tl;dr: I’m very lucky, and I love being gay. Also please see my standard warning.
I’m coming to the end of two weeks of vacation in Provincetown, my first two weeks of vacation since buying (and not losing) a house here in January. My houseful of friends all departed yesterday. I’m working from here next week, before Bunter and I fly back to London on the 2nd of September. As I’m wont to do, I’ve been reflecting on just how lucky I am, and on what I’ve learned about myself and this magical place from my extended stay.
First, it’s been easier than I expected, both to live and to work here. This is probably the longest stretch in my 38 years in which I’ve moved through the world no faster than I can propel myself. That’s coming to an end today when I go on a dune tour, but I’m about 99.99% certain that I’ve never gone this long before without some form of motorized transport. I haven’t missed it. Bunter walks slowly, and seems to miss his dog friends back home, but overall he seems happy here as well.
To toot my own horn: I have been remarkably productive here. As I’ll mention later, there are plenty of distractions here, day and night. But I’m a creature of habit, and one of those habits is not going out after dinner, which can make for very productive days.
My work benefits from concentration. Summer meant I had fewer meetings than usual, and that meant I could dedicate decent blocks of time to reading, reflecting, and producing good work. That made the switching costs between forms of work — and even those between different subject areas — feel less oppressive, more natural. It will be for my colleagues to decide whether the work I did was of high quality, but I feel like it’s been some of my best productivity in years…and undertaken with a happily earnest focus on excellence that’s difficult to maintain for long in an HVAC’ed, brightly lit office.
The wifi here is fast enough to do VCs confidently, and the signal is strong enough that I can work under the arbor in the garden, with Bunter sleeping in the ivy, tethered to my Adirondack chair. Being able to get work done in this setup has brought me no small amount of joy.
I should admit that all my good productivity was job-related. I never found my groove on writing, though I did get a small amount done at the beginning. I’ll take another crack at that when I get back to London. I’ve certainly collected a lot of useful notes (one highlight overheard at Tea: “Are you a pool person or a beach person?” asked one man. “I’m a bottom,” said his interlocutor).
All that said, I couldn’t work from here permanently. I miss the office, odd though that might sound. I miss my colleagues, and hearing what they’re working on, and bouncing ideas off of them, and seeing their daily struggles and achievements, and trying to help where I can. The Internet has many benefits, but technology has offered me no substitute for sitting with people and hearing their thoughts unfold over time.
Second, these weeks have been an ongoing reminder that it’s okay to be an introvert…but that no one other than myself can guard the alone time I need in order to feel like I’m thriving. I mentioned in my reflections on the gay cruise that I struggled to find a sustainable amount of alone time there.
My introversion is complicated by my having a strong commitment to investing time and energy in my friendships, which means I sometimes overexert myself socially. Provincetown has a natural rhythm that certainly helps: since all the bars close at 1am, it’s possible to go out every night and still get 8 hours of sleep without losing the whole of the next day. But I seem to have stumbled upon an even better rhythm, for me anyway: Tea ➡️ dinner ➡️ reading until I’m tired ➡️ bed ➡️ up at 5.30am. I get the alone time I need to recharge, but going to Tea every day means that I get to see who is in town, catch up with old friends, and meet a few new people.
Provincetown’s culture seems to support introverts in other ways too. As in London, it’s completely acceptable here to talk to someone’s dog for 5 minutes without interacting directly. People are inclusive with their invitations but not pushy about them. And a nod across the street or a wave of hello is enough of a greeting for most acquaintances, or friends one caught up with in the previous day.
I did learn one thing about myself: filling the house with friends for two consecutive weeks was probably too much for me. By the time they all left at the end of the fortnight I was getting pretty grumpy for a decent stretch of solitude. The cottage, it turns out, isn’t quite far enough away from the house to allow for full disconnection from others, though I could certainly build some habits that enhance its ability to do that for me. More problematically, holiday creates some bedtime inertia towards later nights, which aren’t my favorite thing. Most surprisingly, perhaps, was the extent to which the house vibe differed between the two weeks, especially since 3 of the 5 people in the house last week had been in the house the week before. I was just starting to get used to the ebb and flow of house energies when things got switched up. Neither was better than the other, to be clear: just different.
