Sam Correia
Photo: Mary Snell
Provincetown and the Queer Joy of Every Day
This is a love letter. To a place, a community, a landscape.
To me, there is no place in the entire world like Provincetown. It is a dream at the end of the world. A holy mythos of beauty and debauchery. Recently, I was in Provincetown with my girlfriend and her sisters. A yearly pilgrimage that I feel lucky to be part of. Provincetown is a friend always there for me to visit time and time again. We might look a little different each visit; I, a new haircut or worse eyesight, but she's the same friend I've known for years.
On the drive, we’re blasting music down Route 6, windows down. The dunes greet us, and we know we’re almost there. As soon as we pull into town, we go to all of our spots. The thrift store at the church. A coffee at Joe’s. We follow the smells of fresh-made pizza at Spiritus. Eventually, we make it to Tim’s bookstore. We wander the stuffed and nearly-toppling shelves. I love Tim’s. I usually find a great book on queer history, or a classic but out-of-print title, and Tim himself is willing to chat with customers, offering secret Ptown bookseller knowledge that always feels like a gift. On to Womencrafts near the art galleries. I chat with the owner, Michelle. She’s at the center of all of the local lesbian feminist community. She has a great podcast recommendation or queer theorist for me to check out. Womencrafts is an institution. It quite literally represents a half-century of queer history in Provincetown. Frankly, nowadays, Ptown is mostly a wealthy, cis, white, older gay male population. Womencrafts is an intersectional space where people gather to organize protests, make friends, buy art, and build community. Womencrafts is a pro-abortion, pro-trans rights space in a country where laws are actively prohibiting the rights of marginalized folks. It’s a space where the women who walked before me made it the place it is now: A space for young, queer and trans folks to feel loved and cared for.
Michelle bought the building in 2022, and I chipped in to her GoFundMe to help. Michelle received over $215,000 in donations. It’s a big deal in a place where real estate is unfathomably high and rents skyrocketing, unreachable for many queer businesses. Queer people here are being pushed to the end of the world because of exorbitant living costs. As we wandered around, we saw stickers plastered onto street signs: “Greed Killed Ptown.” I couldn’t agree more.
That evening, we walked to Tea Dance, a 4:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. dance party on the water (the perfect time for any club experience, in my opinion), We were drawn into the Front Stoop Feminist Readings event at Womencrafts. Older queer women were reading original pieces of writing, while others read from books they had pulled off the shelf. There’s a clear tradition of storytelling here, of artistic expression. You can’t walk 10 feet without tripping over a gallery in the East End of Commercial. Artists and writers are seeped into the marrow of the place. In 1916, the Boston Globe called it the “...biggest art colony in the world.” It’s a place known for its visual artists, but writers like Eugene O’Neill, Kurt Vonnegut, Tennessee Williams, and Norman Mailer, lived here. Today, you might see filmmaker John Waters riding his bike down Commercial Street.
Poets like Stanley Kunitz and Harry Kemp have drawn inspiration from the natural wonders of the place; the dunes, the sea, the ponds. But none are as famous and as well-loved as poet Mary Oliver.
I’ve always been a fan of Mary Oliver’s work, but this past year I’ve devoured every collection of her poetry that I can get my hands on. I’ve turned to her words like prayer, like scripture. To me, the work of Mary Oliver is like Provincetown itself: Loved by many, but with different meaning to all who. I think about how Mary changed people through her poetry. A 40-year celebration of the place that can no longer exist. A place so full of the blinding beauty of the natural world that it’s hard to look away.
I stood for a moment outside of the condo that used to belong to Mary and her lifelong partner, Molly Malone Cook. I imagined what their life was like. Mary was a fiercely private person, but we get glimpses of their relationship filtering in like sunlight. The days spent with their dog, or spent clamming.
Being at Blackwater Pond, the muse of so many of her poems, I felt like what going to church used to feel like. I spoke in hushed tones (it felt sacrilegious to scare any of the animals). I kept looking around in trees (maybe I could find one of the pencils Mary hid on poetry outings).
A short trail around the pond, doable in under 30 minutes. The sand of the path goes right up to the moss of the tree underbrush. Few people were at the pond this Friday morning, away from the bustle of Commercial Street. You could forget you were in Provincetown, except for a spot on the trail where you can see the Pilgrim Monument peaking over the trees. I understood then. I understood the miracles and the utter joy that Mary must have felt every day here. I understood what she was writing, the lessons she was teaching about beauty and joy from her view at the end of the world: "At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled/after a night of rain./I sip my cupped hands. I drink/ a long time. I tastes/like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold /into my body, waking the bones. I hear them deep inside me, whispering/oh what is that beautiful thing/that just happened?" She teaches us “To live in this world/you must be able/ to do three things:/ to love what is mortal;/ to hold it against your bones knowing/ your own life depends on it;/ and, when the time comes to let it/ go,/ to let it go.”
The Provincetown I experience is not Mary Oliver’s Provincetown. Sure, there are still artists and fishermen, with a dash of Portuguese culture. But now, it’s a place of multi-million dollar homes and a sanitized, ‘family-friendly’ version of gay culture. Things change. I get it. I would never be one to rant against change. I think one of the best things about being alive is getting to participate in our own change and growth. But I hold space for the grief of a commercialized version of this place loved by many for so long.
The Portuguese Bakery is still there with fresh malasadas. The Provincetown Bookshop. Womencrafts. Tim’s. The vintage shop at the wharf. Spiritus is still there. These are what make the town special to me. Helltown is still heaven, to me. And I know it was to Mary Oliver as well. “I don’t know if I am heading toward heaven or that other, dark place, but I know I have lived in heaven for 40 years. Thank you, Provincetown.”
There are more conversations happening about Queer Joy and Trans Joy. It helps us define moments of our lives that are full of love and hope and community, when so often those moments feel brief or nonexistent. Sometimes it’s spending time with friends. Sometimes it’s making yourself a nice meal. Sometimes there’s no Queer Joy to be found, and that’s okay, too.
For me, queer joy is about finding myself in nature. It’s about seeing my community as natural and good when the country is trying to demonize our very existence. It’s about holding so much happiness in my chest when I’m walking by myself in the woods on a perfect sunny day. It’s about watching things grow in my little garden. My favorite quote from Leslie Feinberg is from her book "Stone Butch Blues" (a truly glorious find at Tim’s): “I felt happy. Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me.”
Queer joy is the activism of every day. It’s making sure that joy is rooted in solidarity, in activism. But sometimes, activism doesn’t look like marching in the streets. It’s about writing poems in nature. The mundanity of walking down the street, feeling safe. It’s going to a Tea Dance at the Boatslip, where DJ Maryalice keeps us dancing. It’s buying fresh veggies at the smallest farmer’s market I’ve ever seen on Commercial Street. It’s setting an alarm to wake up at 4:30 in the morning to watch the sun rise over the water and feeling something break open in your chest.
It is a serious thing, after all, just to be alive on this fresh morning, in this broken world.
Sam Correia is the Community Engagement Librarian at the Duxbury Free Library and the newest columnist for PCS. They are passionate about community care, collective liberation, and radical hope for the future. They are the creator and Project Director of the South Shore LGBTQ Oral History Archive, an intergenerational project focused on bringing together LGBTQ teens and LGBTQ elders to participate in oral history interviews, bringing to light long-excluded stories about queer history in Massachusetts communities. Sam is also a co-organizer of the Queer Collective of MA/RI.
Sam is reading “Angela Davis: An Autobiography” and “Our World” by Mary Oliver and Molly Malone Cook
