P-town's ups and dunes: is Provincetown a peaceful gay haven or a once-charmed village looted by gay tourists? As two new books suggest, it all depends on whom you ask.Ptown: Art, Sex, and Money on the Outer Cape * Peter Manso * Scribner * $25 Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown * Michael Cunningham * Crown Journeys * $16 Twelve years ago I took a boat from Boston on my first trip to Provincetown. Approaching the former fishing village, founded in the 18th century on a sandbar sandbar or offshore bar Submerged or partly exposed ridge of sand or coarse sediment that is built by waves offshore from a beach. The swirling turbulence of waves breaking off a beach excavates a trough in the sandy bottom. at the end of Massachusetts's Cape Cod, I chuckled in awe at the crown of white steeples, the rustic wharves Structures erected on the margin of Navigable Waters where vessels can stop to load and unload cargo. Cities located on lakes, rivers, and oceans usually have at least one wharf, where ships can deliver and pick up passengers and load and unload various types of goods. , and the looming stone watchtower on the horizon. On land, I en countered more drag queens, lesbians, heterosexual cross-dressers, gay Republicans, and sexual fluidity in a single week than I had in my entire life. I have returned every year since, lately spending half the summer snared by the rugged landscape and laissez-faire lifestyle. Two new books, one by a sensationalistic sen·sa·tion·al·ism n. 1. a. The use of sensational matter or methods, especially in writing, journalism, or politics. b. Sensational subject matter. c. Interest in or the effect of such subject matter. straight writer, the other by a Pulitzer Prize-winning gay novelist, offer two distinct, and distinctly engrossing, views of the quixotic quix·ot·ic also quix·ot·i·cal adj. 1. Caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals; idealistic without regard to practicality. 2. New England town The New England town is the basic unit of local government in each of the six New England states. An institution that does not have a direct counterpart in most other U.S. states, New England towns are conceptually similar to civil townships in that they were originally set up so . The more controversial--residents of Provincetown were abuzz about it months before publication--is Ptown: Art, Sex, and Money on the Outer Cape by Peter Manso. The book lives up to its subtitle--if not in substance, then at least in the gay-obsessed author's relentless preoccupations. Here's the kind of information he finds noteworthy: "The men who come to Ptown for sex--and that's most of them--have their own vocabulary: Rice Queen: anyone attracted only to Asians ... Chocolate Queen: those who like only blacks ... Potato Queen: those who only like whites." The book is full of curiously derived facts. Manso writes about the town's infamous public sex spot: "Occasionally, local straight men visit the Dick Dock to receive a competent blow job, but if they see the person who serviced them the next day on the street, they do not acknowledge him." Ultimately, one is left to imagine Manso's method of obtaining data, since this 307-page book contains only 27 footnotes. The whole project is so haphazardly researched and edited that Manso even describes one of gay Provincetown's drugs of choice as "GBH GBH (in Britain and South Africa) grievous bodily harm ." (Frankly, I have no idea how popular GHB GHB abbr. gamma-hydroxybutyrate GHB 1 Gamma-hydroxybutyrate, γ-hydroxy-butyrate See GABA 2 Glycosylated hemoglobin, see there GHb Glycosylated hemoglobin, see there is; I am that apparently rare gay man who goes to Provincetown to read by the water and ride the bike trails.) The impression is not so much homophobic as clueless. Although Manso's survey of Provincetown's century-old art scene is perfunctory, he does, toward the book's end, convincingly project a bleak cultural future for a town whose artist colony and Portuguese fishing community have been gradually replaced by rich vacationing lesbians and gays. But by then Manso has packaged so much idiocy IDIOCY, med. jur. That condition of mind, in which the reflective, or all or a part of the affective powers, are either entirely wanting, or are manifested to the least possible extent. 2. Idiocy generally depends upon organic defects. as insight that any faith in his judgment is permanently shipwrecked. In Land's End: A Walk in Province-town, Michael Cunningham presents no grand opinions disguised as fact--just a lot of grand opinions. "With this book I hope to offer neither more nor less of my own particular devotion," he writes, Cunningham alternates between the personal (such as his disappointing first summer 20 years ago as a writing fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, was founded in 1968 by a group of American artists and writers to support promising individuals who were early in their creative careers. ) and the historical (the beaching of more than 600 whales during the mid 1800s; playwright Eugene O'Neill's fruitful stay). He also includes prose and verse from such present and former residents as Norman Mailer, Mark Doty, and Denis Johnson. An assured and engaging ham, Cunningham is the perfect guide, deftly capturing Provincetown's Dionysian delights and Apollonian beauty with wit, whimsy whim·sy also whim·sey n. pl. whim·sies also whim·seys 1. An odd or fanciful idea; a whim. 2. A quaint or fanciful quality: stories full of whimsy. , and lyricism. For him, sex in the dunes is "innocently bacchanalian--more creaturely than lewd." And when he writes of the "gulls gliding overhead, white as bone china, searching from their high silence for whatever they might be able to eat down there among the dunes and marshes, the black rooftops, the little lights tossing on the water as the tides move out or in," I am back on the boat from Boston, reliving my first visit, memory and myth resonant still. Bahr has written for The New York Times, The New York Times, The Morning daily newspaper, long the U.S. newspaper of record. From its establishment in 1851 it has aimed to avoid sensationalism and to appeal to cultured, intellectual readers. New York Times Book Review, and Poets & Writers. |
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