Third, an extended stay in Provincetown has felt both different and similar to my previous one- or two- week stays. The differences are easier to pinpoint. I feel less urgency to do particular things. I think I’ve been to two of the ten possible Purgatory Underwear Parties that have been available to me, for example. And I haven’t made it to Church at Grotta Bar even once. Indeed, all events have taken on the urgency level that I’ve always maintained for the dick dock: a vague intention of attending, thwarted by my strong inclination to be asleep around 10pm. That’s had some downsides: my vague intentions to make time for whale watching, dune tours, and sunset cruises have gone mostly unrealized. But I’ve been able to get plenty of reading done. Second, I have met a set of awesome year-round and summer residents. They make a walk down Commercial Street slower, certainly, but they’re also a bulwark against the feeling each Saturday afternoon that all one’s friends are dead.
Other things felt very familiar. My drive to go to Tea every day was unabated. I have only missed it once, and that was to go to a wedding (plus ahem). And while the urgency to do things has been much lower, my desire to spend quality time with people has felt just as urgent since so many folks cycle out each Saturday. There’s always someone to catch up with, but there’s not much overlap between this week’s set and next week’s. It’s therefore felt like a much more satisfying experience of the town, while making me appreciate London even more. Back home if I don’t manage to get dinner with Dorothy one week, we can do so the following week. It’s not entirely the same here. And trying to see the weekly crew can make it difficult to take time to see longer-term residents. And that gives me pause: how fortunate I am to have this problem!
Finally: I love being gay. There have been more reminders of that in the past few weeks than I can remember, but some have stayed with me. I’m currently reading a decent but not amazing book on gayborhoods, which has had me thinking about the purpose, promise, and ethical implications of queer communities. I’ll save the book review for another time, but it did remind me of a passage from The Inheritance that always makes me cry:
To anyone else, it was simply a house. But Eric knew it was Walter’s house. And because of that, he found it beautiful. Eric thought of Walter, and the story of his friend Peter who came here to die, of all the young men who came here to find peace in their final days. He thought of all the men who died in those years and what they might have become, what the world would look like today had they been allowed to end their story on their own terms. Eric wondered what his life would be like if he had not been robbed of a generation of mentors, of poets, of friends and, perhaps, lovers. Eric breathed and filled his lungs with the past. It stretched before him now, limitless — the past and the present, mingling together inside the house, inside him.
Or, earlier, when Eric speaks for himself:
We need our community, we need our history. How else can we teach the next generation who they are and how they got here? Human culture from time immemorial has been transmitted through stories, right? Think about the ancient epics: the Odyssey, the Mahabharata, oral histories that allowed cultures to understand themselves. In order to become an honorable Greek, one had to study the actions of Odysseus. A young Hindu would reflect on the conversation between Arjuna and Krishna on the battlefield. African Americans teach their children about slavery and Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement so that they will understand Freddie Grey, Sandra Bland, and Trayvon Martin. Just as my family taught me about the Holocaust . And from this intergenerational conversation, passed along in some cases for millennia, history is conveyed and cultures survived. Greeks thump their chests and reflect on the invasion of Troy. Black children stand just a little taller at the mention of Rosa Parks. And we in our own culture feel the stirring of pride when we reflect on the meaning of Stonewall, Edie Windsor, Bayard Rustin, Harvey Milk, and the bravery of the men and women on the front lines of the epidemic. And to let that go means we’ve relinquished a part of ourselves. If we can’t have a conversation with our past, then what will be our future Who are we? And more importantly: who will we become?
After New York’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Provincetown was the first place in the US (and probably the world) to have an AIDS support group. If you haven’t cried in a library recently, I recommend the video exhibit in the Ptown library that looks at the town’s response to the epidemic.
Queer culture is mimetic, which has strengths and weaknesses. People don’t choose their sexuality, and the grand majority of SOGI minorities are raised by a majority (straight, cisgendered) culture that is ill-equipped to help them understand their collective past. People don’t choose to be queer, but that means they have to choose to be part of queer culture. Almost no one is defaulted in, since it happens largely through inter-generational non-familial contact. It’s *this* as much as anything else, that makes Provincetown feel like home to me. Whether on the ferry, or a coffee shop, or Tea, or the table next to me at dinner, I get to meet older LGBT people here. And listen to their stories and ask questions and consider just how lucky I am.
