Provincetown for Bear Week

World Traveller Series II — Events & Incidents ~ Episode 2

by Brett Hayhoe

Russell, Alan, Paul, and the Particular Luck of Lifelong Friends

Travel, at its best, is inseparable from the people who share it. Over the years, a small number of those people have graduated from fellow traveller to something considerably more permanent.

Russell — encountered first at that initial InterPride gathering in Zurich, where he served as President — belongs in that category. So does Alan, who appears across enough episodes of this series to constitute a recurring character in his own right. And then there is Paul.

Paul is naughty. Paul is bearish. Paul is, by his own cheerful admission, a rice queen — a man who has spent many enjoyable evenings at Asian clubs and whose company, on those evenings and on this particular road trip, has been consistently excellent. The naughty nights are well-documented between the two of us. The road trip to Provincetown for Bear Week sits comfortably among the highlights.

To be genuinely blessed with lifelong friends is not a small thing. It is, in fact, one of the larger things. Russell, Alan, and Paul are evidence of that.

The Bear — A Brief Introduction for the Uninitiated

For those unfamiliar with the territory: in the LGBTQIA+ community, a bear is typically a larger, hairier, and often heavily bearded queer man who embraces a rugged, masculine aesthetic. The subculture emerged in the 1980s as a deliberate and welcoming alternative to mainstream gay culture’s preoccupation with youth and hairlessness — a reclamation of a different kind of beauty standard, and one that has produced, among other things, an annual gathering in Provincetown that draws its community from across the country and beyond.

Bear Week is exactly what it sounds like, and rather more fun than it sounds.

The Drive — Uneventful, Which Is the Best Kind

Road trips are always fun. The particular pleasure of a road trip is not always the destination — it is the combination of movement, conversation, snacks of questionable nutritional value, and the accumulating sense that something is about to happen. This one delivered on all of those elements.

The drive itself was uneventful. This is not a criticism. An uneventful drive is a gift, and after the Hurricane Sandy episode, uneventful had a great deal of appeal.

Provincetown sits at the very tip of Cape Cod — a long, curling arm of Massachusetts that reaches out into the Atlantic as though trying to catch something. It is a resort town by reputation and by history, beloved in summer for its beaches, its art galleries, its restaurants, and its long-established status as one of the most LGBTQIA+-welcoming communities in the United States. In summer, the deck of a beachside chalet would be an excellent place to spend an afternoon.

It was not summer.

The Cold — Bitterly, Unforgivingly, Personally Offensive

Living in Melbourne produces a reasonable familiarity with cold weather. Melbourne’s winters are not to be underestimated. They are the kind of cold that Melburnians complain about with great enthusiasm and considerable expertise.

Nothing in that experience prepared for Provincetown in winter during Bear Week.

The cold was not merely cold. It was bitterly, relentlessly, personally cold — the kind that finds its way through every layer and makes itself at home in places layers are not supposed to reach. The chalet on the outskirts of town was small and genuinely quaint — charming, even — and it came with a sizeable deck that in summer would have been an outstanding feature. In winter, the deck was decorative. A beautiful, entirely unusable decoration.

The cold, it must be said, did not improve with time. It simply continued.

The Town — and the Karaoke Discovery

What Provincetown lacked in warmth it compensated for in almost every other respect.

The township itself is genuinely delightful — the kind of place that has been carefully loved over many decades, where the architecture has character and the streets invite walking even when walking requires three layers and a level of personal commitment usually reserved for more serious endeavours. The restaurants serve seafood, as one would expect from a working harbour town at the tip of Cape Cod, and they serve it with a seriousness of purpose that rewards the visitor who arrives hungry and without dietary restrictions.

The cuisine was, without exaggeration, unbelievably delicious. This is not praise offered lightly.

And then there was the karaoke bar.

Paul and the new friends acquired over the course of the weekend found the karaoke bar. The karaoke bar revealed something that not everyone in Provincetown had previously been aware of: the ability to sing.

This is perhaps the moment to mention — briefly, without undue emphasis — that the first karaoke host in Australia was, in fact, based in Cairns. That the career that followed included two years travelling the country opening bars on behalf of Pioneer Australia. That the Moomba Festival stage was hosted for the same company. That Reno’s Nightclub in Cairns was where the residency began, before weekly trips to Townsville to run karaoke at a pub and nightclub for twelve months running.

Not everyone knows that particular piece of history. Paul’s new friends in Provincetown did, by the end of the evening.

The Aftermath — Worth Every Degree of It

The road trip produced, in its aftermath, a terrible flu. The kind that arrives with a sense of grievance and settles in for longer than is welcome. The cold of Provincetown — that bitterly personal cold — had taken its toll in the most predictable way.

No regrets.

Good food. Lovely surroundings. Great company. A karaoke bar that did not know what was coming. Paul, bearish and naughty and entirely himself throughout. These things add up, and they add up to something worth a week of flu and several boxes of cold and flu tablets.

Provincetown in winter is an experience that has no equivalent elsewhere. It is cold, it is beautiful, it is full of bears, and it serves the finest seafood on the eastern seaboard with the confidence of a town that knows exactly what it is doing.

The deck, admittedly, was wasted on the season. Everything else was not.

The World Traveller Series is written and produced by Brett Hayhoe — publisher, editor and administrator of Q Magazine. Read more at Q Magazine Blogs — Ask Brett Podcasts — Ask Brett Podcasts | Hayhoe YouTube Channel

Next: My Youth in Japan.