The New Republic

The actual dimensions of the thong remain somewhat in dispute. But
on a Monday night in July, an aspiring drag queen named Barbie-Q
was detained outside the Crown %amp% Anchor Inn in Provincetown.
Her thong was apparently too revealing to be worn on the street.
One eyewitness told me that the arresting police officer had
allegedly complained, "What if my wife or children saw you dressed
up like that?" In Provincetown, a small, countercultural enclave at
the tip of Cape Cod, them's fightin' words. Arresting drag queens
for wearing skimpy clothing in Ptown is not unlike arresting a
priest for saying Mass in Saint Patrick's Cathedral. Few would
claim that the many drag queens who clomp up and down the town's
main street are aesthetically on a par with the searing sunsets,
dappled shingles, and golden dunes that you see on postcards from
the Cape. But unshaven men in frocks and pumps are a central part
of the Ptown flora and fauna, and locals take their civic duty to
protect them quite seriously--even when, like Barbie-Q, they had
had previous minor run- ins with the law.The arrest wouldn't have seemed such a big deal if it hadn't been
part of a trend toward more aggressive police work--i.e., normal
for everywhere else--by a new chief recently imported from, yes,
Texas. When I first heard that a Texas police captain had been
hired in Ptown, I thought it would make a great premise for a
situation comedy. But, alas, the reality has been more situation
than comedy. An inquiry by the Provincetown Banner revealed that
"protective custody" arrests had risen markedly since the previous
summer. Rumors spread about people being yanked into jail for
walking home drunk after closing time. A patch of rocky sand under
the deck of the Boatslip Inn--which in previous years had served as
an impromptu sex club for after-hours revelers--was now subject to
regular police patrols. During the week of July 4, when thousands
of muscle guys descended on this little village for raves to music
made palatable only by discreet consumption of illegal substances,
the cops went into overdrive. Subsequent dances were canceled to
protect the patrons from the increasingly assertive policing.

In Ptown this series of events meant one obvious thing: drama. Every
summer, it seems, we have some kind of controversy. Last year it
was the town's attempt to shut down an all-nude singing review
called "Naked Boys Singing." It was one of the worst shows I've
ever seen in Ptown--and that's saying something. But the principle
of defending tacky pseudo-entertainment is not one Ptowners could
or should abandon lightly. So we didn't, and the show simply
continued despite mounting fines. This year the fuss about the new
law-and-order regime came to a head at a town meeting, where
residents presented their impressive list of complaints to the new
police chief and town elders. Robert Putnam would be proud of the
rampant communitarianism on display. Grievances were aired and,
after much hyperventilation, the town selectmen averred that, while
they still backed the police chief, he obviously had some cultural
adjustments to make. And for the most part, August seemed to pass
without any similar trauma. Texas, it turns out, we ain't.

Ptown is a place, after all, in which the law has always been
enforced more by the spirit than by the letter. It has long been a
place of outlaws, outsiders, refugees from somewhere or other. It
therefore exists in its own way as a petri dish for what is now
described as "diversity." It's not racially diverse, mind you; like
much of Cape Cod, it's numbingly white. But it mixes working-class
Portuguese fishermen and their families, nesting and
entrepreneurial lesbians, old Cape Cod dynasties, imported Jamaican
manual workers, aging drag queens, European exchange students, and
plenty of wealthy gay men. Add to this mix writers, painters, and
druggies, and you begin to see why both John Waters and Norman
Mailer call it home. (The ancient joke is that Ptown is a drinking
town with a fishing problem.) The comedian Margaret Cho is the
latest arrival; one of the more surreal experiences of this summer
was finding myself on a makeshift stage at the Governor Bradford
bar singing a karaoke version of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" with
Cho, Ryan Landry (a local drag genius), Penny Champagne (Landry's
boyfriend in drag), my boyfriend (not in drag), and several quite
drunk teenage girls who, by their ministrations, had clearly got
the wrong idea about my sexual orientation. We had a blast.

Ptown, of course, has its puritan aspects as well. It's highly
regulated, highly taxed, and passersby will sometimes tell you how
to walk your dog. Renovating your home is a little like applying
for a driving license in the old Soviet Union. The ongoing culture
clash between the more hedonistic gay men and the more
serious-minded lesbians is also a reminder of the tension always
present in the gay-lesbian "community." Straight-gay relations are
equally fraught at times and were made worse by the publication of
Peter Manso's new book, Ptown, which bemoans the fact that so many
super-wealthy gay men have allegedly taken over the town and forced
its older and less affluent (i.e., straight) residents out. Growing
income inequality has also made Ptown's cultural balance more
precarious. When I first came here, 13 years ago, there were far
more drifters, wanderers, freaks, potheads, and other assorted
strays who showed up, were made welcome, and then moved on.
Increasingly, these types simply can't afford the rents here or
they have to spend every waking minute working at menial jobs to
keep a roof over their heads. So while most of us who arrived in
the late '80s and early '90s are still coming back, the ranks of
the younger generations are clearly thinning. No one knows quite
what to do about it. We're all terrified of becoming some kind of
Nantucket in pumps.

But somehow, I feel confident Ptown will escape that fate. It has an
ecology of its own, an ecology that quietly sifts through newcomers
and selects the ones who get it, who know why they love it and see
the same glint in each others' ornery eyes. Ever since I first came
here, people have been bemoaning how Ptown was going down the
tubes, how it wasn't the same as it used to be, and on and on. But
this coiled, exposed sandbar of difference hangs on. Perhaps it's
the sheer, gob-smacking natural beauty of the place, its light, its
spiral of land at sea, its meandering mischief. Each year I put off
leaving longer and longer, as the place wraps itself around me like
a vine. It isn't real, I realize. But somehow it is more real. You
can come here, as Thoreau wrote, and leave all America behind. And
then you realize that this too is America, unkempt, unruly, pied,
prickly, tolerant, an emblem of what the future of the whole place
could be, if we wanted, if we tried.

By Andrew Sullivan

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