The sordid history of the Meat Rack is about more than simple sex. It was birthed from repression and persecution and it speaks to our need to find safe spaces to explore our queer selves. Since it became popularized in homo-circles in the 1940’s, the Meat Rack has been used as a place for anonymous sexual adventures for decades. During the McCarthy Era men found freedom in the sandy strip of grass and trees between Cherry Grove and the Fire Island Pines. As gay liberation expanded our ideas of what it meant to have “community”, men frequented the Meat Rack to experience a sexual freedom and to cultivate their queerness.