Author: Andrew Sullivan

A first-hand account of Provincetown’s recent history from a reader:

As one who has actively been part of the Provincetown gay scene over the past 50 years, I do not find the Banner 1950 news archive about “The Boys” summer influx at all unusual. Implicit, and at times aggressive, homophobia was part of the culture – in the Police Department, at Town Hall, and in the other institutions, church and school. Stilted rhetoric, such as, “climax of abnormality” describing aberrant behavior can be found in the Provincetown Advocate and in the Town Reports.
Right after World War II, the artistic-literary world flooded and shocked and staid Provincetown. An example is the famous Forum 49 conference held in Provincetown that featured speakers and exhibits by the prominent, new avant-garde in the artistic, literary and journalistic world. Provincetown natives were conflicted–how to encourage tourism and at the same time keep the status-quo.
Homophobia was part of a widespread sexual bigotry: cohabiting heterosexuals couples who were not married to one another were arrested, sometimes in the middle of the night, whether they were in bed with one another or not. And then there is the 1960’s Beatnik era, when police barricades were set up at the entrance to Town, and suspected Beatniks were prohibited entry. Provincetown has historically been a mixture of sophisticated and small-town mores, sometimes peacefully mixing, other times not. …the more it changes, the more it stays the same.

Another emailer comments:

Regarding your link to the Provincetown Banner, and your comments about it, I have to ask, with all due respect – are you crazy? Do you think that gay people were really welcome anywhere in this country 50 years ago? I’m in my 40s, but I live in New York and have several gay friends who are now in their 70s. Their recollections of life in the 1950s are filled with horrible accounts of police entrapment. Thanks to the draconian laws of the time, if you met someone in a bar and asked him back to your apartment, you were risking arrest. In the 60s, John Lindsay, the liberal mayor of New York instituted a crackdown on gay bars that caused further misery. All this took place in one of the most sophisticated cities in the world. Do you really think that the citizens of a rural beach community like Provincetown, whatever its history as a haven for artists and non-conformists, were happy about a large influx of gay summer people during this same period of time?
It is true that gay people have made tremendous achievements over the last several decades – being 48, I feel like I have seen several lifetimes of social change since I came out in 1979. But when you announce the end of gay culture, it really makes me want to burp. You may be right in the long run, but these kind of grand pronouncements ignore the very real details of what so many young gay people are still undergoing today.

As any reader of the essay will see, I specifically made the latter point myself. The gradual emergence of the truth about human lives, and our political and social response to it, will always be uneven, and sometimes contradictory. But that doesn’t mean that the truth, once it has emerged, is easily forgotten. Or that it doesn’t change lives.

According to Time. But the Onion has the real scoop.

Beliefnet is having a reader-voting contest to pick the most inspiring person of 2005. Captain Ian Fishback, who risked his career to expose and correct widespread abuse of detainees in Iraq, is in the final round of voting. Put him over the edge. Vote here.

If you’re looking for my response to Charles Krauthammer on his proposal to legalize torture, here it is.

It’s a must-read on literary depictions of that lowest of occupations, the journalist. Hitch cannot avoid some nostalgia for the old days:

Yes, the suicidal imbibing in the King and Keys, or the Punch, or El Vino. Yes, the demented whims of the latest proprietor. Yes, the overflowing ashtrays and the pounding of ancient upright typewriters. Yes, the callousness and gallows humour. (“Shumble, Whelper and Pigge knew Corker,” as Waugh describes a hacks’ reunion in Scoop. “They had loitered of old on many a doorstep and forced an entry into many a stricken home.”) And yes, it’s true that the most celebrated opening line of any Fleet Street war correspondent was that of the hack in the Congo who yelled: “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?”

How Hitch turns stuff out of this quality and quantity is a mystery to me. It must be alcohol and nicotine and raw, insane talent, I guess.

“Politics turns into virtue what religions often see as a vice – the fact that we do not all think alike, that we have conflicting interests, that we see the world through different eyes. Politics knows what religion sometimes forgets, that the imposition of truth by force and the suppression of dissent by power is the end of freedom and a denial of human dignity. When religion enters the political arena, we should repeat daily Bunyan’s famous words: ‘Then I saw that there was a way to Hell, even from the gates of Heaven.'” – Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, reminding us of something vital that today’s Republican leadership has forgotten.

Signs that the Washington Post’s Don Graham really, finally does understand the future of news and opinion media.

If this is true, then some Bushies have officially lost it.

The Iron Lady meets Monty Python:

[Thatcher’s daughter], Carol said: “The memory loss is very strange because her recollection of distant events is still sharp. A friend commented to her the other week: ‘Oh, Margaret, it’s like rationing!’ Immediately, my mother sparkled and this fellow got 15 minutes on wartime privations, including all mum’s favourite recipes for Spam.”

Wonderful spam.

BEFORE GAY CULTURE? The Provincetown Banner runs occasional stories from its previous editions. This one is from 1950. Check it out:

December 7, 1950 CHAMBER TO PONDER ‘THE BOYS’ INFLUX

At the regular meeting of the Provincetown Chamber of Commerce on Monday night, Chief of Police William N. Rogers will speak on various phases of the problem created by the summer influx of ‘The Boys,’ according to an announcement yesterday by Chamber president, Joseph E. Macara.

Commenting on the subject for discussion, Mr. Macara termed the problem one of foremost importance and added that while there has been a tendency to shy away from bringing it out into the open, he felt that it had reached such proportions that the Chamber of Commerce should give it the consideration it demands.

Each season, he said, the number of ‘The Boys’ continues to increase and with the increase in numbers and abnormal actions of many become more public and brazen with the result that more and more normal people turn away from the town in disgust.

Mr. Macara said the problem will be difficult to handle but it must be met and solved before the summer trade of the town is seriously damaged and before some climax in abnormality occurs.

A couple of questions. Was this serious? I don’t know enough precisely about the atmosphere in 1950, but this seems a little draconian for Ptown. But maybe I’ve under-estimated the staggering speed of cultural change. But the metaphors. “Climax of abnormality!” One of ‘the boys’ wrote that one, I bet you.

An exasperated Democrat writes:

The Democrats are such spineless, unimaginative dorks that they can’t make political hay even at a time like this with opponents like the Bush administration. I am (was?) a Democrat, and they make me sick. I can’t imagine what FDR, Harry Truman, or LBJ would have to say about the maladroit politicing of these amateurs. It only goes to prove that they have no core ideas about which political practices might cohere. On the other hand, I couldn’t ever be a Republican. I don’t know what to do. The great political philosopher, Dave Barry, probably had it right:

“The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They’re the kind of people who’d stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn’t bother to stop because they’d want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club.”

That’s why I’ve never thought of myself as either a Republican or a Democrat. Both parties drive me nuts – for different reasons.