We’ll Always Have Provincetown

Welcome to Beach Week, our annual celebration of the best place on Earth.

The first time my father and his husband, Luis, visited me in Los Angeles, nervous to impress these two men I love, I took them to Sal’s Place. I would normally never take my family, dressed in their unironic Carhartt and Farm’n’Fleet jackets, to West Hollywood. But I knew the seasonal restaurant would charm them, with its cash-only checks and the unshakeable owner helming the phones in her rough Irish brogue. More than anything, I knew Sal’s Place would be special because, when the restaurant leaves L.A. for the summer, it re-opens on the edge of a dock in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

When my older sister and I were kids, my father and Luis would take us to Cape Cod every summer. Our sojourn would start in Mashpee with a visit to my paternal grandparents. We’d fly kites on Popponesset Beach and drive to the bookstore in my grandma’s blue VW bug. I’d jump on beds with Luis and take quick, shallow baths to conserve water. Mashpee is, in my memory, pleasant and predictable: neat nuclear families and manicured homes with picture windows lined by purple hyacinths.

Then our little caravan would leave the old folks behind and drive down to Provincetown, that curling hook at the very edge of Cape Cod where things turned technicolor. The tidy order of Mashpee gave way to a three-mile stretch surrounded by water on three sides. There, colorful fishing boats with peeling paint and white yachts bobbed off wooden docks, while tourists—whether in search of art or whales or food or a bit of a party—flooded the narrow, charmingly chaotic streets hemmed in by shingled cottages, many of them converted into shops and galleries.

I remember once going whale watching, with cold ocean air and overcast skies, mild nausea, and stretches of boredom punctuated by a cresting humpback, its rough speckled skin peaking over waves—a collective gasp from the boat, enough to briefly pull me out from the plexi-glass enclosed cabin. (In one of my favorite photos, Luis leans on the railing, baby faced at 22, looking like a DEI campaign sponsored by Polo Ralph Lauren with his pastel crewneck and cargo shorts.) Between whale watching excursions we’d walk the hot crowded streets and seek shade at sidewalk cafés, where I tried clams for the first time, taken aback by sand cracking between my molars and my father reassuring me that this was not only normal, but to be expected.

The streets of Provincetown, in my memory, are painted with rainbows, which if you think about it is really a fantastic way to decorate a beach town—flags and banners and posters, gift shops selling cheeky T-shirts and cheesy fridge magnets. I remember seeing men kissing and being surprised—I had never seen any of my parents kiss each other. From the backseat of our car, I would see my dad put his hand on the back of Luis’s neck while Luis teasingly called him viejo, old man. I remember seeing two women kiss on a moped and feeling like I was seeing something I shouldn’t be privy to, unable to classify the moment.

It was in Provincetown, not Plymouth Rock, that the pilgrims first arrived. I like to think those Puritans sensed it had a certain air about it even then. Provincetown would become an artists colony and LGBTQ haven, where Andy Warhol, Cookie Mueller, and John Waters vacationed, and where Portuguese fishermen earned their keep. My dad and Luis insist that we didn’t go because it is one of the gayest towns in America. We went for the whales and Portuguese soup and sand dunes. At four years old, I couldn’t have understood that Provincetown, or P-Town, as pretty much everyone except my family calls it, was a gay mecca. But years later it started to make sense, perhaps around the time my friends pieced together that my father’s longtime roommate was not just a buddy chipping in to make rent.

When I was young, I could grasp that my family was different but words like gay and straight had no meaning to me, nor did I understand them as good, bad, or otherwise. I recognized that the families around me had Mom and Dad, and that I had Mom and Joe, and Dad and Luis. Their living arrangements were separate and came about post-divorce. My parents were not modern by choice. As I got older, a foreign sense of shame began to take root in me. I can’t pinpoint where or when exactly it started, whether it was at school or from other parents, from the books I read or the shows I watched. But as I developed from little kid to tiny person my perspective would warp for a time, my family composition morphing from a neutral fact to a secret I learned to keep. As I started middle school our trips out east came to a halt for various reasons, and with them a chance to develop my own understanding of Provincetown.

On one of our earliest trips to Cape Cod, when I was around four, my father was, more or less, newly out. And even though we were there for the whales and soup, looking back on it now, I like to picture him surrounded by his family in a place that so ardently embraces gay pride. On a later trip, we went to the Human Rights Campaign store, where my father and Luis bought leashes for our two tiny dogs back home. I can still see those blue fabric leashes perfectly, which we’d use for early evening walks that became a staple of my childhood. Not long ago my father told me that walking with those leashes around the neighborhood was one of the first times he and Luis asserted their relationship so publicly.

My father’s homes have always had three things: a garden, a birdfeeder, and a windchime, a three-sided metal sculpture that dangles an outline of Bell Buoy No. 3, which marks the entrance to the port of Provincetown. Its bell punctuated breakfasts of popovers and blueberry muffins in the sunroom of his first apartment in Highwood, Illinois, games of backyard badminton in the home he shared with Luis, and now, on the terrace at the farm where, in the summers, he smokes a cigar while Luis and I drink sparkling rosé. Luis, who has been part of my family since I can remember, wasn’t on one of those early trips to Provincetown. That’s when my father bought the windchime, purchased from a local artist and shepherded back to Illinois as a gift for Luis.

Long after we stopped visiting Provincetown, the afterglow of its technicolor streets would continue surfacing in my life. I grew up watching Anthony Bourdain’s shows with my father who, to me, shares his charmingly gruff demeanor masking a taffy center. As an adult, I was surprised to find Provincetown in Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s seminal memoir, which portrays it as an endearingly raucous proving ground where he cut his teeth under the drunken tutelage of Howard Mitcham, a legendary stone-cold-deaf chef.

Like Bourdain, my father’s reason for Provincetown was largely the food. He’s a chef and a farmer, and brought us in search of brothy Portuguese kale soup with thick slices of linguiça sausage and steamed clams and dinners at The Lobster Pot, a postage-stamp-sized building with a neon crustacean christening the doorway. It was here that I’d first try lobster dipped in warm butter, my father cracking the shell for me. We’d stop at the Provincetown Portuguese Bakery on the main drag, walking away with a gluttonous amount of pastries with names none of us can remember now.

Bourdain’s early days as a chef were in Provincetown, when he was young and buoyant and rebellious, with so much life ahead of him. (His upcoming biopic, Tony, in fact zooms in on that moment.) It’s how I like to think of my family in Provincetown over two decades ago; my father, in love, out, and sober; Luis, baby faced and building his life in the U.S.; and my sister and I too young to know any better.

Back at Sal’s Place in West Hollywood, sharing pastas and salads and tiramisu, Luis and I drinking goblets of white wine, I watched, delighted, as the owners and servers and hosts chatted with us and wove through tables. In the main dining room, a party of men showboated around a table, while my family and I sat in a corner booth ensconced by plants and linens and dim lighting. There, more than 3,000 miles from Cape Cod, we were together and relaxed in a Provincetown of our own making.

Top photo by Brooks Kraft / Getty Images

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