Is it possible to feel nostalgia for a place you’ve never been?
Last year, my husband found a poster for a long-shuttered Provincetown guesthouse called The Rushes in an online auction of gay ephemera from the 1970s and 1980s. Between the extravagantly muscled model in the drawing and the promise that all major credit cards would be accepted, it’s a veritable time capsule from the pre-internet era, when you had to request a brochure for more information in making travel plans, something I am just old enough to remember.
What’s missing from the poster is any evidence of its historical and cultural context. The illustration, dated 1982, is by Len Paoletti, who the auction house reports was the proprietor of the also-closed Elephant Walk Inn (now the Charm guesthouse) on Bradford Street from 1985 to 2003, and who died in 2018. But a search through the archives of Bob Damron’s Address Books — popular pre-digital guides to gay-friendly accommodations and other travel amenities — suggests that The Rushes was open for only a single season in 1986.
By that summer, AIDS had been ravaging the gay community for half a decade. The proprietors of The Rushes must have been hopeful that gay men would still need places to go to relax and forget about the epidemic for at least a week during the summertime.
In the guide for the following year — which was the first summer I came to Provincetown myself — the listing for The Rushes had vanished. I imagine it wasn’t the only business catering to gay men that may have closed that year.
Even the address doesn’t exist anymore: as far as I can make out, the property The Rushes occupied at 14 Mechanic St. is now part of the Kensington Gardens condominium complex on Cottage Street. It’s tempting to read the location’s transformation from sybaritic getaway to domesticated tidiness as emblematic of the changes since then in Provincetown as a whole.
The poster now hangs in the entryway of my own family’s condo on Bradford Street, and I walk our dog past where The Rushes used to be every summer afternoon. It’s a quiet block, and usually the only noises are the hammers and electric drills from whatever house is being renovated nearby. But if I listen closely enough, I can almost hear the distant splashes from the pool and the laughter of men who came to Provincetown to escape the encroaching darkness of the real world, if only for a little while.
