TRAVELOGUE
Untamed P-town
Returning to Provincetown a changed man, this writer finds a wild nightlife even in an off-season. BY JACOB ANDERSON-MINSHALL
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p Commercial Street business where the window reflects the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown t The author aboard the 47-foot yacht with Moment Sailing Adventures
of the Delta variant that would run through P-town like wildfire, leaving nearly 1,000 confirmed cases despite 75 percent of those being among the immunized. Provincetown made it through unscathed, with no deaths, and says it’s an even safer place to visit since they learned from the experience. On the narrow tip of Cape Cod, the town of under 3,000 (during the summer it can swell to 60,000) is immensely walkable and bikeable. Ptown Bikes provides convenient rentals, and most inns in town have bicycles as well.
With nar row streets and a fair amount of pedestrian traffic, it’s hard to maneuver a car around and I was happy to arrive on Bay State Cruise Company’s Provincetown Fast Ferry from Boston Harbor. The 90 minute trip down the coast was beautiful. Provincetown’s bustling Commercial Street is crowded with quaint shops and busy restaurants. Although I spent much of my visit away from the area I returned every evening. At the Crown & Anchor for dinner and a drag show I especially enjoyed the crème brûlée.
GETTY IMAGES (OPENER); JACOB ANDERSON-MINSHALL (ALL OTHERS BOTH PAGES)
he first time I v isited P r o v i n c e t o w n , Ma ssachuset t s, I wa s a young dyke who was escaping from personal drama in Northampton, a town known as Lesbianville, U.S.A., even back in 1989, when I followed a girlfriend there. In the six months since arriving I’d had my heart broken, had to move three times, been fired for being a lesbian, and been held up at gunpoint. When a housemate suggested I go to P-town for a few days to clear my head, I jumped at the chance. It was off-season and a lesbian inn owner she knew let me stay in one of the rooms for free. I credit the psychological space that the seaside solitude afforded me with literally saving my life. And yet, in the ensuing decades, after I went back to my western roots, met my lovely wife, moved to California, and matured into the transgender magazine editor I am today, I never returned to P-town. Until this year. In some ways the queer tourist town hasn’t changed in the past 30 years. But I certainly have. I don’t have the kind of adrenaline-and-alcoholfueled drama that I did in my 20s. I was happy to arrive in the offseason (before mask mandates were lifted but after indoor meals returned). I came and went well before the rise
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