Queer Places:
81 Gerard Walk, Sayville, NY 11782
Kay
Guinness (1903-1989) was wealthy
and closeted, she had affairs with women while also being married three
different times to men. She flew small airplanes, had her own motorboat, and
loved to be part of fashionable society. In the 1950s, Guinness was arrested
in Cherry Grove for nude sunbathing on the beach. Her cottage was named No
Man’s Land. The life of this person has been researched by Esther Newton for
her essay: "Cherry Grove, Fire Island", published by Duke University Press.
She was friends with
Marty Mann, the founder of the National
Council on Alcoholism, and Priscilla
Peck, an attractive woman who was art editor at Vogue.
Kay had come to New York in 1926, where she got a job as publicist for
Paramount Pictures. She also seems to have parlayed family money into more
money in the booming stock market of the 1920s.
Patricia Fitzgerald, Kay Guinness, Mary Ronin, and Bea Greer, Duffy’s Hotel
c. 1950
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Gay Nathan and Julie Paradise
Kay had sexual
relationships and friendships with the “follies girls,” like Dottie Justin and
Peggy Fears.
According to Kay and other Grovers, she and
Natalia Murray were lovers for a
period around 1948.
Several narrators mentioned that Jane
Bowles and Patricia Highsmith,
though not central or longtime participants, were in and out of the Grove
scene; the latter had a brief affair with Kay, who also remembered Jane Bowles
climbing a ladder to try to get into her bedroom.
Gay Nathan had once been Kay’s lover and eventually bought Kay’s cottage.
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