July 20, 1978 - Provincetown - Journal Entry

Provincetown is packed with cruising homos and hippies retired from the world. P-Town is the end of the world. Thankfully beyond the end of US6 and a ferry ride away from Boston. Ann suffers from motion sickness after a morning session of sit-ups and yoga. I feel for her, but we are free; fresh sea air, a morning fuck, some money in our pockets, New York and its problems hundreds of miles away. I almost feel like getting a job on Commercial Street. We both love of tge town is so fey. I used to come here in the early 70s with my friends from the 1270 disco and have orgies in cheap hotel rooms. We were so free. Some queer restaurants must need a butch dishwasher. Ann could work in a sea taffy shop. Certainly a better holiday than the stifling heat of West Virginia, the smog canyons of New York, and the overbearing familiarity of Boston. We head out to Race Point, where Ann rants a wicked version of Pattie Smith's GLORIA. She is so very very funny and cute.

Did Jesus have a younger brother?

Or was he the Only Holy Child. Mark 6:3 of the New Testament refers to his brother James. Nothing of anotger Immaculate Conception. I tell Alice my theory that Christ was thr red-headed bastard of the Celtic legionaire. No mention of this soldier in the Bible, but when Ann and I had sex the first time, she cried out, "Oh God."

Blasphemy is considered a deadly sin by the Catholic Church, but at death I fear not the lightning of a Myth. I shall not ask for the Last Rites. I shall not shake with fear for the loss of my immortal soul. I shall be dead.

Jimmy Jesus lived past his thirties
The sole son of Mary Magdalene
His father had survived the Crucifixion
To seek refuge in the Himalayas
Where he had spent in youth.

Kashmiris said, "You look like your father."
Jesus, Mary and Joseph had fled there
After the disgrace in the Temple___
Kashmir
A holy child
The son of Yuz Asaf
Wandering Jews begged for forgiveness from the only son of the Holy One.
But Jimmy was gifted with visions.
A stutter
A stammer
A lisp
No one could understand him
Not god-struck
Just a little gob-struck__

Mary took him every day
To his father's grave.
Screaming, "Why Jesus? Why Jimmy? He has no sins."
The Heavens remained silent to all.
Except Mary Magdalene heard a voice.
"I told you not to call me here."
Jimmy Jesus calls out, "Jesus, Da-da."
A bolt of lightning struck him.
Dead for want of a father's love.

Minor Blasphemy.

Still at the beach. The water cold as ice. Windblown sand whispers against our naked bodies. Creepy men saunter along the strand. White bodies hidden by white shirts, black shorts, high white sox, loafers, binoculars hanging from the neck. More unneeded feet on these secluded beaches, crushing the fragile ecology, although the Park Service allow dune buggies to furrow across the sand. I stand up naked. My swimming suit dry. I would so like Alice to suck my dick now.

Dunes everywhere I look. Angles of sand topped by sea grass and more voyeurs. Damn them, but then so what. They have their own pervy lives to live. Honest citizens hiding their wicked ways fifty weeks a year to being themselves for a two-week vacation in P-Town. Next Saturday they will return home to be replaced by others of them. The beach calming the homo-erotic cravings they can't feel at home.

I saw Jeff Berger, one of my old lover's at a bar. A go-go boy cutie fighting off early old age. Alice and I made love twice tonight. She asked, "What was it like fucking a man?"

"Different from you."

"How?"

"Savage versus vicious."

I show her how,and then what it was to be fucked in the ass. Not queer. A sexual adventurer.

Damn, my wisdom tooth is fucked.

Foto by Monroe Wheeler, Provincetown, 1947

July 20th 1978 - Provincetown - Journal Entry

 

In Provincetown with Alice. Commercial Street is packed with fey homos and hippies retreated to this end of the road refuge. Both can be who they acre without pretending to be what the rest of America wants them to be. I look for any old friends from the 1270 in front to the afternoon Meat Rack. I recognize none of the face, but hustlers' etes scream, “Lose the fag hag.”

