_{Images courtesy of Museum of International Folk Art}

Provincetown’s History Told Through Artifacts

by Steve Desroches

In 1968 American cultural anthropologist Esther Newton wrote The Drag Queens: A Study in Urban Anthropology as her PhD dissertation at the University of Chicago. It was a landmark academic work that would be widely published in 1972 as Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Her work is important as she was the first in American academia to establish LGBTQ people as a distinct cultural group, opening up further ethnographic studies. Now, in many ways LGBTQ folklife and ways are studied, documented, and preserved, representing the variety of culture, traditions, and customs of LGBTQ life around the world. 

Provincetown is of course home to many distinctly LGBTQ cultural expressions, with Carnival being the biggest. Indeed, the weeklong celebration presents many ways in which revelers express an LGBTQ point of view, perhaps most so on the day of the annual parade. Running down Commercial Street just a little over two miles, the Carnival Parade features inventive floats, often designed by local artists. But since the first Carnival in 1978, revelers increasingly present an organic promenade before the parade which can feature elaborate costumes, flash mobs, dance numbers and sing-alongs, as well as so much glitter that the pavement sparkles the next day. 

Provincetown Carnival has become the town’s signature event, and the cultural expressions practiced that day attract a lot of attention, including from the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which acquired this costume from Carnival in 2015, in which the theme was Candyland. As an artifact, it represents the very distinct culture Newton studied and how Provincetown continues to be a home to a robust LGBTQ community and its unique folkways.