Customer Reviews

Ptown: Art, Sex, and Money on the Outer Cape

5 star:		(6)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I first visited Ptown just after the mid-Sixties when two gay artist friends of mine bought a house there and turned it into a very barebones B&B with a gallery attached. Ptown was a great place, and I have returned there many times since.

I found Manso's book to be well written and entertaining, despite a minority of Amazon reviewers who found it quite otherwise. His style is straightforward, and the narrative is a combination of history, storytelling and gossip interwoven in a very deft manner. He develops various topics in the story of Ptown and does an excellent job of weaving in the life stories of a wide spectrum of Ptown's inhabitants. If you have a problem reading Manso's book, then "walk/don't walk" signs must be daily life threatening situations.

The author sketches in the pre-colonial and 19th century history of Ptown with interesting anecdotes; however it is in his presentations of the development of the Portuguese fishing community, the beginning of the arts colony and the arrival of the earlier gay settlers in the 60s and 70s - and their battles, cominglings and final integration - where he excells. The lives of many people are explored and they weave in and out of the Ptown story over the years so that one gets a real feel for the community.

There were three reviewers who claimed that the book is homophobic, though one of those reviews has now disappeared. As a gay man, I really feel compelled to comment on those claims. And my response is "{crud}!" One of these complainers after making that assertion, then goes on to also complain that certain topics are treated at too great a length - one of them being a gay man who has been at the center of Ptown's life for decades, and has been involved in many of community service projects. Maybe she read so fast she didn't realize he was gay.

Several members of the established gay community are featured repeatedly, prominently and positively in the book. Manso has certainly balanced his attentions very fairly among the Portuguese, artistic, and gay communities of Ptown, and he has done a great job showing how the town various elements could pull together when faced with crises.

However, in the end this is not just the story of the life, but the death by strangulation of an old diverse - get that word, "diverse" - rock 'em, sock 'em town funky old place. The impact in the Nineties of luxury real estate development aimed overwhelmingly at wealthy gay people and a flashy commercial environment for gay visitors has all but killed the town. The powerful arts and business conglomerates - very heavily gay in their makeup - are advocating more and more economic development and centralization; however, failing to point out that it will primarily benefit them, and not the old long time communities of Ptown.

The Portuguese, the artists and the old time gay residents are not only being pushed out by the sky-high costs of life in Ptown, they are not wanted by the wave of gay arrivistes who are indifferent, when not antagonistic, to Ptown's past history and traditions - and the new arrivals make no bones about. It is ironic that we gay people who make so much - in our political campaigning - about diversity are actively and with malice destroying it in Ptown. Manso is not homophobic on this score even, from my own personal experience I would say he's been, if anything, extremely lighthanded.

I had decided in the 90's to investigate Ptown as a place to settle in year around. I was fortunate enough to have enough money to consider purchasing an apartment there and felt that if it were well enough situated I could deal with the hordes of summer visitors that almost suffocate Ptown. However, I wanted to get a picture of the all-year residents, and, therefore, stayed for three off-season months with two gay friends who lived in Ptown. During that time they seemed to be constantly and unwillingly sucked into "us against them" conversations. Twice they were visited by recent gay female residents who proceeded to instruct them on what their attitudes should be on local issues, and in each case departed with a shameless warning that "If you don't support us, you'll be sorry you live here." I was stunned - my friends were established gay residents in town. I left convinced - and Manso's book confirms the rightness of my decision - that the new Ptown was not run by the kind of people I would want for neighbors. Ultimately I found that Europe offered more congenially integrated gay-straight society.

Not at all the gossip-ridden quick-read i had been led to expect--but a really tragic story of the destruction of one of America's most special and historic towns--a place where innovative art has been created for decades, a place where everyone was welcome, but a place that now is being erased from the face of the earth by big money and political correctness. There's a lesson here for every community.

I do not know nor have I ever met Mr. Manso. I think he has written a better than average book that is entertaining, enlightening and sadly disturbing. Let me first point out that the negative reviews here have no substance. They more resemble hysterical reactions of bratty children caught misbehaving than book reviews written by intelligent adults. They do not cite examples from the book itself to take issue with but rather rely on emotional name-calling and imaginary conclusions arrived at without any support. Manso wrote a fine book the facts of which are mostly in the public domain and independently verifiable to anyone taking real issue.

Peter Manso discusses Provincetown's history, evolution and devolution of one of the most exciting and interesting cities of the world. As a straight man that has fallen in love with Provincetown over 15 years ago, I am very grateful to Mr. Manso for pointing out some of Provincetown's current problems. I have considered buying a house there and living in it year round. But after reading it and some of the reviews here on Amazon, Manso's critique has been thoroughly confirmed. It seems that there are people who hate the idea of tolerance even while pretending to be "politically correct." They seem to reject heterosexuals and homosexuals living, working and playing side by side.

