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| Ptown: Art, Sex, and Money on the Outer Cape | 
 enlarge | Author: Peter Manso
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $0.62
You Save: $13.38 (96%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (18 reviews)
Sales Rank: 608802
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0743243110
Dewey Decimal Number: 973
EAN: 9780743243117
ASIN: 0743243110
Publication Date: April 22, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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."
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 Congrats Pete August 29, 2008
Peter Manso is an incredible Jerk who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. But, I salute him for his fight against the Truro Police Dept mafia. Fight the good fight brother! Spend that trust fund on the legal injustices of the the TPD!
 Norman? Is that you? July 3, 2006
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.
Give Ptown a Fair Read April 3, 2006
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
I don't think the point of Manso's book is homophobic, but I do think it is prejudiced. Manso is prejudiced in favor of the bohemian strain of Provincetown history in which artists (straight and gay, American and foreign) came to Provincetown as a refuge from the "square" world and, more or less, managed to co-exist with the native Yankees and Portugese. Because bohemians strike an egalitarian pose, whether or not they are wealthy (and many Provincetown bohemians were very wealthy), the bohemian dominance of Provincetown for most of the 20th century had a leveling influence. A wealthy Portugese fisherman or Yankee businessman's home would not seem much different from that of a wealthy artist like Robert Motherwell.
Those who know Provincetown, as Manso certainly does, knows that there was an informal "cap" on ostentation. If you owned an old sea captain's home from the 19th century, you could fix it up just so (and you were almost expected to), whether you were rich enough to live in it yourself for two months in the summer only, or whether you ran it as a gay guesthouse year-round. If you were a wealthy art dealer from New York, you could build a lovely waterfront home in the East End, but God forbid it should look showy (except for the garden), or dwarf the converted sail loft next door.
Manso's point, I think, is that this changed when people began to purchase real estate in Provincetown both as a financial investment and as a manifestation of their own financial success-conspicuous consumption. That Provincetown had remained largely free of this for most of the 20th century, while the Hamptons, Jackson Hole, and other destinations became bloated with ostentation, was a perverse product of the dominant bohemian class. What Manso may not make clear enough is that the dominance of this class was an anomaly; it couldn't last. Eventually, somebody or some group was going to decide that Provincetown was THE PLACE to display its financial success, just as the bohemians declared in the 1910s and 20s that Provincetown was THE PLACE to let it all hang out. Because real estate is the dominant financial market of the late 20th and early 21st century, and Provincetown is one of those places that only has a little bit of it (like Key West, like Manhattan, like the Hollywood Hills) this unstoppable trend inevitably had to manifest itself in the real estate market. And, as Manso points out, a small number of millionaires can quickly crush the affordable housing market in a physically tiny place like Provincetown; it takes longer in a place like Manhattan or Santa Fe.
Really, Manso's book is an elegy to a simpler-or simply stupider-time in which bohemians (first socialists, then beats, then hippies, then a more punky strain, and ALWAYS gays and lesbians) ruled the cultural life of Provincetown. As Manso points out in the cautionary tales of Ciro Cozzi and Tony Jackett, those who were of this world put art, booze, drugs, good times, and sex (not necessarily in that order) above maximizing the value of their real estate. Not so the new class of wealthy gays for whom real estate in Provincetown is the point. I think the book does a pretty good job of making it clear that these gays feel Provincetown is THEIR town, and since real estate is what matters to them (and everybody else, these days) there is no more sincere form of flattery than to develop great digs in Ptown.
Crusty dune poets like Harry Kemp may spin in their graves in the new Provincetown, but the reality is that anyone today who could be transported back to the Provincetown Tennis Club in its heyday in the 1970s would have laughed at the mixed doubles played by aging communists and second tier abstract expressionist painters with lesbian photographers and hippie Jewish real estate millionaires from the Upper West Side on a dusty, pitted court with tumbledown chicken wire fences. All of this presided over by the slicked-back male pulchritude of the PhD pro, Chris Busa. These people WANTED Provincetown this way, and as long as they dominated Provincetown, they could keep it this way. But the fact is that they started to die-of old age and AIDS-and a younger group took over. That group thinks the funky Tennis Club sucks. And they are right; it really is a joke. There are better tennis courts at many minimum security prisons. Trying to explain to them why the Tennis Club was actually great in its own weird way, is like trying to explain why you loved your first junior high boyfriend or girlfriend. You eventually learn that you should just not bother. Peter Manso did bother in Ptown, and I think he should get some credit for that effort, and not simply be branded a homophobe, which is hardly the point of this book.
