BEACH BOYS

Eating and drinking through Provincetown.

- HANNAH GOLDFIELD

In n summer, life in Provincetown, Massachusetts, is idyllic and fairly simple: among the few decisions a visitor has to make is whether to attend Tea (short for Tea Dance), a party held daily from 4 to 7 P.M., on the enormous pool deck of the Boatslip, a hotel and beach club in the town's West End. Every day around three-thirty, a migration begins: bodies, in various states of undress and drag, drawn, as if by magnets, down Commercial Street. At the height of the season during Bear Week, in July, or Carnival, in August-the deck might be hundreds deep, bass thumping, drinks sloshing, and the possibility of friendship, or more, palpable in the air.

Attendance was sparse on the sunny Tuesday I went to Tea, this past June, but a handful of people were grooving blissfully below a disco ball on the dance floor. Near a spirited group of young men wearing brightly colored jumpsuits, including one patterned with eggplants, I chatted with Jeremy Hobson, a publicradio journalist who spends part of the year in P-town, as it's affectionately known. "I would say this is, if not the center, one of two or three centers of gay America,"Hobson said. "No matter how gay you can be on the streets of West Hollywood and Chelsea, it's nothing like this. You could walk down the street in a jockstrap and nobody would bat an eye.

Provincetown, also called Land's End, sits at the northernmost tip of Cape Cod, a spit of sand which resembles the fist at the end of a flexed arm.

In 1620, it was the site of the Mayflower's initial landing, a distinction that is often overshadowed by nearby Plymouth, where the Pilgrims settled instead. By 1899, Provincetown was home to a small population of New Englanders, who had displaced the Wampanoag and Nauset tribes, and to Portuguese immigrants working as whalers and fishermen.

That year, an American painter named Charles Hawthorne chose it as the location for the Cape Cod School of Art.