone, the water is still warm, and the communities that invented so much of American queer culture have room to breathe. A first-year festival lives or dies on whether people show up to it, and this one has given Long Islanders a good reason: three days of new films in a theater that has been telling these stories longer than anywhere else in the country.