Alice yogas on the beach like she was Isadora Duncan. A bull dyke shoots fotos. Alice obliges her. It’s a lovely pas de deux. Alice loves the attention. I wander off to the Atlantic Bar. More gay men. I know one. I recall fucking him on Newbury Street. An apartment with brown decor. Gary buys me a beer. We talked who knows who. He comes from Boston. He knows my good friend Donny Ward from the 1270. We both love the black dancer extraordinaire. We huff poppers at the bar. He strokes my cock. It gets hard. I touch his. A huge cock. P-town is hot. Gary says, "Lose the girl. I want to fuck your ass and you piss in my mouth."

He is hard as steel. Me too. I reject his offers of sin. For some reason I don’t queer any more. Sexually.

Alice has finished her session. A bull dyke scowls at me. She’s not Alice’s type. She likes them femme.

We go back to our hotel room. She throws up in the shower. A sensitive stomach. I stand on the deck naked. The Atlantic air medicine. Alice has recovered from the nausea. We fuck. I feel great. Away from New York. Away from the sullen summer of West Virginia. The pollution of Manhattan, and the imprisoning familiarity of Boston. Our problems two hundred miles away. We both have money in our pockets from my painting her father’s house, even in thought I got paint on some of the bushes. Alice is in a good mood. She’s singing a parody of Patti Smith’s HORSES with Race Point in view. So very funny.

I love the dead end on the Cape.

Later a naked gay man with a small penis approached us and said I looked like Jesus’ brother.

“No bearded.” He eyes my crotch.

I laugh and he drifted away to the dunes with a backward glance, as if he expected me to follow. Alice shrugs like she doesn’t care. I stayed with her.

Suddenly think of whether Jesus had a younger brother or a son with Mary Magdalene. She was no whore, although the nuns taught she was.

I wondered if Jesus had a brother or son. Blasphemy. A mortal sin for the Church. Worthy of eternal damnation, unless I ask for a pArdon from Hell. Atheists don’t fear an afterlife.

Provincetown Lore - niizh manitoag

In the summer of 1620 my antecedent, John Howland, crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower. Mid-voyage a storm washed passenger the indentured servant was overboard. He sank under the waves about twelve feet (4 m), but a crew member threw a rope, which Howland managed to grab, and he was safely hauled back onboard. The pilgrims landed after the prevailing winds prevented their sailing south to Virginia. The settlers left the peninsula, which the Nauset people called Meeshaun or 'going by boat'. Seemed the Puritans were upset by native gays or niizh manitoag” (two spirits) the Algonquin term for transgender or homosexual genders. None of the Nauset was sad to see the back of the grim saganash or white men. We queers like our freedom offered by such dead end communities such as P-Town, Fire Island or Key West.

According to https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/ Tennessee Williams later described the four groups who made up Provincetown’s residents. He belonged to the first two: The flamboyant gay summer visitors and the elite artists and writers who came to write, paint, dance or act. Third, gay wash-ashores who came as visitors and stayed year-round to work or run businesses. Finally, the Yankee, Portuguese and mixed-race native gays.

The playwright Tennessee Williams, then 29, arrived in the summer of 1940. He joined a group “dominated by a platinum blonde Hollywood belle named Doug and a bull-dike named Wanda who [was] a well-known writer under a male pen name.” P-town, he wrote, was “screaming with creatures not all of whom are seagulls.”

It remains a safe haven for sailors and other wanderers to this day.

My first trip there was in 1971 with Bruce and Paul. Friends from the 1270 Club in Boston. Bruce and I drank at the Shipwreck and fucked complete strangers from the Meat Rack. Paul was in love with me and watched from the shadows.

Please read Cape Queer? A Case Study of Provincetown, Massachusetts and Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort by Karen Christel Krahulik,for a better grasp of P-town's his/her/themtory.

ps John Howland fathered eleven children in a long life in the Bay Colony.