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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (April 1, 1988)
\ Provincetown C0venfm Cycle , (7 Works There was Herring Cove Beach. Like a combined music festival and faerie gathering from the future, the beach was life-changing. B Y See Vue PEUGEOT • PANASONIC FAGGIN (From Italy) Experience th e u n u su a l 95590 Highway 101 OPEN TUESDAY-SUNDAY 6.2 miles south of 230-7723 2025 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Yachats, Oregon 97498 (503) 547-3227 GAY DATING LINE O nly $2.94 per call. C a ll 24 hrs. V i J- ' Futons ★ Luxurious &. Affordable Futons. All cotton, cotton/foam core, wool/cotton. All sizes are available. • Platform &. Folding Frames. * Beautiful Futon Covers &. Pillows. Fine Art Ceramics, Hand-Woven Rugs &. Hand Painted Fabrics and Screens. cotton cloud futon qalleRy 3125 E. 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I was tains that do a lot more for my well-being. writing for The Ladder at the time and later Friends, definitely, but I’m such a hermit that I learned that the woman who sat at the bookstore probably communicate better by mail anyway. cash register was a Ladder cover artist, as It’s Provincetown that sometimes calls me anonymous as myself. back. Provincetown that comes flooding into The restaurants were a special treat. Even we my consciousness at odd times, a place that had no doubt about the waiters. They were ail it took to make us comfortable. Their presence, as we watched the other diners watch us, was permission to be ourselves and confirmation that we were just where we should be. Were there drag shows back then? I don’t remember. There certainly was not an influen tial gay businessperson’s group, nor were there openly gay guesthouses, nor a Womancrafts store. There was Herring Cove Beach. Like a combined music festival and faerie gathering from the future, the beach was life-changing. Never before had I seen so many gays in one place. It didn’t matter a bit if I talked to anyone or anyone to me, we were all still shy and scared of one another, still raw from the rejection of the rest of the world. We were there, an incon testable fact, in the biggest, broadest, brightest daylight we could find, and I was surrounded feels like lying in a lover’s arms. for once by my own. Carol and I went there first in, perhaps, 1969. One night Carol and I put on our very best Ours was a college marriage. When all the other ironed bell-bottoms and strolled the town with girls got engaged, we became lovers. When they the nonchalance of carefree window shoppers. all graduated and had their weddings, we col Our disguise did not fool us. Hearts hammer lected some cats and set up housekeeping in the ing, we were looking for the notorious Ace of ghetto. When they all flew off to Puerto Rico or Spaces, the lesbian bar. the Virgin Islands for honeymoons, we, some Now remember, back then the word lesbian what belatedly, made our first timid foray into had a sinister cast. The word bar doubled it. I’d Provincetown — P-Town, as the veterans called been hearing about the Ace of Spades since age it. Ah, to so comfortably belong! 15. By 1969 I’d built it in my head into a We rented a motel room in North Truro next towering, dungeon-like affair frequented by door. I almost think we would have stayed knife-wielding, duck-tailed, leather-jacketed, there, in hiding, if we hadn’t been forced into burly half-women who snarled at their slight, the gay mecca to find food. I remember teased-haired femmes and laughed four-eyed, that painful mixture of staring/not staring college-educated, scrawny baby-butches like that was cruising for us. the pinky me off the face of the earth. signals with which we told each other, “ There’s one!” Carol and I finally ran out of shops in which to linger. The Ace of Spades was up toward the Provincetown itself is pretty tacky. It’s a end of the earth — that is, the end of town. To tourist town. Because gays flock there, some of get to it, we turned down a long, dark, narrow the touristy things are more interesting, but alley. The bar was built out over the beach. The there were innumerable shops that specialized in plastic squeeze purses imprinted with “ Cape alley smelled of salty fog and felt as clammy as Cod, Mass.” my hands. It was empty, but we could hear We loved it. We bought the sweatshirts and music pound inside the walls of the bar. It was T-shirts and hats and postcards that we, middle- all I could do not to tiptoe. There was nothing on class-state-employee-social-service types, earth I wanted so much as to be in that bar, to would have bought anywhere. But back then, join in The Gay Life — nothing . . . except to even before the concept of gay culture had been run like hell. We approached. Lacking the nerve hatched on a large scale, because we were gay to go through the door, I craned my neck to peer we were able to step into another level of ex in one of those windows. I did not recover for perience. The straight tourists, secretly search years from the shock of what I saw. as they might for the fascination of gay life, Inside this towering, dungeon-like affair could not enter this world. It was made of were knife-wielding, duck-tailed, leather- nuance, colored by need, and the directions jacketed, burly half-women snarling at their were not on any Chamber of Commerce map. slight, teased-haired femmes and laughing this I was familiar with the history of the place. four-eyed, college-educated, scrawny baby- We sat one night in terribly uncomfortable fold butch off the face of the earth. We turned tail ing wooden chairs, backs to the harbor, feet on a and scurried back to the bright straight lights. sandy, splintery wooden floor, and watched a Was that really what I saw? Or did I have in tedious Eugene O ’Neill production in a crowded that moment nothing but a glimpse of my own firetrap called the Provincetown Playhouse. I fears, a vision of who the world predicted — am so grateful that I got there before the Play and I feared — I would become? house disappeared for good. Djuna Barnes once When I next went back, a few years later, the sat in front of that stage, as did Edna St. Vincent bar had changed hands and was called The Pied Millay and many, many others — aspiring Piper. The tremors of Stonewall, the tentacles literary gays like myself. It seems that every of the women's movement, had reached time I go searching in a biography of a suspected Provincetown — and me. When I looked inside gay writer, I discover that they’d spent a sum myself then, the lesbian I saw was not an Ace of mer or a winter at Provincetown. Spades at all. She was a Pied Piper. This time, The bookstore. I can’t recall its name, but on when I went down that long Provincetown vacations I half-lived there. By my last trip, in alley, I opened the door and went inside. • AMAZON Personal telep h o n e ads for d atin g , friendship an d rom ance. > L Y N C H T H E The OREGON f L E E