Gay subcultures

For the better part of two decades, I have spent much of every summer in the small resort of Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. No one bats an eye if two men walk down the street holding hands, or if a lesbian couple pecks each other on the cheek, or if gay drag queen dressed as Cher careens down the main strip on a motor scooter.

As gay America has changed, so, too, has Provincetown. In a microcosm of what is happening across this country, its culture is changing. Some of these changes are obvious. A real-estate boom has made Provincetown far more expensive than it ever was, slowly excluding poorer and younger subcultures and residents.

A Gay in the Life: Gay subcommunities

Where, once, gayness trumped class, now the reverse is true. Beautiful, renovated houses are slowly outnumbering subculture shacks, once crammed with twenty-something, hand-to-mouth misfits or artists. The faces of gay dying from or struggling with aids have dwindled to an gay few. The number of children of gay couples has soared, and, some weeks, strollers clog the sidewalks.

Bar life is not nearly as subculture to socializing as it once was. Men and women gather on the beach, drink coffee on the front porch of a store, or meet at the Film Festival or Spiritus Pizza. And, of course, week after week this summer, couple after couple got married—well over a thousand in the year and a half since gay marriage has been legal in Massachusetts.

Gay my window on a patch of beach that somehow became impromptu hallowed ground, I watched dozens get hitched—under a chuppah or with a priest, in formalwear or beach clothes, some with New Age drums and horns, even one associated with a full-bore Mass. Two friends lit the town monument in purple to celebrate; a tuxedoed male couple slipping onto the beach was suddenly greeted with a huge cheer from the crowd; an elderly lesbian couple attached cans to the back of their Volkswagen and honked their horn as they drove up the high street.

The heterosexuals in the crowd knew exactly what to do. They waved and cheered and smiled. Then, suddenly, as if learning the habits of a new era, gay bystanders joined in. In an instant, the difference between gay and straight receded again a little. They felt merely like small, if critical, steps in an inexorable evolution toward the end of a distinctive gay culture.

For what has happened to Provincetown this past decade, as with gay America as a whole, has been less like a political revolution from above than a social transformation from below. There is no single gay identity anymore, let alone a single look or style or culture. Memorial Day sees the younger generation of lesbians, looking like lost members of a boy band, with their baseball caps, preppy shirts, short hair, and earrings.

Family Week heralds an influx of children and harried gay parents. Film Festival Week brings in the artsy crowd. East Village bohemians drift in throughout the summer; quiet male couples spend more time browsing gourmet groceries and realtors than cruising nightspots; the predictable population of artists and writers—Michael Cunningham and John Waters are fixtures—mix with openly gay lawyers and cops and teachers and shrinks.

Slowly but unmistakably, gay culture is ending. You see it beyond the poignant transformation of P-town: on the subcultures of the big cities, on university campuses, in the suburbs where gay couples have settled, and in the entrails of the Internet. In fact, it is beginning to dawn on many that the very concept of gay culture may one day disappear altogether.