three trips to Provincetown
looking for the future at the end of the continent
July 2018
I had a day off from the bookstore and took myself to Provincetown. I knew I was leaving Boston soon, and wanted to get there before I left. And I was seeking, I suppose, a glimpse of myself; a look into a future I was only just beginning to imagine. As far as I could see at the moment, the future entailed cutting my hair short, wearing a lot of backwards baseball caps, and riding my bike everywhere I possibly could.
It happened to be Bear Week. As I biked through the dunes, everyone smiled and waved and said hi to me, shows of solidarity as we chugged up and down the sudden steep inclines of the dunes. I rode to Race Point Beach and lay there reading – unaware of Boy Beach around the other side of the peninsula – then rode back into town. In town I put on the shirt that made me feel most like a boy, a cotton button-up with narrow red and white stripes, and turned my Oakland A’s hat around backwards in the afternoon sun. I drank decaf iced coffee through a paper straw and strolled the length of Commercial Street, back and forth. Men congregated on porches, and some called out and waved to passersby, me included.
At the Canteen, I waited in line for the bathroom. A tall twink asked me if I was there for Bear Week; I could have exploded at the mere suggestion that I could be there for Bear Week. I said I wasn’t, alas, but was enjoying the scene. “It’s an aggressive week,” he said, looking faintly harrowed, albeit in a way that suggested he’d enjoyed his harrowing experiences. “I’ve seen some things.”
I wanted to see some things. Such things were out of my reach that day, I knew. But still I stayed in town until the sun started to set, walking, seeing and being seen.
June 2022
Five months post-top surgery, I found myself at East End Books, leafing through a biography of Frank O’Hara. I had been talking with a guy via app, and thought I spotted him coming through the door. Naturally my response was to look away and pretend to be engrossed in the book, even as I could feel him meandering past me. After he left, I messaged him and we confirmed: yup, we just saw each other. (I dream of something that maybe never happens anymore – locking eyes from across the room, walking straight up to someone without previewing them online first. But I guess they’re training wheels, anyway, for me; they also offer the crucial ability to tacitly disclose you’re trans ahead of time, weeding out anybody who’s going to freak out, rather than having to bring it up in person, in the moment.)
We met up at the Boatslip tea dance, which as far as I can tell is so named because it takes place at teatime, at four in the afternoon. R was a sweet, burly guy who hugged me in greeting, and we talked easily, then flirted easily. It was cool and drizzling, so we had the uncovered area of the patio mostly to ourselves, after his friends wandered off.
Still practically brand new, I was braced for things to get weird around the topic of me being trans: weird either in that he wouldn’t be into it, or that he’d be too into it. Instead it came up as naturally as did his family owning a Thai restaurant in Orlando: a relevant part of one’s life, but not the focal point of the encounter. I mentioned that this was the first summer I could take my shirt off at the beach, and he asked whether I’d just had top surgery. Within minutes, I was unbuttoning my shirt so he could trace the way the trail of hair was growing and darkening up from my belly button toward my chest. In between stretches of making out, he asked how long I’d been on T, and was surprised to hear it had only been about a year and a half. I know, I said – imagine how much hotter I’ll be in a year! “You’re very fucking hot already,” he said, “in a year I’m gonna be like, excuse me, can I get a dance ticket?”
Our nights took us, grudgingly, in different directions, and unless I upgrade to Scruff Pro for $16.99 a month, I’ll never even be able to see my message history with R again. It doesn’t matter: I walked back down to the Canteen beaming at everyone I passed. I had arrived.
From the notes app in my phone on this 2022 trip:
· Agador Spartacus works at The Canteen and I love him. “Oysters for JORDAAAAAAAN!”
· A penhasco is a DELICIOUS Portuguese treat, a meringue perfectly crunchy on the outside and delightfully soft inside, fluffy, textured, sweet, A+
· RIP Frank O’Hara, you would have loved Scruff
June 2023
This year I came back with friends. Last year R had said to me, upon finding I was there alone, “you’re brave!” So I came back with friends, and I talked my dear friend A – who, on top of being obnoxiously handsome, has about 15 years more gay experience than I do – into joining me for the tea dance.
The way I have set up this triptych, I should be telling you that we had a threesome with a hot sailor; that would be the appropriate culmination of this journey. What actually happened was less spicy, but lovelier. We spent two hours talking about it all, the scene around us and scenes like it, what we loved and what we found exhausting about it. We drank endless vodka sodas and ran into a guy I had met in San Juan a few months earlier (that sentence alone! I have become the sort of person who meets someone in San Juan, and then runs into him in Provincetown).
And now to be a baby gay at the age of 32: surrounded by beautiful men standing in groups of four or six, unsure how often anyone breaks out of those groups to go chat up someone interesting; unsure how one would start such a conversation, if one wished to; overwhelmed at the illusion of choice, which seemed to result in everyone looking over everyone else’s shoulders for other, possibly better options.
At one of the bookstores in town, I bought Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance from the sweet green-haired queer at the counter (tipped off by many references to it in Gay Bar, which I had studied the summer before like I was going to be quizzed on it). To quote from the former book now: “Now of all the bonds between homosexual friends, none was greater than that between friends who danced together. The friend you danced with, when you had no lover, was the most important person in your life; and for people who went without lovers for years, that was all they had.”
And for all that Dancer from the Dance’s main character, Malone, spends his time yearning for romance – the story is framed by letters between two friends, one of whom is writing the story of the characters they knew in New York in the 70s. Nobody finds the one lover they’ll be with for the rest of their life, not in the frame narrative or in the main one. Malone’s greatest love affair is with the city of New York and every man in it, the constantly renewing sense of possibility. And the two friends in correspondence have, in the end, what lasts the longest: each other, and the stories.
