It's in your DNA
Aug. 4th, 2008 10:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnAll in all, Provincetown is a bit gay. And because of the flagrant misuse of that word at the hands of most of the English-speaking world I should justify that immediately - it's probably one of the most liberal and... generally rainbow-coloured places that I've ever been in. And I've been to Berkeley.
It's probably best exemplified by the way that the gay/lesbian community site is the fifth Google result for the town. I didn't know this when we arrived, though - the first signs happened when we arrived at the bed and breakfast and looked at the brochures we'd been given, which seemed to advertise a surprising number of massage parlours run by men who appear rather more muscular and hairier than normal. I mentioned the people dressed in drag yesterday, who were out as adverts for a drag show and drag karaoke going on simultaneously.
If you're from America the idea of someone who you might think of being a bit proper and British being thrust into somewhere like this might be a funny one, but I think that even though it's nothing like I've seen before I'm coping reasonably well. Naturally Barack Obama posters hang everywhere, there's a psychedelic taxi called the "Funkmobile" that you occasionally see driving around, and there's a shop halfway down the main road that can only be described as stoner central. (We were in there briefly looking at the rainbow-coloured visual assault before Whitney had to leave because of the smell of marijuana, but I don't know what it smells like and so cannot detect it.)
We were in a shop that sells Christmas decorations - the kind of thing that you'd think wouldn't get much business apart from in one month of the year, but you go in anyway and buy something - and even their ornamental mermaids looked like they had stepped straight out of late-night chatline adverts. On one small artificial tree, there were "Just married" porcelain drawings of two types - one for two grooms, one for two brides, and none for any mixture in between.
They also had a couple of things that caught my attention, though. And if you go back and look at that quotation from Scott Kearnan's article on the front page, it's possible to interpret the first sentence in the wrong way entirely as you first read it. I know I did. (Ironically the next paragraph starts "You read that last part right", which I didn't.)
It's probably best exemplified by the way that the gay/lesbian community site is the fifth Google result for the town. I didn't know this when we arrived, though - the first signs happened when we arrived at the bed and breakfast and looked at the brochures we'd been given, which seemed to advertise a surprising number of massage parlours run by men who appear rather more muscular and hairier than normal. I mentioned the people dressed in drag yesterday, who were out as adverts for a drag show and drag karaoke going on simultaneously.
If you're from America the idea of someone who you might think of being a bit proper and British being thrust into somewhere like this might be a funny one, but I think that even though it's nothing like I've seen before I'm coping reasonably well. Naturally Barack Obama posters hang everywhere, there's a psychedelic taxi called the "Funkmobile" that you occasionally see driving around, and there's a shop halfway down the main road that can only be described as stoner central. (We were in there briefly looking at the rainbow-coloured visual assault before Whitney had to leave because of the smell of marijuana, but I don't know what it smells like and so cannot detect it.)
We were in a shop that sells Christmas decorations - the kind of thing that you'd think wouldn't get much business apart from in one month of the year, but you go in anyway and buy something - and even their ornamental mermaids looked like they had stepped straight out of late-night chatline adverts. On one small artificial tree, there were "Just married" porcelain drawings of two types - one for two grooms, one for two brides, and none for any mixture in between.
They also had a couple of things that caught my attention, though. And if you go back and look at that quotation from Scott Kearnan's article on the front page, it's possible to interpret the first sentence in the wrong way entirely as you first read it. I know I did. (Ironically the next paragraph starts "You read that last part right", which I didn't.)
no subject
Date: 2008-08-05 04:40 pm (UTC)Not that this place is alone in that regard. It's actually a disturbingly frequent pattern I've noticed. Even my own home town isn't immune--hope you just happen to already know where Albuquerque is, because we're certainly not going to tell you.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-05 08:10 pm (UTC)For a far longer time than I would admit, I thought that Albuquerque was just a made-up place - its name sounded far too fantastical to be real. But then my parents' house is down the road from somewhere called Meikle Wartle.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-05 08:48 pm (UTC)(It doesn't help that most of New Mexico looks like a Roadrunner cartoon, thus sort of making Alquerque a double reference....)
And I suppose I can see a lack of state/province name not being as important in other countries, but in the US, it's really good to know just where in the country a particular city is. Especially if I were to, say, suggest you should visit Springfield sometime, since there's only about eight of them. There are also two Kansas Cities, and only one of them is actually in Kansas.