The AIDS pandemic would soon enough give the lie to those stereotypes, as gay people, responding to government inaction, formed ad hoc activist groups like ACT UP to devise networks of treatment and care. In hindsight AIDS casts a shadow over Mr. Bianchi’s pictures of men roughhousing and coupling and gamboling and, yes, shaking tambourines. But the disease was unknown when Mr. Bianchi began taking his pictures, and thus the Polaroids offer an evocative glimpse of a community composed of what he termed “the brightest, most imaginative people on the planet, people at the top of their form in every field,” before many of them died.

Consider the cast of characters living in the Pines in those years, said Mr. Kirtzman, one of a team of investors who in 2010 bought the majority of the commercial real estate in the Pines, including the Botel, the former Bay Bar, the Blue Whale and the Pavilion. “You had Calvin Klein, Perry Ellis, Angelo Donghia, and they were only the most well-known denizens,” he said.

There were many others, he added, men like Andy Tobias, the journalist and author who has been the treasurer of the Democratic National Committee since 1999. There were movie stars and Broadway stars and television actors and a parade of high-profile transients out for the weekend, people like Luciano Pavarotti or Yoko Ono or Liza Minnelli or the singer Peter Allen.

There was Jerry Herman who, disembarking from the Fire Island ferry one afternoon soon after his “La Cage aux Folles” had swept the Tony Awards, was given a standing ovation by all the partygoers at the Pavilion for the boozy ritual called afternoon tea.

While gay people may no longer “need to take shelter from a hostile world back in reality,” as they once did, said Mr. Kirtzman, there remains something precious about a community formed by a once-marginalized people, a place safeguarding if not always celebrating difference. (As Larry Kramer, Edmund White, Andrew Holleran and others have pointed out, the Pines population skewed white and prosperously middle class.)