Gay Guide to Provincetown
Provincetown has been an art colony since 1899 and a theater town since 1916, when the Provincetown Players staged Eugene O'Neill's first produced play in a fish house out on a wharf. Tennessee Williams wrote here through the 1940s. Both men drank at the Atlantic House, which sits in a building from 1798 and has catered openly to gay customers since at least the 1950s, which makes it a serious candidate for the oldest gay bar in the country. By the 2010 census, Provincetown had the highest proportion of same-sex couples of any municipality in the United States, at 163 per thousand households.
The town is essentially one street. Commercial Street runs three miles along the harbor and carries nearly everything: the A-House and Macho Bar tucked off it on Masonic Place, the Crown & Anchor complex with the Paramount and the Wave inside it, the Boatslip, Aqua Bar, Bayside Betsy's, and the Gifford House with Purgatory underneath. Brass Key and Shipwreck sit a block back on Bradford. You walk, or you rent a bike; driving here is a mistake in July.
Afternoon Tea Dance at the Boatslip is the fixed point of a Provincetown day, and has been since the 1970s. Most people stay in guesthouses rather than hotels, which is part of why the place feels less like a resort and more like a town that happens to be full of you.
The calendar runs on theme weeks and they genuinely change who is here. Bear Week takes July, Carnival takes August and brings the parade, Women's Week owns October, and Family Week fills the town with queer parents and their kids. The year-round population is a few thousand and summer multiplies it many times over.
Herring Cove and Race Point are the beaches, backed by the dunes of the National Seashore, and the water is cold enough to be a talking point. AIDS cut through the year-round population here in the 1980s and 1990s in a way a town this small could not absorb quietly, and Provincetown has never been shy about saying so.