Now that I am officially writing a book, every interaction with media and humans is potential subject matter. A birthday trip to Provincetown is an opportunity for field research. And as at least seven people have told me, this vacation is now deductible.
Friends P and C, who I have known for many decades--so long, obviously, that we are of an age where I have to take care to avoid calling them "very old friends"--kindly offered to drive us to Provincetown. Instead of taking the train from New York to Boston and hoping that delays wouldn't keep us from catching the only Provincetown ferry that was even theoretically possible with the Sunday train schedule, we would take a leisurely train to Providence, Rhode Island, on Saturday afternoon, enjoy a Restaurant Week meal out in that city of gustatory delights, then head to Ptown by car on Sunday morning.
It worked wonderfully--certainly for us. We had a fabulous meal in a restaurant with valet parking--which, like a walk around any supermarket bigger than a Brooklyn bodega, always seems like an exotic treat--and got to stare at C and P's books. (They're academics, so there are walls and walls of them on every floor.) And in the morning, we got to eat breakfast on the screened-in back porch before heading out to the Cape.
P and C take the hard-copy New York Times on weekends. I'm a digital subscriber, but I hadn't touched an actual copy of the paper in years. Over the time we've lived in New York, newspapers have become much harder to get hold of. In 2005, there were at least two vendors selling papers on my four- or five-block morning walk to the subway, as well as several bodegas with papers out front. Now the vendors are long gone, and only one of the bodegas still offers newspapers (and, perhaps reflecting the vastly increased cost, they're now inside the store rather than sitting unguarded on the curb). I probably spend more time with the Times now than I did in those days--it's a lot easier to navigate from section to section on the phone app, and I never did perfect the broadsheet origami that made it possible to page through the paper on a crowded train--but sharing one paper between four breakfasters exposes the slow-grabber to sections she might not usually peruse, like Vows.
This week's Vows was jam-packed with very cute same-sex spouses, including an adorable Manhattan-cocktail-loving lesbian couple, whose June 2021 marriage was their second attempt to have their relationship recognized by the state. (Their first marriage was invalidated by the California Supreme Court in 2004.) I'm fascinated by that specific set of would-be marriers who had to go through multiple ceremonies before their tax status officially changed--I once dreamed of seeking the couple with the most marriage attempts--the Canada, Massachusetts, home-state domestic-partnership suddenly becomes marriage marathon. (I stated my own position on same-sex marriage in 2012. It basically boils down to "hard pass"--after so many years of being told that this sacred institution was far too special for the likes of me, it became like the party you're pointedly not invited to. If someone eventually offers me an invitation after years of denial, don't imagine I'm showing up--a position that is undoubtedly easier to take when you don't have immigration, custody, or medical-insurance needs.)
Despite being a wedding grinch myself, I do enjoy a nice Vows narrative--and seeing oversized photos of dykes kissing in the paper of record certainly seems significant. Perhaps because I'm now spending time paging through old newspapers and magazines, I'm newly aware of the importance of that permanent record.
Anyhoo: After a couple of hours of driving, we found ourselves in a cemetery in Dennis, Massachusetts. It is named for an ancestor of my partner R's--the old-timer deeded the land, so it bears his name, even though it is dominated by Winslows and Homers, the Smiths and Joneses of the Cape. The headstones dated from the late 17th century to the late 1880s. They all look old and broken down in that atmospheric way Halloween prop makers strain to match. It was pleasingly olde-worlde--now-strange names like Kenelm and Thankful, and so many Abigails. It was a cool family-history exploration. But for all the sad tales of death in childbirth, death by drowning, and some astounding feats of longevity, there were no same-sex couples to be seen.
This is a newsletter, not a magazine assignment, so I won't be serving up a thumb-sucker of a kicker here. Just to say that the New York Times didn't start acknowledging same-sex commitments until 2002--170 years after the paper was founded. I wonder how long it will be until cemeteries are useful sources of news about same-sex relationships. Clearly, some graves do now acknowledge lesbian and gay inhabitants--Leonard Matlovich's was the first I was aware of that made an explicit statement about queerness--but it seems likely that the people who are out in death were out in life. Locating queer graves seems to be on a continuum with finding queer subjects in portrait galleries (one of my FAVORITE pastimes)--it can be done with a bit of sleuthing, but once again it's mostly possible because of fame or infamy in life. When will the genealogists of the future casually learn about same-sex relationships as they now glean new information from poring over records of birth, marriages, and death? Not for a while, I'm guessing.
RECOMMENDATIONS: Every newsletter does recommendations, right? I imagine that this slot will usually be devoted to podcasts, TV shows, stationery, and the like, but this week: a great fish-and-chips place on the Cape: Captain Frosty's of 219 Main Street, Dennis, Massachusetts. I don't know if the name is bad or if I just think that it doesn't fit the place. Either way--fantastic fish, very good chips (albeit not of the British chippy variety), and, I'm told, excellent fried shellfish.