In the autumn 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 about 12 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. No one was said 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.” Ptown, 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.