Tolerance is for me an extremely important quality in the town I wish to live in for the rest of my life. However, it seems to be undesirable to some. According to at least one reviewer, paranoid militant lesbians have launched an attack on not just heterosexuals who have the audacity to want to live or even just visit P-town, but even on homosexuals who don't pledge allegiance to the party line. The reviewer is a male homosexual.

One of Provincetown's most endearing qualities to me has been its tolerance and willingness to live and let live. I have loved its rejection of mindless mainstream mores. That may sadly be going the way of most other American towns that have an "us against them mentality." It is ironic that gays and lesbians that have been on the receiving end of the discrimination stick would now turn into reverse bigots. What a great way to insure more fear and hate! Bravo! You have thrown down the gauntlet to those homophobes for whom your exclusivity fulfills their prophecies.

On my last visit to Provincetown I stopped into a real estate office and confirmed Manso's allegations of property values driving out the very people that have been born there and who welcomed the wealthy gays who now seem set on throwing out the poor Portuguese, painters, writers and anyone else who can't afford the rent they are now setting.

My wife and I have a number of gay and lesbian friends. One of them has told me a number of times how he dislikes many gays and lesbians that want contact with only homosexuals. I didn't really believe that many homosexuals were like that. I couldn't understand how he believed that let alone that it might be true. After reading Manso's book and the reviews it has inspired I have come to see what my friend is talking about. Perhaps some gays and lesbians do want a town exclusively homosexual. All I can say to them is beware what you wish for! Segregation has never produced anything good thing.

I don't think the point of Manso's book is homophobic, but I do think it is prejudiced. Manso is prejudiced in favor of the bohemian strain of Provincetown history in which artists (straight and gay, American and foreign) came to Provincetown as a refuge from the "square" world and, more or less, managed to co-exist with the native Yankees and Portugese. Because bohemians strike an egalitarian pose, whether or not they are wealthy (and many Provincetown bohemians were very wealthy), the bohemian dominance of Provincetown for most of the 20th century had a leveling influence. A wealthy Portugese fisherman or Yankee businessman's home would not seem much different from that of a wealthy artist like Robert Motherwell.

Those who know Provincetown, as Manso certainly does, knows that there was an informal "cap" on ostentation. If you owned an old sea captain's home from the 19th century, you could fix it up just so (and you were almost expected to), whether you were rich enough to live in it yourself for two months in the summer only, or whether you ran it as a gay guesthouse year-round. If you were a wealthy art dealer from New York, you could build a lovely waterfront home in the East End, but God forbid it should look showy (except for the garden), or dwarf the converted sail loft next door.

Manso's point, I think, is that this changed when people began to purchase real estate in Provincetown both as a financial investment and as a manifestation of their own financial success-conspicuous consumption. That Provincetown had remained largely free of this for most of the 20th century, while the Hamptons, Jackson Hole, and other destinations became bloated with ostentation, was a perverse product of the dominant bohemian class. What Manso may not make clear enough is that the dominance of this class was an anomaly; it couldn't last. Eventually, somebody or some group was going to decide that Provincetown was THE PLACE to display its financial success, just as the bohemians declared in the 1910s and 20s that Provincetown was THE PLACE to let it all hang out. Because real estate is the dominant financial market of the late 20th and early 21st century, and Provincetown is one of those places that only has a little bit of it (like Key West, like Manhattan, like the Hollywood Hills) this unstoppable trend inevitably had to manifest itself in the real estate market. And, as Manso points out, a small number of millionaires can quickly crush the affordable housing market in a physically tiny place like Provincetown; it takes longer in a place like Manhattan or Santa Fe.

Really, Manso's book is an elegy to a simpler-or simply stupider-time in which bohemians (first socialists, then beats, then hippies, then a more punky strain, and ALWAYS gays and lesbians) ruled the cultural life of Provincetown. As Manso points out in the cautionary tales of Ciro Cozzi and Tony Jackett, those who were of this world put art, booze, drugs, good times, and sex (not necessarily in that order) above maximizing the value of their real estate. Not so the new class of wealthy gays for whom real estate in Provincetown is the point. I think the book does a pretty good job of making it clear that these gays feel Provincetown is THEIR town, and since real estate is what matters to them (and everybody else, these days) there is no more sincere form of flattery than to develop great digs in Ptown.

Crusty dune poets like Harry Kemp may spin in their graves in the new Provincetown, but the reality is that anyone today who could be transported back to the Provincetown Tennis Club in its heyday in the 1970s would have laughed at the mixed doubles played by aging communists and second tier abstract expressionist painters with lesbian photographers and hippie Jewish real estate millionaires from the Upper West Side on a dusty, pitted court with tumbledown chicken wire fences. All of this presided over by the slicked-back male pulchritude of the PhD pro, Chris Busa. These people WANTED Provincetown this way, and as long as they dominated Provincetown, they could keep it this way. But the fact is that they started to die-of old age and AIDS-and a younger group took over. That group thinks the funky Tennis Club sucks. And they are right; it really is a joke. There are better tennis courts at many minimum security prisons. Trying to explain to them why the Tennis Club was actually great in its own weird way, is like trying to explain why you loved your first junior high boyfriend or girlfriend. You eventually learn that you should just not bother. Peter Manso did bother in Ptown, and I think he should get some credit for that effort, and not simply be branded a homophobe, which is hardly the point of this book.