I know that straight people can make meaningful friends in adulthood, but in my experience they do so rarely. Life, perhaps, gets in the way. Certainly being a parent reduces the time available for socializing with new or old friends. The default expectations of heterosexual relationships preclude married straight people from forming deep attachments to anyone who could be a potential sex partner. As an aside: I’ve found one of the most effective if perplexing ways to explain to straight friends why I’m not dating a particularly good friend is by saying that we’re the type of friends who only have group sex together.
And of course life is busy. So (and I could be wrong here: I’m looking at it from the outside) it seems to me as if most of my straight friends cling to the friends they made in high school and college. Moving to a new city or a new country, they struggle to build a new community. Queers, on the other hand, have to build their communities as they grow up, finding people who will support them and their growth, and cultivating those communities as their growth requires new forms of support. And so my houseguests ranged in age from 23 to 43, and my dinner companions have extended to the upper 60s. While our lives are different, we are all adults, and we can engage with each other as peers, finding affinities and friendships in places that might not be promising at first glance.
What else have I felt particularly grateful about this visit? Most importantly: all body types are welcome in Provincetown. This is not just a place for the young and beautiful, though they’re welcome of course. If you’re an LRB subscriber I highly recommend this essay from last year on the political ramifications of sexual decisions. This passage has stayed with me particularly:
The obvious irony of ‘What the Flip?’ is that Grindr, by its nature, encourages its users to divide the world into those who are and those who are not viable sexual objects according to crude markers of identity — to think in terms of sexual ‘deal-breakers’ and ‘requirements’. In so doing, Grindr simply deepens the discriminatory grooves along which our sexual desires already move. But online dating — and especially the abstracted interfaces of Tinder and Grindr, which distil attraction down to the essentials: face, height, weight, age, race, witty tagline — has arguably taken what is worst about the current state of sexuality and institutionalised it on our screens.
A presupposition of ‘What the Flip?’ is that this is a peculiarly gay problem: that the gay male community is too superficial, too body-fascist, too judgy. The gay men in my life say this sort of thing all the time; they all feel bad about it, perpetrators and victims alike (most see themselves as both). I’m unconvinced. Can we imagine predominantly straight dating apps like OKCupid or Tinder creating a web series that encouraged the straight ‘community’ to confront its sexual racism or fatphobia? If that is an unlikely prospect, and I think it is, it’s hardly because straight people aren’t body fascists or sexual racists. It’s because straight people — or, I should say, white, able-bodied cis straight people — aren’t much in the habit of thinking there’s anything wrong with how they have sex. By contrast, gay men — even the beautiful, white, rich, able-bodied ones — know that who we have sex with, and how, is a political question.
Some of the best sex I’ve had this summer has been with people who are far from my “type”, but because of chemistry or circumstance (e.g. post-pizza invitations) we’ve found ourselves in bed together. Some of those tumbles have blossomed into meaningful friendships. Others have remained friendly acquaintances or even fuck buddies. But they’ve all been a healthy reminder that the ‘distil[ation of] attraction down to the essentials’ is something that is both anathema to me and something that can only be remedied by queer spaces that exist in the real world. Not unlike retaining meaningful relationships with friends and colleagues.
Which is not to say that Provincetown is a judgment free place…though in my experience it’s short lived for most people here: within a few days, people realize that the friendliness and sense of community they find here is not a facade but a real aspect of the town’s culture. One of my houseguests was more resistant than most to the idea that he’d find someone to have sex with on his first night in town. He insisted that he wasn’t in the right shape or state of mind. But he hit it off with someone that evening at A House and continued flirting with the same guy through the rest of the week. Which warmed my heart.
All of which is to say that this trip has made me feel incredibly lucky, and like I’m building a home for myself in this little corner of the world. Although it’s rather bland to finish two successive reflections with the same quote, I can’t help myself. In the final essay of Upstream, Mary Oliver writes:
I don’t know if I’m heading toward heaven or that other, dark place, but I know I have already lived in heaven for fifty years. Thank you, Provincetown.
