Not P'town with Palm Trees

After looking around for a few hours, though, it was clear something was missing. Where were the gay people? Provincetown is wonderfully mixed during the day, with something for everyone, from the party boy or summer sharer from Boston to the old, straight couples off the tourist bus looking for where the Pilgrims landed.

Although a few businesses sported rainbow flags, Key West's crowd seemed much more homogeneous: plain, Midwestern, upper-middle-age straight couples, looking around off a cruise ship or in between trips on a fishing boat. There was neither the verve of a P-town summer crowd nor the louche decadence one would expect from Margaritaville. And we saw virtually no identifiable gay people at all.

(Edmund White, in his recent Guardian piece about Key West, posits that surging real estate prices are the problem, that only the elderly who bought long ago can afford to live there anymore. Maybe.)

Along Duval Street we saw four gay bars. Granted, it was a Monday and so not a fair test. But two of the bars were completely empty. The third, called Aqua, was having a drag show and seemed to have a crowd, so we paid our $15 and went in.

And discovered that the crowd was almost completely straight. We thought of leaving, but decided to get our money's worth, and gradually discovered that it was quite amusing watching these middle American straight people experience what was probably their very first drag show. Seeing a retired businessman fumble to put a dollar down the drag queen's dress while his wife tittered, or watching some guy on a date with his new girlfriend blush when the drag queen offered her cheek, was actually quite amusing.


I would be willing to go back on a weekend to give it a fair test, but judging by this trip, a gay vacation in Key West is one spent by the pool of your guesthouse, and not much more.