[For many up
here in New England, summer means a trip or twelve to the Cape—Cape Cod, that is (with no disrespect to
the beautiful Cape Ann). So this week, I’ll AmericanStudy five Cape Cod
stories—share your own summer favorite places and their stories for a crowd-sourced
weekend getaway, please!]
Three significant
stages in the life of a Cape Cod community.
No place was
more meaningful to the development of English settlement in New England (and
beyond) than Provincetown Harbor, located at the Cape’s extreme tip (which,
because of the quirks of the Cape’s shape and geography, is also actually its
closest point to Boston). It was while navigating the harbor that Bartholomew
Gosnold, considered the region’s first English explorer and one of the
principal architects of English settlement in the New World overall, gave Cape Cod its name. And it
was while the Mayflower lay anchored
in the harbor that the Pilgrims
signed the Mayflower Compact and began the coastal explorations that would
lead them to Plymouth. The latter event in particular is the source of
Provincetown’s longstanding motto, one inscribed on the flagstaff near the town
hall: “Birthplace
of American Liberty” (although other Massachusetts sites such as Lexington and
Boston claim that honor for themselves).
Whether we buy
that particular nickname or not (the Pilgrims, while pursuing a certain form of
liberty to be sure, also practiced without question their own restrictions
on liberty), there’s no doubt that Provincetown has subsequently helped
give birth to a couple significant American freedoms. For one thing, there’s
the artistic freedom represented by the Provincetown
Players and the town’s early 20th century experimental theater
community, which in many ways (often linked specifically to Eugene O’Neill,
but captured at least as successfully by his fellow playwright and theatrical
collaborator Susan
Glaspell) signaled the first truly ground-breaking American dramatic forms
and works, finally free of the 19th century conventions of melodrama.
That’s probably an overstatement, and there’s plenty worth remembering and studying
in 19th century American drama; but nonetheless the Provincetown
theater community represented a watershed moment for American drama and
literature, and one thoroughly tied—as is all performance and live art—to the
place in which it was created. “Birthplace of American Theater” has a nice ring
to it too, doesn’t it?
“Birthplace of
American Gay Tourism” is a bit more unwieldy, but it fits quite nicely a third
stage of Provincetown’s American story. The town’s experimental theater
community and artists’ colony
helped create a more welcoming environment for gay Americans than in most early
20th century places, and there were apparently prominent drag
performances in town as
early as the 1940s. By the 1970s, the town’s identity as a vacation destination
for gay visitors was well-established enough to merit the 1978 formation of the
Provincetown Business Guild (PBG), an
organization dedicated to promoting gay tourism. Coming less than a decade after
the
Stonewall Riot, with most of the nation still thoroughly hostile to (or at
least unwilling to acknowledge the existence of) gay Americans, the PBG’s
formation reflects just how much Provincetown took the lead on gay rights. It
has continued to do so in the decades since, and on the 2010 census
had the nation’s highest rate of same-sex couples, at 163.1 per 1000 couples. A
21st century reflection of Provincetown’s continuing yet evolving role
as a prominent site of American community, history, and ideals.
Last Cape story
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Summer favorite places you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment