Months in the making, the event attracted nearly 1,000 "starlets" and "sailors" inspired by the Golden Age of Hollywood. Robert Donnelly as Anne Miller at the Hollywood Shore Leave party in The Pines, Fire Island, 1988 from Patrik Moreton Fire Island Snapshots Although Patrik's parties began as purely social events, they soon evolved into charity fundraisers to help those affected by HIV, which at that time was a death sentence. Patrik's collection preserves an extraordinary era of LGBTQ life as the joyous freedom and unrestrained hedonism of early years of the Gay Liberation Movement came to a horrific end with the emergence of the AIDS crisis in 1981. When you look at them, they are in a beautiful state of being in flux even though they are inert, archival materials." As you turn the pages, they move and reconfigure themselves in a kaleidoscopic way as they shift within the sleeve. "Some of them are almost full-size snapshots, but most of them are cut into smaller shapes and are housed in plastic sleeves. "The photographs are fragments that have been removed from photo collages," says Matthew Leifheit, author of To Die Alive (Damiani), who is doing research at the Archive. Getting ready in The Pines, Fire Island, 1989 from Patrik Moreton Fire Island Snapshots
In the 1950 movie Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson, starring as reclusive film star Norma Desmond, famously said, "We had faces then." It was a sentiment Patrik understood and adopted as his own, creating an alter ego Marlene Dietrich, the legendary German actress who embodied Weimar decadence, for his fabled Fire Island soirees. Many of the productions drew from golden age Hollywood films. Possessed with a vision of taking his passion to the grandest stage of them all, Patrick took New York by storm doing hair and makeup for legendary Broadway shows like The Elephant Man with David Bowie, Cabaret, My Fair Lady, Pippin, and Little Foxes. He dreamed of becoming an actor in the theatre, then found his true calling doing hair, designing wigs at a Mayfair salon before landing his first cover at British Cosmopolitan. Patrik grew up under the shadows of the Age of Austerity, then came into his own as Swinging London took root. The family lived there until India achieved independence in 1947, and then returned to London. That same decade, halfway around the globe, Patrik Moreton (1942–1995) was born to British parents in northern India. Unidentified attendee of the Hollywood Shore Leave party in The Pines, Fire Island, 1988 from Patrik Moreton Fire Island Snapshots