It was in the endless runs of open mics and shows that this flippant and appealingly glib persona emerged.
Before this performance, Booster’s stage presence depended on what he has described as a “Hot Idiot” persona: libidinally driven, yet astute in his observations mockingly facile, but self-assured cheekily illiterate, but also, as one character in Fire Island says with admiration, “biting.” It’s a clever costume and putting it on has been a useful kind of drag in the last decade or so of Booster’s career, but Fire Island lets him add another dimension.īooster, born in South Korea and adopted into a white family in Illinois, got his start in standup in Chicago and then moved to New York, his name steadily rising with his queer peers. Later, through a glass window watching friends, he surveys a neon-soaked underwear party. But in Fire Island, the film he wrote, executive produced, and stars in, we see him lose his gaze in a mix of wonder and yearning, his eyes wandering on the ferry to the Fire Island Pines. It is relatively unusual to see Joel Kim Booster stare off into the middle distance.
