The Courage to Connect: Sexuality, Citizenship, and Community in Provincetown (review)

Faiman-Silva has written a provocative and complex study of Provincetown, Massachusetts. She has used interviews with residents, town resolutions and bylaws, some newspaper coverage, and scholarly sources from a variety of academic fields, primarily anthropology. Ptown, as locals and visitors call it, is a narrow peninsula at the very tip of Cape Cod. Its entire length is three miles. It is a stunningly beautiful place known for its haunting light, sea captain's homes, carefully tended yards, and gorgeous beaches. These captivate the casual visitor and the longtime resident. It is equally known as the most openly gay resort (proportionately in terms of population), where straights and gays interact on the streets, in town meetings, through antibias bylaws, in their jobs and schools, and through winter's difficulties.

(I have called Provincetown my home since 1973, when I sought refuge there from my homophobic parents. While I have lived and earned a living elsewhere, my home there is my true place of belonging. Thus my reading of Faiman-Silva's study is informed by my own experiences as well as her research. I have witnessed and lived through the changes the author describes and felt the tensions and possibilities that have existed among Ptown's residents.)

Faiman-Silva begins by asserting that the pervasive ethos in Provincetown is one of diversity and tolerance. She suggests that it can serve "as a prototype of community building across any social divide, be it sexual, racial, or class based" (11). To support her thesis she traces the town's roots and shifting demographics: Yankee, Portuguese, and bohemian. Even within the Portuguese community, she notes, various regions of origin from Portugal forced residents to accept and negotiate difference.

She then details the town's initial economy—dependent upon fishing—and its gradual shift in the 1970s toward dependence on tourism. This shift was caused by ever-increasing strict fisheries management and forced many longtime Portuguese residents to abandon or blend their means of support. Once this social landscape is laid out, Faiman-Silva begins the task of describing Ptown as a "borderland region" (94) with a dual personality: it is a charming mainstream rural fishing village and a sexually transgressive resort playground (200).

One of her foci is an examination of specific sites within the town that have been flash points of conflict. These are police-community relations, the public schools, and town meetings (decisions are made by a show of hands by residents to resolve contested issues). These two chapters are particularly well done, as they are based on extensive editorials from the Advocate and Banner, at one time the two competing weekly newspapers. By 2000 only the Banner survived, thus signaling what some thought of as a victory for the gay voice, since the Banner is owned by a lesbian, Alix Ritchie. Faiman-Silva also relies on accounts of competing factions, one of which sought to insert an antibias curriculum in the schools; the other, the straight community, fought this curriculum vehemently. In these two settings, she argues convincingly, "straights invoke heterosexual privilege, signifying their normalcy against a cultural tapestry where 'queer' is mainstream and the privileged sector of gay" (181). These two venues continue to be contentious realms, exacerbated by an ever-decreasing school-age population (in one recent year only one birth was recorded in town).

The bulk of her research details the wildly diverse sexual outlaws who populate the town. She rightly distinguishes between the year-rounders and the seasonal people, and it is in fact the tourists who often engage in the most publicly outrageous sexual transgressions. The author draws a clear and informed portrait of the sexual transgressors: gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, leather men, bears, muscle men, gay families, drag queens, and participants in camp drag. She explains how Commercial Street, the main street, serves as a place of performance and negotiated tolerance. Sexual transgressors of all sorts publicly display...