There was a time when the seaside town of Long Spit was known only to a few wealthy families and a straggle of New England beachgoers. But when gay developers from Man-hattan, searching for a new place for summer shares and tea dances, get a look at its gently curving beaches, they hatch an ingenious plan to transform the sleepy Rhode Island hideaway into the next gay hotspot. If only someone would tell the townsfolk.<br><br>As a contingent of gym-buffed and cell-phone-toting vacationers descends on the village, some locals are outraged, others strangely titillated. Hollis Wynbourne, a reclusive antiques dealer and longtime subject of gossip, is drawn from his cocoon by the sight of sunbathing beauties; wealthy Wesley Herndon suddenly finds the town overrun with his two favorite attractions, frisky hunks and yachts of pedigree; and Anthony, a callow eighteen-year-old, embarks on a sentimental education he never expected to get in his own backyard. An uproarious send-up of both small-town provincialism and the absurdities of contemporary gay life, The Summer They Came will capture you with its portrait of a town you thought you knew, run amuck.