Provincetown

Summer 2005-2010

Province Lands Road

STUARD and I are walking through the Center of Town and he says, quite casually, “Notice anything missing?”
I look over at the Crown and Anchor, rebuilt after the fire some years earlier; I look left toward Galadriel’s, the Provincetown BookShop, Adams Pharmacy…
I haven’t spotted anything different. And STUARD answers his own question, prodding me to awareness:
“NO GAY PEOPLE!!!” elongating the phrase into eight syllables for emphasis on the obviousness of it.
I look around me.
And for the first time since we’ve been walking, I notice the crowd on Commercial Street is almost entirely composed of Heterosexual Couples with 2.2 children and 2.5 cars in their garage back home — the kind of people from Red States who for as long as I could remember were a shadowed minority here and only passed through this place for the express sole purpose of purchasing those exact items of Salt Water Taffy and Fudge.
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