[...]

While at some points wildly historically innacurate, I might be the best person to review this book other than Mr Manso himself. I know, on a first name basis, everyone who was profiled most heavily in that book, and I have met Mr Manso on several occasions. I lived there untill my father and I had to move last year because of heavily rising property taxes.

The book is, as a whole- exaggerated. And yes, Manso is run out of town, and almost universally disliked. He's a nice person, but after airing everyone's dirty laundry, he has to deal with the consequences.
His comments on the gay community have been overblown. Millionaires have blown out me, my friends and family out of the town. The Millionaires happent o be- gay. I would be saying the same thing if the millionaires were straight, mind you.

On the whole, a lot of people's reviews of this book got me upset. My town isn't a lesson to be learned- sure, many of the things I grew up with have come and gone, like ice cream and fast food joints owned my what's his name Silva and such, but if all one can see is the psycolgical changes in the make-up of the place, then- you're not looking close enough.
The sun sets the same way, and the monument will always get dressed up around Thanksgiving, and there will always be the ocean. Long after Provincetown becomes a Gays only Utopia, you will find the ocean, and the light and all that makes it beautiful.

Although this book did not grip me, it does present a good overview of what Provincetown has become in the 21st century. As a regular visitor for almost 20 years, even visiting as recent as last weekend, I have become disappointed in what has happened to PTown. The fun and free days are gone, and we cannot attribute this to the AIDS crisis, rather PTown has become less tolerant, more exclusive, and unless you are rolling in the dough, be prepared to be disappointed. This book gathers the sense of what PTown has now sadly become.

For fiction I would recommend you purchase LEAVES OF RED AND GOLD by Scott Chapman. It is an excellent riveting read of a gay attorney set in Massachusetts.

This post-modernist hybrid is a joy to read. Part local history, part travelogue, part whodunit, the book shows how a politically and culturally fashionable pressure group was able to succeed where the Puritans failed: homogenize a town that was famous for its diversity.

If you want to know anything intimate about the folks
who dwell and stand out in Provincetown, you must read this
book.

Not only informative, but totally exciting and it would
interest anyone in its close details of the lives of the
people there. In fact, most of their names, telelphone
numbers and addresses are in the Cape Cod telephone books:
Orleans and Hyannis.

Norman Mailer, Jay Critchley and others are discussed, also a famous murder, Christa Worthington, and more.

Traveling to P'Town and Cape Cod is a bit expensive, coming
from Central MA where I live, but if I could, I'd be happy
as a writer to travel there often to interview some of the
well known people there.

Evidently, this book didn't go over well with many current Ptown residents, but I found it informative and, in various parts, quite entertaining. However, it does get very dull when Manso spends way too much time on a certain two individuals, artist and gay activist Jay Critchley and some woman I'd never heard of, who take up more than half the book. Ptown is full of interesting characters, but these two are given way too much space. What's good are the descriptions of life in Ptown circa late 90s when most of the book seems to have been reported. I first visited Ptown in 1960 and returned almost yearly until 1999 when I left the state. Ptown is a strange aberration of a place. You will also read a lot about Tony Jackett, a local fisherman, who is now featured in this and at least one other book about the Christa Worthington murder, an event which caps this tome but which is left unexplained. A trashman was later convicted. Tony was a suspect, but didn't do it. Read this if you have been to Ptown and are interested in its background and current evolution as a strange gay playground of rich people and tourists.

I suspect all the negative reviews of Ptown were written by Norman Mailer, under various pseudonyms. His hatred of Manso and the book is legendary. But this is a great work. As someone who's been coming to Cape Cod for the last 52 years I have seen the change for the worse that Ptown (yes, we call it that) has undergone. The funky, free-spirited town where everyone does his/her thing as long as no one gets hurt has been replaced by a sort of gay Disneyland. Thank you, Mr. Manso, for telling the world about this.

To borrow a phrase from the book, Manso isn't homophobic, he's wealthophobic. Sure, new money and the people who own it are ruining Cape Cod from the canal to Race Point. The fact that those who are ruining Ptown are gay is just coincidence. Let's not even get into the gross environmental destruction they're laying (or trying to lay) on that fragile strip of sand. What they are bringing to the town is ostentation and bloated self-importance at the expense of others, including fellow gays. A gang of rich bullies should not have the power to destroy a way of life. Let this be a lesson for any other non-conformist town that values things as they are.