Part of the Gay Fire Island Guide — bars, events & things to do.
Saturday, September 19, 2026
The Belvedere Guest House, Cherry Grove, Fire Island
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Cherry Grove is where gay America summered before there was a word for it. Here's the complete guide to Fire Island's original queer hamlet — its history, its drag-soaked nightlife, where to stay and eat, the beach, and how it differs from the Pines next door.
Robbie S.The Fire Island Pines is the glamorous, modernist, party heart of gay Fire Island. Here's the complete guide — its architecture and history, the tea-dance nightlife, where to stay and eat, the beach, and the marquee events, plus how it differs from Cherry Grove.
Robbie S.Dining on Fire Island is casual, harbor-side, and woven into the rhythm of the day. Here's where to eat across Cherry Grove and the Pines — the sit-down dinners, the coffee-and-provisions spots, the late-night slice, plus how to provision a share house.
Robbie S.
The ultimate LGBTQ+ guide to Fire Island — Cherry Grove, The Pines, nightlife, legendary events, beaches, and where to stay on America's original gay paradise.
Robbie S.Fire Island's summer doesn't end quietly. Every September, just as the share houses empty and the ferries thin out, Cherry Grove throws one last, gloriously uninhibited blowout: Spartacus, the season-closing party at the Belvedere Guest House. It's part beauty pageant, part clothing-optional bacchanal, part community reunion — and it's been sending the island into winter with a bang for well over a decade.
Produced by longtime NYC nightlife impresario Daniel Nardicio and the Belvedere, Spartacus is exactly the kind of event that could only happen on Fire Island: a crowd of men packed into an ornate Cherry Grove mansion for the Mr. Nude Belvedere contest, then spilling over to the Ice Palace for an infamous underwear party that runs late into the last warm night of the year. Here's everything you need to know to be there.
Here's the night at a glance:
Pro Tip
Spartacus is deliberately the *last* big party of the Fire Island season — it lands the weekend the island starts shutting down for winter. That gives it a bittersweet, everyone-came-out energy, but it also means ferries and lodging get scarce after it. If you're staying over, book your room and your return boat before the weekend, not during it.
Spartacus is Fire Island's end-of-summer institution: a clothing-optional party at the Belvedere built around the Mr. Nude Belvedere contest — billed, with a wink, as America's only all-nude, all-lewd, all-dude beauty pageant. Contestants compete for the crown by audience acclaim in a raucous, cheering, purely-in-good-fun ceremony that's more camp theater than swimsuit competition. It's the Grove doing what the Grove has always done best: turning something taboo into a communal, joyful spectacle.
The night is unabashedly adult, but the tone is warm and welcoming rather than heavy — this is a body-positive celebration, not an exclusive scene. You do not have to compete, and you do not have to bare anything you don't want to; plenty of the crowd comes simply to watch, cheer, and toast the end of the season. What everyone shares is the sense of occasion: this is the last time the whole summer crowd is in one room before the island goes quiet.
See What's On Across Fire Island This Season
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Spartacus runs in two acts, and doing both is the point.
Act one — the Belvedere, 6–11 PM. The party gathers at the Belvedere as the sun goes down, drinks flow around the pool and the ornate terraces, and the crowd builds toward the main event. Around 10 PM, the Mr. Nude Belvedere contest takes the stage — the loud, gleeful centerpiece of the whole night, decided by the roar of the audience.
Act two — the Ice Palace. When the contest wraps, the party migrates a short walk to the Underwear Party at the Ice Palace, Cherry Grove's historic dancefloor. The Ice Palace has anchored Grove nightlife for generations, and its Spartacus underwear party is one of the signature nights on the whole Fire Island calendar — the dancefloor packed until late on one of the last warm nights of the year.
Pro Tip
Buy the ticket ahead and travel light. The Belvedere is clothing-optional and the Ice Palace after-party is an underwear party, so the practical move is to come with a bag you can check, minimal to carry, and a plan for getting between the two — everything is a short boardwalk walk within Cherry Grove.
Half the reason Spartacus feels the way it does is where it happens. The Belvedere Guest House for Men is one of Fire Island's most recognizable buildings — a men-only, clothing-optional guesthouse in Cherry Grove built in an over-the-top white Venetian-palazzo style, all balustrades, statuary, cupolas and fountains, more Grand Canal than Atlantic barrier island. It's been a Grove institution for decades, the kind of place that is itself a landmark on the island.
That theatrical setting is exactly why Nardicio's contest lives here: the Belvedere's terraces and pool make a natural stage, and the guesthouse's long history as a clothing-optional men's retreat means the crowd is already in the right frame of mind. Staying at the Belvedere on Spartacus weekend is the deep-end version of the experience — you're sleeping where the party happens.
Pro Tip
The Belvedere sits on Main Walk in Cherry Grove, an easy boardwalk stroll from the Grove ferry dock, the Ice Palace, and Cherry's on the Bay. Cherry Grove is tiny and entirely walkable — you won't need a water taxi to get between any of the Spartacus venues.
Spartacus is the work of Daniel Nardicio, the New York nightlife producer who has spent years building a signature brand of cheeky, body-positive, boundary-pushing gay parties across the city and out on Fire Island. He and the Belvedere have run the Spartacus contest annually for over a decade — the 2026 event is the 14th edition — and it has become a fixture of the Cherry Grove calendar, the party that officially closes the summer.
Nardicio has been a fixture of downtown New York and Fire Island nightlife for years, known for parties that put body-positivity and a little provocation front and center — the kind of gleefully NSFW events that treat nudity as celebration rather than spectacle. Pairing that sensibility with the Belvedere's over-the-top setting is what gives Spartacus its particular flavor: campy and knowing, communal rather than exclusive, more in on the joke than shocking.
