Small Town, Big Heart

A fishing village on the eastern tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is a bastion of inclusiveness for the LGBTQ+ community—and anyone else who wants to join the fun. JORDAN KISNER discovers Provincetown, a modern-day utopia surrounded by sand dunes and sea.

- JORDAN KISNER

I HADN’T SPENT much time in Provincetown, Massachusetts, before last summer, but I had been given to understand that it’s a place not entirely like the rest of Cape Cod. If Cape Cod is beach-club conservatism and navy-blue-striped American prep, Provincetown is glitter and magic, poets and painters, and queens—or so the hearsay went.

My partner, Lora-Faye, and I arrived by car and were greeted not by glitter, but by a warren of narrow lanes lined with tidy houses and gardens bursting with spectacular beds of flowers. Through these lanes strolled men, usually young but sometimes middleaged or older, walking hand in hand, evidently on their way to the beach or returning to their own hydrangeathick front yards. Lora-Faye and I live in New York City, where there is no shortage of gay couples, but there was something remarkable about seeing only gay people on a street lined with white picket fences and American flags. Lora-Faye looked out the windshield, astonished. “What kind of colonial gay Disneyland is this?” she asked.