Where Are All the Gay People in Tony’s Provincetown?

“In 1972, my feeling was that this was a gay town and that I was here at the pleasure of somebody else, which is sort of the opposite of everywhere outside of here at that time.”That’s how late chef, author, and television host Anthony Bourdain described his first summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts in a 2014 episode of his program Parts Unknown. That upside-down feeling of queer culture being dominant is exclusive to a select number of locales in the United States — Wilton Manors and Fire Island come to mind — and to even fewer back then, when a young and reckless Bourdain first careened into town.When New York Times food reporter Pete Wells went looking for the version of P-town Bourdain likely experienced in his summers there, he, too, found a queer picture: “It was a safe harbor for poets, artists, drifters, clamdiggers, gay men, lesbians, drag queens, hippies, and dropouts of all kinds,” Wells wrote. Bourdain, as Wells noted, once described the cooks at local fine dining establishment Ciro’s as speaking with “a high-pitched, ultra-femme, affected drawl, salted with terms from eighteenth-century English literature and Marine Corps drill instructor-speak.”And yet the version of Provincetown presented in the new biopic Tony, while faithful in many respects, does not bear much resemblance to these descriptions. NPR pop culture critic John Powers called it “strangely un-gay,” an apt description of a film in which I could count on one hand the number of moments in which LGBTQ+ people are outwardly acknowledged — including the use of the F-slur in a very heterosexual kitchen environment. The language may be period-appropriate, sure, but was Bourdain’s experience of the Cape really so steeped in straightness? Not according to Parts Unknown, which painted the young chef’s time as far more bohemian, including casual sightings of John Waters.I am perhaps higher on Tony than Powers — but not higher than Bourdain frequently was in Provincet