In 1976, a visitor in drag was
denied entry to a restaurant in the Fire Island Pines, an oceanfront
island community east of New York City. When a group of his friends
from the neighboring town of Cherry Grove heard what had happened,
they too dressed up in drag and returned to the Pines by water taxi
on July 4, 1976, staging what would become the first annual drag
"invasion."
Thirty years later, the annual Fourth of July Invasion of the Pines now attracts hundreds of drag queens and thousands of spectators to what has become the most spectacular and unusual Fourth of July event anywhere.