I’m in Provincetown for what is apparently “Family Week” (the season is organized into semi-official theme weeks—Bear Week, Women’s Week, Leather Week, etc.). The place is awash in gay parents navigating a life transition: the plumped muscle daddy in tactical black workout gear with a Van Cleef bracelet dragging a pink girl’s scooter, the tense PMCs in matching stretch-chino shorts pushing IVF twins in a stroller. There is also, of course, the cavalcade of sturdy lesbians in big t shirts who form the backbone of the week. It’s kind of charming to be surrounded by all this willful blood kinship, and it feels historically particular in an interesting way (we are across the street from the Human Rights Campaign gift shop, if that gives you some indication). The week does lead to some confounding arrangements of older families: a portly red-headed woman, sullen on her rickshaw, beside a roided-out Fort Lauderdale gay with whom she shares not one physical characteristic, and a kindly, dull looking straight man, who has been putting off getting a haircut (it will be very cheap when it happens) who seems to have never met either of the other two. Who are these people? And how do they know each other? It feels like an important reversal: I’m so used to bands of near clone gay guys describing themselves as “chosen family” that it’s more jarring to see the reality of unchosen family: dissimilar, but here together anyway through some mix of love and guilt.
Anyway—come here. It’s enchanting. We’re staying on the main drag, Commercial Street, in a little apartment in an old house, pained all white with a bed tucked under the eaves. My brain is not really functioning at the moment, but it’s not unpleasant: there’s blessedly little to think about. More soon.
To the listings!
From 1935, quite tall (58” and 56”). These machine age auctions from Wright are some of the best—always something new, and cool that it’s organized by style/period rather than medium. Check it out.
Kupka (1871-1957), Czech artist. Cubist (he was in the 1936 MoMA show) and then developed his own idiosyncratic style. This is nice.
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