xx033 • Provincetown

I've been to paradise, but I've never been to me.

Writing to you from back home in Brooklyn after my single dad summer vacation— minus my actual child. (Don’t feel bad for her, she had two upstate trips bookending her first week of summer camp.) 

I started my adventures with a years-overdue return to Provincetown with my chosen family of gay men, their dogs, and gaggles of shirtless muscles. Then after an epic day of travel from Massachusetts to Mississippi, I spent the rest of the week in the Deep South visiting with another branch of my chosen family: two moms, their two kids, and their large extended southern family. 

The trip made good on a promise I made 20 years ago to visit Tupelo and was timed around a Brandi Carlile show in Nashville. It was hot AF, The Indigo Girls bowed out with COVID, the amphitheater was struck twice with lighting… thankfully the skies eventually cleared and the city waived curfew. Halfway through Brandi’s set Wynonna surprised everyone on stage, and now I can say I went to church in Tennessee.

It’s not geographically bicoastal, but definitely felt culturally bisexual. (At least one friend fired off that it might even be bipolar.)

This is my first piece for the Substack-ified version of this newsletter. As I get back into a writing rhythm I’m sharing an early draft from a much longer piece I’m working on about generational queerness and place-making. Please excuse the uncorrected copy—getting this out before the demands of real life reclaim my time.

Hope you enjoy. 

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PROVINCETOWN

Where the women are strong. 
And the men are pretty.

It’s the perfect tee shirt slogan for the place where I became both. 

I used to wear this exact shirt in minty green to my suburban Virginia high school. It was one of a handful of soft statements I rotated through to make sure it was clear I wasn’t like the other girls. When I was feeling a little extra I wore another Don’t Panic classic: simple, bright white tee with 2QT2BSTR8 in Helvetica bold, black. The latter I lifted from my father’s dresser; the former I picked out for myself.

Don’t Panic was a small chain of gay gift shops from the mid-90s that capitalized on increased queer visibility with witty tee shirts and rainbow tchotchkes. At their peak there was a shop with bright rainbow stairs on San Francisco’s Castro Street, an iconic Santa Monica Blvd corner in West Hollywood, and a prime location in the middle of Provincetown’s cruisey Commercial Street. I eventually visited all of them.

I first heard tales of Provincetown from my father. He came back from a weekend away with his new lover and described to me an idyllic Cape Cod village that was ‘wrong way’ up. Yes, you could be openly gay there but what stuck with me most was his take on the geographic disorientation. What you expected to be east was actually the West End and vice versa. That the preferred method of arrival was by boat added to the romantic fairy tale. A town for fairies, arriving by ferry, with the sound of their heels and roller bags clicking on the wooden piers.