[...]
Intimately involved, you might call me. January 7, 2006
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
While at some points wildly historically innacurate, I might be the best person to review this book other than Mr Manso himself. I know, on a first name basis, everyone who was profiled most heavily in that book, and I have met Mr Manso on several occasions. I lived there untill my father and I had to move last year because of heavily rising property taxes.
The book is, as a whole- exaggerated. And yes, Manso is run out of town, and almost universally disliked. He's a nice person, but after airing everyone's dirty laundry, he has to deal with the consequences.
His comments on the gay community have been overblown. Millionaires have blown out me, my friends and family out of the town. The Millionaires happent o be- gay. I would be saying the same thing if the millionaires were straight, mind you.
On the whole, a lot of people's reviews of this book got me upset. My town isn't a lesson to be learned- sure, many of the things I grew up with have come and gone, like ice cream and fast food joints owned my what's his name Silva and such, but if all one can see is the psycolgical changes in the make-up of the place, then- you're not looking close enough.
The sun sets the same way, and the monument will always get dressed up around Thanksgiving, and there will always be the ocean. Long after Provincetown becomes a Gays only Utopia, you will find the ocean, and the light and all that makes it beautiful.
REQUIEM FOR TOLERANCE AND A UNIQUE TOWN October 12, 2004
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
I do not know nor have I ever met Mr. Manso. I think he has written a better than average book that is entertaining, enlightening and sadly disturbing. Let me first point out that the negative reviews here have no substance. They more resemble hysterical reactions of bratty children caught misbehaving than book reviews written by intelligent adults. They do not cite examples from the book itself to take issue with but rather rely on emotional name-calling and imaginary conclusions arrived at without any support. Manso wrote a fine book the facts of which are mostly in the public domain and independently verifiable to anyone taking real issue.
Peter Manso discusses Provincetown's history, evolution and devolution of one of the most exciting and interesting cities of the world. As a straight man that has fallen in love with Provincetown over 15 years ago, I am very grateful to Mr. Manso for pointing out some of Provincetown's current problems. I have considered buying a house there and living in it year round. But after reading it and some of the reviews here on Amazon, Manso's critique has been thoroughly confirmed. It seems that there are people who hate the idea of tolerance even while pretending to be "politically correct." They seem to reject heterosexuals and homosexuals living, working and playing side by side.
Tolerance is for me an extremely important quality in the town I wish to live in for the rest of my life. However, it seems to be undesirable to some. According to at least one reviewer, paranoid militant lesbians have launched an attack on not just heterosexuals who have the audacity to want to live or even just visit P-town, but even on homosexuals who don't pledge allegiance to the party line. The reviewer is a male homosexual.
One of Provincetown's most endearing qualities to me has been its tolerance and willingness to live and let live. I have loved its rejection of mindless mainstream mores. That may sadly be going the way of most other American towns that have an "us against them mentality." It is ironic that gays and lesbians that have been on the receiving end of the discrimination stick would now turn into reverse bigots. What a great way to insure more fear and hate! Bravo! You have thrown down the gauntlet to those homophobes for whom your exclusivity fulfills their prophecies.
On my last visit to Provincetown I stopped into a real estate office and confirmed Manso's allegations of property values driving out the very people that have been born there and who welcomed the wealthy gays who now seem set on throwing out the poor Portuguese, painters, writers and anyone else who can't afford the rent they are now setting.
My wife and I have a number of gay and lesbian friends. One of them has told me a number of times how he dislikes many gays and lesbians that want contact with only homosexuals. I didn't really believe that many homosexuals were like that. I couldn't understand how he believed that let alone that it might be true. After reading Manso's book and the reviews it has inspired I have come to see what my friend is talking about. Perhaps some gays and lesbians do want a town exclusively homosexual. All I can say to them is beware what you wish for! Segregation has never produced anything good thing.
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