PROVINCETOWN — Camp Lightbulb, a summer program for queer youth, is not returning to the Outer Cape this year, ending a run that began in Provincetown more than 14 years ago.
Puck Markham, the camp’s California-based founder, announced the cancellation of this summer’s week-long Provincetown sessions in an email to parents in May. The news came as campers looked forward to arriving at the old youth hostel high on the oceanside dunes of Truro, where the program has been based since its inception.
“Due to increased costs, we must consider alternative options to our week in Provincetown,” Markham wrote in the email. “The town has become increasingly less diverse, and we can host a more exciting, queer inclusive experience in Los Angeles and New York City.”
Markham said in a July 3 interview that this will be the first year — aside from 2020, during the pandemic — that Camp Lightbulb won’t host campers on the Outer Cape since its founding in 2011.
Markham pointed to funding challenges and concerns about his own health as the reasons for his decision, but this is not the first time excited campers have been told the program was canceled.
In 2023, the camp shut down after just one week, when counselors raised concerns about a lack of proper food, adequate medical supplies, and required certifications.
A Lightbulb Dims
When Markham founded Camp Lightbulb, it seemed like a “win-win situation,” he told the Independent. “My partner and I can come here for the summer, and I can start a camp for kids — how liberating must that be?”
Despite initial challenges — like having no sign-ups for the inaugural session — Camp Lightbulb seemed to grow quickly. In 2015, Markham added camp locations beyond Provincetown, launching sessions in Los Angeles and soon after that in New York City. On its website, Camp Lightbulb claims to have welcomed more than 3,000 participants from across the U.S. and around the world over the years.
Advertisements for Camp Lightbulb touted kayaking along the coast, drag performances, variety shows, and the chance to simply walk down Commercial Street and see queer couples out in the open. “Our M.O. is to bring kids to a queer community — a smaller one like P’town and larger ones like New York or L.A.,” Markham said, and “really make the town our campus.”
According to five former counselors who worked at the camp in 2023 and 2024, the experience often failed to live up to what campers and their families saw in those ads.
Sky Clapp, a teacher from Quincy, was overjoyed when she received the offer to spend the summer of 2023 working at Camp Lightbulb in Provincetown. For Clapp, it felt like the ideal off-season gig: meaningful work that aligned with her values.
“This sounds amazing,” she said she thought at the time. “Getting to be out and proud, just like we say we want our campers to be.”
But as the first session of Camp Lightbulb’s 2023 season unfolded, Clapp said, what she had thought would be a “dream job” began to feel like a nightmare. “There were no returning staff members for the 2023 summer,” she said. “We were all completely new, which should have been one of our first signs.”
Clapp said that after campers arrived, the situation behind the scenes quickly unraveled. With no dedicated chef or proper kitchen supplies, the counselors were left to shop for groceries and prepare meals for the campers themselves — a task that included trying to meet the needs of kids with severe dietary restrictions, Clapp said.
Still at home in Fairfield, Conn., Will Fleijer, then a high school senior who had enjoyed the camp in 2022 and was scheduled to attend session two of Camp Lightbulb in Provincetown, began receiving frantic messages from friends who were already here. In addition to severely delayed meals, the texts warned of disorganized medication management and daily schedules being thrown together on the fly.
Clapp said the camp’s owners had not secured necessary licenses and bookings in time, leading to the cancelation of activities ranging from kayaking to drag performances.
“That was a responsibility of the camp owner — to acquire those licenses with the town,” she said. “If you’re starting camp in two weeks, you should already have all these.”
When a camper had an emergency that required care the counselors could not provide, it revealed a lack of preparation “at the highest level,” Clapp said. “It was a medical issue that we as a camp were not equipped to deal with,” she said. “Not to say that we couldn’t have, if we’d had the proper resources.”
Fleijer, who was still at home, said messages from his friends at camp described how two campers — in addition to the one who left because of the medical emergency — had returned home because they were feeling unsafe.
At that point, Fleijer said, he told his parents, “I don’t want to go to P’town — I’m nervous.”
As the end of session one approached, Clapp said, she and the other counselors met and decided that the camp could not remain open. They called Markham, who was not on-site, and told him of their decision. He agreed after some discussion, Clapp said.
The day before the next session was supposed to begin, Markham sent an email to parents announcing its cancellation.
“Unfortunately we have to postpone camp starting tomorrow,” he wrote in an email on July 9, 2023. “We have realized that we do not have the correct team in place to provide your camper with a safe and happy space.”
‘Old News’
The problems at Camp Lightbulb that year were not confined to the Provincetown location, according to Cameron Riefe, who worked at Camp Lightbulb L.A. in 2023.
“There was not a lot of infrastructure,” he said. “We had to improv a lot of stuff. We had to do a lot of the scheduling and a lot of the work involved in running a fulfilling camp on the fly.
“On top of that, we had to run around town getting food,” he added.
Hoping things had improved, Fleijer signed on as a counselor-in-training in Provincetown in 2024. That year, he said, the camp remained disorganized.
Despite the concerns and the cancelations, Markham said on July 3 that he was committed to ensuring Camp Lightbulb returns to Provincetown. “We have every intention of being back,” he said. “We’re thinking about doing a homecoming on Labor Day weekend.”
But in a July 14 interview with the Independent, Markham would not comment on the specific issues raised by the former counselors, instead calling their complaints “old news.”
“We dealt with what we dealt with in the past,” he said. “I really don’t have any comment about what happened two, three years ago.”
Counselors and campers who attended Camp Lightbulb before 2023 said they were surprised to hear about the problems.
Jesse Rodriguez, who worked as a counselor at the Provincetown camp in 2022, wrote that he didn’t encounter any of the issues reported by staff who worked there after that year.
“Overall, I had a fun, life-changing experience with Camp Lightbulb,” he wrote in an email. “Serving my community while meeting extraordinary people from across the country and learning how to be the best ally possible is something I will cherish forever.”
Fleijer said the strength of his experience in 2022 made the camp’s decline all the more difficult.
“It could have been good is what really hurts me the most,” he said. “But the way that I have been disappointed by this organization over and over again — it’s just not what queer people need.”