What makes it endure isn't shock value; it's the ritual. Fire Island's season has a rhythm — Memorial Day opens it, the Invasion and Pines Party crest it in July, and by mid-September the crowds are thinning and the light is turning gold. Spartacus is the community's agreed-upon last hurrah, the night everyone comes back for one more before the boardwalks empty. That's why it draws the crowd it does, year after year.
Spartacus centers on the Belvedere and the Ice Palace, but the same handful of venues anchor Fire Island nightlife all season. In Cherry Grove, the Ice Palace is the historic dancefloor (and the Spartacus after-party home) and Cherry's on the Bay is the waterfront bar-and-restaurant hub. A short water-taxi ride away in the Pines, the Pavilion is the main dance club, the Blue Whale runs the harbor-side tea dances, and Sip·n·Twirl keeps the Pines dancing past midnight.
The Ice Palace deserves its own mention. Attached to the Grove Hotel, it's one of the oldest gay dance clubs in the country — a Cherry Grove institution where drag and dance have mixed for generations, and long a stage for the Grove's Homecoming Queen and the drag culture that gives the hamlet its character. Its Spartacus underwear party is the natural finale: the whole crowd, one last time, on the dancefloor that has closed out Fire Island summers for decades.
Fire Island, New York
Fire Island, New York
Fire Island, New York
Fire Island, New York
Fire Island, New York
Fire Island has no big hotels — you stay in a guesthouse or a share house, and by mid-September, after the summer rush, you'll often find a little more availability (and better rates) than at the July peak. Staying in Cherry Grove puts you steps from every Spartacus venue; the Belvedere Guest House for Men is the clothing-optional epicenter, and the Grove is small enough to walk everywhere. Prefer the Pines side? The Madison and the Grove Hotel are the marquee harbor-area stays, a short water taxi from the Grove.
HotelFire Island, New York
HotelFire Island, New York
HotelFire Island, New York
Fire Island has no cars and no bridge — you get there by ferry, and for Cherry Grove the gateway is Sayville on Long Island's south shore.
Pro Tip
Check the **last ferry back to Sayville** before you commit to a day trip — the after-Labor-Day schedule is thinner than the summer one, and the Ice Palace underwear party runs late. If you want to actually close the party, plan to stay over.
Coming out for Spartacus is a great excuse to see Fire Island at its most beautiful. Cherry Grove is one of the oldest gay communities in America — a haven since the 1930s and '40s, decades before Stonewall — and its Community House & Theater is often called the oldest continuously operating gay summer theater in the country, home to the volunteer-run Arts Project of Cherry Grove since 1948. In 2013 the Community House and Theater was added to the National Register of Historic Places as one of the first sites recognized for its LGBTQ history — a rare official acknowledgment that this little boardwalk hamlet is a landmark of queer America.
The Grove has always been the campier, more theatrical of the island's two hamlets — the drag-forward counterpoint to the glossier Pines next door — and that spirit runs straight through Spartacus. It's the same community that crowns a Homecoming Queen each summer and sends her across the bay to lead the Invasion of the Pines every Fourth of July. September strips away the peak-summer crush and leaves the good stuff: wide, empty Atlantic beaches, warm water, and that low golden light.
If you have a slow morning, walk the boardwalks between the Grove and the Pines through the wooded stretch known as the Meat Rack, or take a water taxi west to Sailors Haven and the Sunken Forest — a rare, 300-year-old maritime holly forest below sea level, laced with a boardwalk trail and protected as part of the Fire Island National Seashore. It's the perfect antidote to a late Spartacus night.
Pro Tip
Make a weekend of it. Spartacus is a Saturday night, but the shoulder-season calm on either side — quiet beaches, a Sunday walk to the Sunken Forest, an unhurried last swim — is some of the best time you can spend on Fire Island. Come Friday, leave Sunday, and let the party be the middle of the trip rather than the whole thing.
Spartacus 2026 is on Saturday, September 19, 2026 — the 14th edition. The main party runs 6–11 PM at the Belvedere in Cherry Grove, with the Mr. Nude Belvedere contest around 10 PM, followed by the Underwear Party at the Ice Palace.
At the Belvedere Guest House for Men on Main Walk in Cherry Grove, Fire Island, with the after-party a short boardwalk walk away at the Ice Palace. Both are in Cherry Grove, which is small and fully walkable.
Yes. The Belvedere is a clothing-optional men's guesthouse, the main event is the all-nude Mr. Nude Belvedere contest, and the Ice Palace after-party is an underwear party. That said, you set your own comfort level — plenty of attendees come to watch and cheer fully dressed. It's a body-positive, adults-only (21+) crowd.
Not at all. Most of the crowd is there to watch, drink, and celebrate the end of the season — the contest is decided by audience acclaim, so cheering is participating. Entering is entirely optional and entirely up to you.
Tickets are sold ahead of the event, typically through Brown Paper Tickets. Because Spartacus is a season-ender that draws a big crowd to a small island, buy early — and plan your ferry and lodging at the same time, since both get scarce after Labor Day.
You can, but it's tight. The party runs into the night and the after-Labor-Day ferry schedule is thinner than in summer, so if you want to stay for the Ice Palace underwear party, it's far easier to book a room in Cherry Grove and stay over. Confirm the last ferry to Sayville before you decide.
Spartacus is the perfect distillation of what makes Fire Island Fire Island: theatrical, uninhibited, welcoming, and a little bittersweet — the whole summer community squeezing one last joyful night out of Cherry Grove before winter. For 2026 it's Saturday, September 19.
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