Instead of figuring that everyone is straight, you can figure that everyone isn’t. Now day-trippers of all sorts (heterosexuals, too) pop in, and the particular flavor of queer varies from week to week: lesbians for Memorial Day and the “Girl Splash” event, ab-flaunting men around Independence Day, scruffier types for July’s “Bear Week.” What’s constant is that an otherwise ironclad rule of life gets flipped to glorious effect. Long a queer haven, the Cape Cod artist colony grew into an internationally renowned LGBTQ party spot during the same era when Brown made her New York–bathhouse visit. In Provincetown, Massachusetts, where I’ve spent portions of the past few summers, I’ve found it impossible to avoid comparisons. It can also involve a crossing of physical boundaries that bears an undeniable resemblance to the surprise kisses and below-belt grabs called out in the recent reckoning with sexual harassment. This pursuit can take forms as mild as dinner and a movie. In those places, folks who otherwise might edit themselves for the straight world find the miraculous-seeming freedom to directly pursue their desires. Even so, 50 years after a police raid on the Stonewall Inn catalyzed the mainstream LGBTQ movement, gay people still maintain spheres of separation from the wider world: nightclubs, vacation spots, and dating apps where like can meet like. Yes, assimilation and smartphones-and, before them, legal crackdowns amid the AIDS crisis-have thinned the ranks of spots like The Club. But many gay men might not find the scene so strange. Read during today’s #MeToo wave, Brown’s vision of a “paradise” packed with men groping unabashedly yet respectfully may sound like a hallucination. Sex isn’t a weapon here, it’s a release.”Ĭheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read. “If you say ‘no’ it means ‘no,’ that’s all, and that simple ‘no’ also protects fragile egos. “The easiness of refusal is incredible,” she wrote. As a stranger reached for her groin, Brown’s “first response was to turn around and smash the offender’s face in.” Later, to one man who hugged her from behind, she whispered, “Thank you but I’ve been here for an hour and I’m tired.” The man left her alone. The way people touched felt foreign, too. “The leer is gone, the thinly disguised hostility of the street vanishes … The transaction boils down to: curiosity, no connection, disconnection.”
“Men look at each other differently than men look at women,” she observed.
To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.Ī robe hiding her female form, she marveled at the sex being had around every corner, from a dimly lit “maze” of semi-blind groping to an “unbelievable orgy room” of group activities to a corridor of cubicles in which men lay waiting for partners.