John Waters, by Mark C.O’Flaherty
Somebody told me, back when I was being a beatnik in Baltimore in the 1960s, that Provincetown was a weird place and I’d like it, so I hitched here and they were right. Everyone says it’s so different now but I don’t think it is. It was a hippy thing back then, but there aren’t hippies now so why would there be a hippie thing going on? The main difference is in the winter – I was never a year-round resident here but it used to be that there used to be a winter community. Then everybody bought condos and of course they don’t come in the winter and they don’t rent them. I come back every summer and it feels like if I dropped a piece of paper out front the year before, it’d be in the same place. It stays uncannily the same, in many ways. The bookshop I ran as a kid is still here – the Provincetown Bookstore.
I premiered Eat Your Makeup in a church here – we showed my early movies in churches. There was the Arts Cinema, which is no longer here. I would rent this 35mm theatre and sit in the back with a 16mm projector after flyering all week. Mondo Trasho and Multiple Maniacs premiered here. This was the first place outside of Baltimore the films caught on. Tennessee Williams and Billie Holiday lived in Provincetown, so did Robert Motherwell and Norman Mailer – it’s always been an artistic community.
View from the Pilgrim Monument, Provincetown
Provincetown is really a gay fishing village. It got gayer when people started coming out. People didn’t want their parents to know where they were going so they said Cape Cod, not Provincetown. It was always bohemian, eccentric and gay but not totally gay. Families come here every year to look at gay people, but not in a mean way. We have Family Week now – I joke that next year there’ll be S&M Family Week for Communist Children. Bear Week is shocking if you don’t know what they are but actually where I live in Baltimore, all the middle aged straight men are bears but they just don’t know it.
Monday to Friday I get up at 6am and write. I go out for bike rides and for dinner but I go out partying on Friday night. I’ve always been a coal miner with a pay cheque. A hangover has to be scheduled three weeks in advance.
At night I look out over the deck and it’s like a Fellini movie… like being on a boat. Sometimes it’s like a calendar in a barber shop, or a Lichtenstein painting of the moon over the water
People often ask me if I’m having a good vacation and I’m not really vacationing, I’m working here. At 1pm every day I go to the beach and swim for half an hour, and I like to ride my little Pee Wee Herman bike. When people shout after me I’m already a block away. I’m an aggressive driver. I don’t ride for exercise. I never work at weekends. I go out and have fun here.
It’s too late to change summer resorts now. I have friends in the Hamptons but with P-town you don’t give up a summer rental or someone else inherits it. And it’s way too late for me to go to another summer resort.
I look forward to coming here to work every year. I’m not the kind of person who just goes on vacation. How many times can you just go to the beach? It’s boring. I go for half an hour a day with no sunblock on and my dermatologist says its okay. Now of course I’ll probably die of skin cancer and the irony will be immortalised in print.
I kind of hate summer and hot weather so I come here so that I’m by the water and it’s cooler. At night I look out over the deck and it’s like a Fellini movie… like being on a boat. Sometimes it’s like a calendar in a barber shop, or a Lichtenstein painting of the moon over the water.
I wrote Desperate Living here, which is about an isolated town outside of the rest of the community – just like P-town. I like to watch people and it’s a great people-watching place. I like to sit on front of the benches in front of Town Hall, which is what used to be what Spiritus is like now – if you haven’t seen gay anarchy you can find it at Spiritus Pizza at 1am when the bars close. AIDS really changed this town, wiped it out for a while. 70% of my friends died. It’s horrible but there’s something they say: “fags die and dykes buy.”
The circuit queens are kind of over. The muscle men have stopped exercising and turned into bears. The clone look is over. The kids are twinks now, real skinny with skinny jeans. It’s a new generation of gay kids, and they hang out with straight people, which I like. You’ll lose if you believe in separatism. It’s not a big deal to them what you are. But then it’s really only true if you’re a rich kid – it’s a class issue. It’s expensive to come here.
There is no hostility from the straight families. The straight people don’t come in a mean way, they come and have their pictures taken with drag queens. It’s the first time a lot of kids see gay people.
There’s a lot of gossip in this town – you spend the night with somebody and your mail gets delivered there the next day. That’s why I like closet queens as they won’t tell. I don’t feel worried about gossip here. Everyone here is fairly eccentric and liberal about most everything, and the gossip doesn’t happen in a bad way – you hear stuff, but so much goes on. June is my favourite month, the Provincetown Film Festival is on and I’m very active in it. Tarantino has visited, lots of big stars have. I like May too – in May everyone’s thinking they’ll fall in love and get rich, and in August they either did or didn’t, so they’ll either be in a good mood or not, and that’s when the melodrama happens, and then it’s time to leave for another year. C