I first saw Provincetown when I was 16. I came for a few hours with my parents on my father’s highlighter-yellow boat, a midlife-crisis acquisition we rarely made use of. Provincetown played a large role in my imagination at that time — I had never been but had always known it was there, not far from my home in Cambridge, just as I had always known, whether by picking up on clues or some intuition, that it was for people like me. This knowledge alone was a beacon for a teenager who was, on the whole, excited to be gay — culture! humor! good taste! — but who had no outlet for that excitement. And so, one morning at the end of the summer of 2016, I mentioned that it was sad that the boat never left its slip. Why don’t we take it for the day to Provincetown?
Provincetown looked exactly as I had imagined it: pastels, tiny houses, crowds, manicured gardens with hydrangea bushes, tchotchkes that were somehow both kitschy and tasteful. All we did that day was order ordinary sandwiches, but even this seemed remarkable. I was not just eating a sandwich; I was eating a sandwich in Provincetown. Everything glimmered.
And yet I was relieved to depart. Everywhere there were scantily clad men, and I was pretty sure my parents could hear my thoughts when that six-foot-two brunet walked by. More than anything, I worried what they thought of this display — so much blatant and unabashed sex appeal, the impropriety and indecency of it all. It occurs to me only now that my parents — who love Provincetown and take every chance they get to visit me here, who, in their own way, are less constricted in this place, chatting freely with strangers at tea — were having a perfectly lovely time that day and that the only person passing judgment was me.
I wasn’t out to my parents yet that summer. When I did come out the following spring, they were loving and supportive and, mostly, unsurprised. Between the ages of four and seven, I insisted on dressing as Dorothy for Halloween and every one of my birthday parties, down to the blue gingham dress and ruby slippers. My mom frequently tells the story of my fifth birthday, when I came downstairs in the dress. My wonderful grandmother, born in 1923, said, “Take that dress off. You look like a sissy.” To which my mother says I responded, “Well, at least I’m not old and ugly like you,” before sashaying away to the dinner table where I asked that cake be served before dinner.
When I came out to my parents, my father kept saying that he loved me but the world was a hateful place and I would need to be careful. I took this to mean that I would have to constrict myself and conform. I wouldn’t be doing that. I’d always expected cake on my own timeline. Whenever he expressed his fears, I rolled my eyes.
On her podcast We Can Do Hard Things, the writer Glennon Doyle says her mother “was freaking terrified” when she came out. She argues that parents are often so scared that the world will judge their gay children that they end up bringing that judgment “right to our doorstep. It’s not even the world that brings it,” she says. “It’s our parents.”
Of course, more often than not, it is the world. One winter night after that trip to Provincetown, soon after Trump was elected, I was hanging out with friends in Harvard Square, which had been my back yard growing up. A man came up, threw slurs at me, and told me I had five seconds to run. I pursed my lips and measuredly walked away, taking much longer than five seconds, no more fearful and no wiser than the five-year-old in the Dorothy dress. At the time, I was feeling confident and nonchalant, refusing to succumb to terror. It strikes me now as blithe disregard for my well-being.
Doyle’s argument is based on the popular misconception that to acknowledge fear is to contradict the word we have taken as our shrine: pride. The two are often mistaken as antonyms and, it is assumed, cannot exist side by side.
At some point, around sophomore year of college, as I ventured into the world more, I stopped believing that fear would always thwart pride, or vice versa. I became scared: of going into certain bars, of meeting certain stares on the subway, of traveling to certain states and countries. This fear, I found, was not something to be ashamed of. It was information, a signal. Listening to it didn’t mean constricting myself; it just meant moving to a different bar, a different subway car, or, if I couldn’t move out of a country going increasingly berserk, I could at least move to the outermost edge of it.
My father recently came to visit me at my Provincetown apartment. He told me, for the millionth time, how scared he was of the world’s treatment — but then he spoke about how happy he was that I lived here, somewhere he knew I wouldn’t be in harm’s way. I recognized his tone as the same one I had once used to speak about Provincetown before I had ever come here. I did not roll my eyes or even have the urge to. I just joined in his sigh of relief.
