Ptown: Art, Sex, and Money on the Outer Cape

By Peter Manso

Book Overview

When you look back at its history, you can see a progression in Provincetown, things getting wilder and wilder, the outlaw element becoming the norm....
Provincetown, Cape Cod: This small Massachusetts enclave has long been home to pirates, commune-dwellers, artists, and other noble countrymen who value liberty over law -- from Norman Mailer and Tennessee Williams to John Waters, Robert Motherwell, and former congressman Gerry Studds. With one of the largest homosexual populations per capita of any town or city in the United States, and some of the highest beachfront real estate prices in the Northeast, Provincetown is a thriving tourist spot that attracts more than one million visitors each year. Here, acclaimed writer and longtime Ptown resident Peter Manso brings together all the celebrities and townsfolk, history and happenstance, and politics and gossip to offer an unparalleled account of this unconventional seaside society -- a place, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, where "one may stand...and put all of America behind him."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743243110
• ISBN13: 9780743243117
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Norman? Is that you?

I suspect all the negative reviews of Ptown were written by Norman Mailer, under various pseudonyms. His hatred of Manso and the book is legendary. But this is a great work. As someone who's been coming to Cape Cod for the last 52 years I have seen the change for the worse that Ptown (yes, we call it that) has undergone. The funky, free-spirited town where everyone does his/her thing as long as no one gets hurt has been replaced by a sort of gay Disneyland. Thank you, Mr. Manso, for telling the world about this. To borrow a phrase from the book, Manso isn't homophobic, he's wealthophobic. Sure, new money and the people who own it are ruining Cape Cod from the canal to Race Point. The fact that those who are ruining Ptown are gay is just coincidence. Let's not even get into the gross environmental destruction they're laying (or trying to lay) on that fragile strip of sand. What they are bringing to the town is ostentation and bloated self-importance at the expense of others, including fellow gays. A gang of rich bullies should not have the power to destroy a way of life. Let this be a lesson for any other non-conformist town that values things as they are.

Great Read

Manso tells it like it is. Superb choice of characters. Have lived in P'town over 30 years.

Joy to read

This post-modernist hybrid is a joy to read. Part local history, part travelogue, part whodunit, the book shows how a politically and culturally fashionable pressure group was able to succeed where the Puritans failed: homogenize a town that was famous for its diversity.