Underwear parties, kink & drag shows in P-town! The full report!

I would never let a summer end without a trip to Provincetown, Massachusetts—the diverse, drag and seafood-filled gem of Cape Cod.

On top of all the eats, entertainment and nature hikes, P-town now has no fewer than two underwear parties—as friends assured me.

Here’s what I experienced this time on the Gay Riviera.

Hotel Heaven…

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A post shared by Crew’s Quarters Boarding House (@crewsquartersptown)

Crew’s Quarters Boarding House, a historic gay establishment with a maritime spin, fills its lobby with leather chairs, a fireplace, and copies of Physique Pictorial. The place is also a rather frisky hangout, to the point where I lovingly say, “It puts the ho in hotel”.

The weekend I went, Crew’s played host to a Boston gear/fetish/kink event called Fascination, which filled the joint with all manner of leather, lust, and philosophizing. Hotel patrons were given three differently colored bracelets, a note explaining “The bracelets are a helpful way to communicate your desired level of intimate interaction with other guests.”

I wore a whole rainbow—for show, of course—and the guys turned out to be not only fascinating, but super polite. “You don’t mind that we’re here, do you?” one of them asked me, in chaps and a harness. “Hardly!” I responded. “This place is always anything but boring.”

When the weekend wrapped up, I asked the fun owner how it had gone. “Great!” he beamed. “Someone was getting cellophane-wrapped in the lobby.” Talk about transparency.

Street Life

Commercial Street (where Crew’s Quarters happens to be) also buzzes with restaurants, cabarets, and pedestrians, including a lot of very brave straight people.

But two things make the place really sing: The pedi-cab drivers are generally young hotties with shirtless torsos that make you want to hitch a ride about every five yards. And since it’s obviously not enough for the drag queens to sing, lip sync, turn cartwheels, and scream “Make some noise,” they are also made to stand in full drag in the street and hawk tickets to their shows to strangers.

Much as I feel for them, this ritual provided a lively chance to catch up with Tammie Brown, Tina Burner, and a host of others, all sparklingly self-promoting in the sun. And then it was time for another pedi-cab.

Sex on the Beach

Tea dance at the Boatslip isn’t so much about sex, it’s about romping in the solar rays and thrilling to the myriad of attendees, which on Saturday included a bevy of chiffon-laden drag Barbies that could easily be a right-winger’s worst nightmare. But they were the only creatures there without crotches.

The nearby Dick Dock cruising area truly promotes truth in advertising, though the most interesting gonads in town happen to be at the two local underwear parties, soirees that actually take guys away from their Grindr for a few minutes.

As I heard from a friend (oh hush; it’s the truth): “The underwear party at Red Room didn’t have that much sex, though it did have a guy with moveable underwear. He’d move it, his business would fall out, and people would touch it. But the underwear party at [another establishment] had tons of sex. There are backrooms, and it’s pretty dark—darker than under the previous ownership, to lend itself to action. There were very few twinks there, mainly because young gays can’t afford P-town anymore. But there were a lot of leather guys with facial hair–big men who work out—and lots of anal.”

Feeling uncharacteristically shy, I went fully clothed to Shipwreck Lounge, where I ran into a passel of young songwriters from New York, including Mark Sonnenblick, who co-wrote the score for the hit mockumentary Theater Camp. Talking musical theater in a gay bar helped me achieve climax.

Judy, Judy, Judy

And then came the shows! Like a fine whine, Judy Gold’s visionary sourness has evolved to the point where—like singer Marilyn Maye, who was in the audience the night I caught Judy’s Post Office Cabaret show, Everything Hurts Everywhere All At Once – she is in peak form and in total command of her material.

In a brilliant hour-long diatribe, Judy hilariously took us through having to cover her arms in Israel, the absurdity of old Jews with walkers and guns in Florida, and the weirdness of everyone being offended by every damn thing people say or do. A tall drink of Manischewitz, Judy revealed, “I couldn’t get shoes that fit me until men needed women’s shoes in their size because of Drag Race!”

She is feminist, topical, and basically the funniest Jew since Groucho Marx. The woman puts the acidic back in Hasidic and should star in a movie called Torah! Torah! Torah! In fact, she should get every possible career kudo she’s been working towards in her entire lesbian life.

Fun with glamour & goiters

Provincetown tickets (June 2 – Sept. 16) NOW ON SALE! https://t.co/VjQXJ2f93D pic.twitter.com/Qs2fAviemw

— dina martina (@dinamartina) May 10, 2023

I now know how to remove unwanted people from my life. I simply take them to see Dina Martina perform, and if they don’t quite get the esoteric genius at work, they become dead to me. Fortunately, virtually everyone finds her a scream, from the skewed lipstick to the apocalyptic outfits to the unsettling vocals and unique pronunciations. (She’s truly a jift.)

In her Sub-Standards show at Crown & Anchor, Dina was priceless, recounting the time she filmed Hoarders and managed to finally find her daughter down the hall. (“She looked great. She had lost weight!”) That led to a story about her daughter’s goiter, which somehow was later repurposed as a piñata for a birthday party…Oh, just go see Dina! Her stuff can’t be adequately described, which is what’s so fine about it. Adding to the madness, she juggles plastic bags with aplomb and also shows inspired videos that transplant her naughty head into classics; you’ll never think of Rhett Butler or Toto the same way again. It’s all done with wicked imagination and also profundity—such as when Dina remarks, “Don’t go through life regretting all the things you didn’t do. Regret all the things you did.”

And no one is offended. After the show, I asked Dina if the goiter community is incensed by her material. “Oh, no,” she replied, blithely. “They’ve got their goiter on straight.”

Dancing Queen

A consummate performer, Edie is a Broadway-style dancer/singer who was in the 2006 Threepenny Opera revival and also appeared in the Las Vegas revue Zumanity (a Cirque du Soleil production) for years.

In her Dance, Edie, Dance! show at Post Office, she delightfully calls upon her experiences and relates her life in movement, in between delivering dance-related classics like “The Music and the Mirror” and “Let Me Entertain You,” complete with shimmies and pivots. On my night, Edie also brought a random guy up from the audience to do an impromptu dance duet and the result was far from the cringefest it could have been; it was a hoot and a half.

At other moments, the beehive-haired, mini-dressed Edie talks to a green cocktail (an “Edie-tini”) that she calls “My boo and my first responder.” And I loved when she told the audience that she doesn’t do death drops, so if she does, it isn’t part of the act; “Call 911.” Yay, Edie! Keep dancing!

Turning Back the Paige of Time

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A post shared by Paige Turner (@paigeturnernyc)

New York favorite Paige Turner exploded onto the Post Office stage with big hair and lots of accessories for Drag Me To The ’80s, an unflaggingly energetic and entertaining show where she spoofed ‘80s divas and trends, countered the creepy My Buddy doll commercial with one for “F*ck Buddys”, and remarked that ‘80s stars all looked like drag queens (and vice versa, I would imagine). Paige grabbed the audience by the parachute pants and defied us not to “Take On Me”. In a self-referential mood, she remarked, “She looks like Barbie, she smells like Ken. She’s been sitting on Ken’s face all summer!”

Thanks to house diva Anita Cocktail (Michael Steers) for lining up so many of my review tickets. And some day, I’ll tell you about my lunch at Bubala’s By The Bay with Anita, Dina Martina and Boca Raton widow Beryl Mendelbaum. I wore my moveable diapers.

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