PROVINCETOWN — The town’s 46th annual Carnival parade moved down Commercial Street with its typical buoyance on Aug. 22: painted props and bodies glittered in sunlight, and floats sent out waves of music that set the gathered revelers spinning and singing.
This year’s celebration had a dual theme — “Renaissance x Revolution” — that was meant to push on the party’s festive edges, however.
In the Provincetown Business Guild’s poster for Renaissance x Revolution, the actor Divine stares cat-eyed and sultry, superimposed on a Mona Lisa with neatly clasped hands. Like Divine, the celebration’s theme flirted with the partyers, offering a layer of gravity that participants could mine or ignore.
Provincetown’s Alan Miles was dressed as the mid-century Marxist Che Guevara, but he said America’s present was on his mind.
“I think the entire American experiment is at risk,” Miles said. “This theme was very emotionally charged for me — the revolution part.”
Miles said that Provincetown is “very much a bubble,” and that the activism here in the 1980s during the AIDS crisis overshadowed any kind of activism here today.
Other Carnival-goers said that Provincetown’s liberal homogeneity makes it feel like a kind of fantasy, somehow removed from conflict.
“P’town is just this magical other world; it’s easy to get wrapped up in it and forget what’s going on” elsewhere, said Brian Corteville, who lives in Washington, D.C.
“I think that’s the whole fantasy of P’town,” Corteville said. “Part of the appeal is that you can suspend reality.”
Corteville wore a jumpsuit emblazoned with “Gay Liberation Front,” which referred to an activist movement that emerged just after the Stonewall riots of 1969, he said. The name was an allusion to other liberation fronts that were active in Algeria and Vietnam, he added.
To decide on a costume, Corteville had asked himself, “What can I wear that is gay and political and a little bit slutty?” he said.
Joe McFetridge and five friends formed a phalanx of suffragettes in white, because few movements had been more revolutionary than women’s equality, he said. Thinking about the present, he found a throughline to the musician Charli XCX and the presidential campaign of Kamala Harris.
“We wanted to keep the momentum going with the Harris campaign, and steamroll that ‘brat-ness’ into suffragettes and supporting women,” McFetridge said.
Jovanny Rosado of Boston also came to Carnival as Che Guevara, partly because he grew up in Puerto Rico, where Guevara’s story is well known.
“P’town is predominantly white, so as a Latino person who knows the history of Che, it just felt right for me to bring it here in a way that felt more authentic,” Rosado said.
Not on Vacation
Some people pointed out a tension in Provincetown’s identity — both locals and tourists trend liberal, but there’s pressure to not interrupt vacation with politics.
Maggie Kelley of Dennis said she appreciated the revolutionary theme, wearing an off-the-shoulder dress covered in red handprints with the words “Free Palestine” and a braided belt in the colors of the Palestinian flag.
“A lot of people don’t seem to be talking about Palestine, despite the fact that it’s one of the biggest atrocities of our time,” Kelley said.
Kelley said she grew up all over Cape Cod and has felt acutely its double-edged keep-the-tourists-happy ethos.
Tourists “want to get away and want to ignore everything,” Kelley said. “We don’t have the right to be comfortable when our taxes, instead of feeding our children and funding their education, are going to kill other children.”
Kelley said she enjoyed all the costumes at Carnival, though, whether revolution or Renaissance-inspired.
A four-person crew came to Carnival dressed as various forms of contraception — including a condom, an IUD, and the birth-control pill. Eduardo Serrate, wearing an oversized replica of a DialPak pill dispenser, said that Provincetown is a place to stand up for other people, even on issues outside one’s direct experience.
“As a gay man, I had never seen this in my life,” he said, gesturing to the DialPak. “I stand for your freedom to choose, even if it doesn’t affect me,” Serrate added.
Another parader in contraception-themed attire said that, despite “intellectual disagreements” over foreign policy or gentrification, “everyone’s liberal” here.
The feeling of consensus was tested by a contingent of marchers with Palestinian flags and placards who were protesting 40,000 deaths in Gaza. A spectator jeered “They want you dead!” to the marchers, presumably because some of them were gay.
According to Farrukh Najmi, an organizer with Wellfleet for Palestine who was in the parade, such heckling was a tiny sliver of the community’s response to their group. “About 98 percent” of onlookers that day were supportive, he said.
Lor Holmes, a co-organizer of Boston’s first Dyke March in 1995, carried a “No Pride in Genocide” sign in the parade. She said that Boston was more conducive to political activism than the Outer Cape.
“I’ve always thought it was a gay white man’s party place,” Holmes said of Provincetown. Cape Cod in general is “white and homogeneous,” she said, and has become “less and less accessible because of the income divide.”
Holmes has had a home in Wellfleet since 2003 but moved here full-time two years ago. She’s planning to get involved in affordable housing advocacy, she said, because “the more diverse our community gets, the more I’ll like it.”
Miles, dressed as Guevara, pointed out an irony: the housing crisis that dominates local politics is “to some extent the product of left-wing policy gone awry,” he said. Historic preservation and environmental conservation efforts have contributed to snowballing prices and a drastic housing shortage.
“None of us intend those consequences, but we cause them,” Miles said, adding that there’s a recognition of those effects, “but no real willingness to change.”
Najmi, his sights set further afield, had reflected on how to resolve tension between a community-wide party and activism around “genocide and arms embargoes,” he said.
On the morning of Carnival, Najmi woke up and said, “Today I’m going to put on a smile and a happy face and wish people Happy Carnival and Free Palestine in the same breath,” he said.
“And I don’t have to have a solemn demeanor,” he added. “I’m going to dance.”
