I snickered in recognition when I read in a recent Huffington Post story about the recent annual Family Week in Provincetown, the unflattering reference to the town's longtime image as the preferred destination of stereotypical "Boston dance boys."
I was one of those Boston dance boys when I was 22 years old, way back in the summer of 1981. But a funny thing happened on the way to age 56: the Boston dance boy grew up.
The journey from there to here has unfortunately included a great deal of sorrow with the loss of my father when I was 30 and virtually all of my oldest friends -- to AIDS, cancer and even a suicide. I myself have been living with HIV since my diagnosis in 2005.
Of course that has changed my priorities. It made me more aware than ever that life is fragile and short. But it also deepened my sense of joy, teaching me life is to be savored like a juicy orange.
When I head out to P-town for a few days later this week, I expect to savor the town's other, quieter pleasures that I've enjoyed for more than three decades. I'll eat dinner with my English friend Roger, visiting once again from London. We met in P-town that summer of 1981, and for many years over the past three decades a springtime e-mail from one of us asks, "When will you be in P-town?"
Just about 34 years to the day before this week's visit, that much younger version of me spent three days in the tiny town at the tip of Cape Cod. It changed my life.
P-town has a way of doing that.
A year after graduating from an evangelical college, in 1980, I was grappling with a "problem" -- as I called my homosexual orientation back then -- that wouldn't go away. I'd been madly in love the last two years of college with a male friend who didn't love me back. That he also didn't love himself very well didn't ameliorate my heartache.
Fortunately, at the same time I finished college, a cute young historian at Yale named John Boswell published his landmark book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. For the first time I learned that the Catholic Church -- in which I was raised, before my teenage evangelical phase -- had not always condemned homosexuality. At least one pope was known to have a male lover.
Boswell showed with prolific historic documentation that the church's condemnation had more to do with the entrenched fear and prejudice of the individuals controlling it than with anything like divine authority.
So began my personal gay liberation -- and the backstory behind the Boston dance boy's 1981 visit to Provincetown.
I took the ferry from Boston, where I was living, with my friend Alan, visiting me from New York. We stayed at The Captain and His Ship, an historic sea captain's home, now a guesthouse, on Commercial Street -- almost across the street from the Boatslip, sight still today of a daily tea dance that draws masses of men and women who enjoy longtime DJ Mary-Alice's mix of old-school and cutting-edge dance music.
I was like a sponge, soaking up impressions of everyone and everything, taking mental notes on the different men I met. I knew I was attracted to men, but I had no clue what that meant as far as how to conduct myself, who I was supposed to be, where I fit in the gay world.
On those blissful foggy mornings in August 1981, men staying in our guesthouse gathered outside on the front steps. We sipped coffee, savored the pastries our hosts provided and talked in quiet voices. Where are you from? Have you been to P-town before? Wasn't the crowd at Spiritus Pizza crazy last night? No one asked, "Are you gay?" It was assumed you were, so we didn't need to spend time talking about it.
For the first time in my life, I felt normal. There was nothing to explain, no one to blame or convince. For the first time since I was a boy fooling around with boys, in those innocent times when I did it because it felt natural and I hadn't yet heard it was supposedly sick and sinful, I simply felt a quiet sense that this is who I am -- and it's perfectly, finally okay.
All these years later, I still say that for me, being an openly and proudly gay man has been a matter of preserving the sense of normalcy I first felt in Provincetown in that summer of 1981. It was an exuberant feeling, a welling-up inside -- not of tears, at last, but a rising orgasm of freedom that can only be expressed in joyful dance -- exactly like I danced, for the first time with other men, at the Boatslip's daily Tea Dance to Kelly Marie's huge club hit, "Feels Like I'm in Love."
When I visit P-town this week, I expect to linger -- naked, as late in the waning daylight as I can -- at the far end of Herring Cove. Roger introduced me to the "nude end" of the beach the day after we met, and many's the time in the years since that I've forgotten to pack a swimsuit because I simply don't associate wearing one with Herring Cove. I do associate freedom and connection to the sand, sea and sky -- and restoration for my soul.
I'm not likely this visit to rush back to town for Tea Dance, as I did back in 1981. I'm a former Boston dance boy, after all.