We’ll Always Have Provincetown

Welcome to Beach Week, our annual celebration of the best place on Earth.

The first time my father and his husband, Luis, visited me in Los Angeles, nervous to impress these two men I love, I took them to Sal’s Place. I would normally never take my family, dressed in their unironic Carhartt and Farm’n’Fleet jackets, to West Hollywood. But I knew the seasonal restaurant would charm them, with its cash-only checks and the unshakeable owner helming the phones in her rough Irish brogue. More than anything, I knew Sal’s Place would be special because, when the restaurant leaves L.A. for the summer, it re-opens on the edge of a dock in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

When my older sister and I were kids, my father and Luis would take us to Cape Cod every summer. Our sojourn would start in Mashpee with a visit to my paternal grandparents. We’d fly kites on Popponesset Beach and drive to the bookstore in my grandma’s blue VW bug. I’d jump on beds with Luis and take quick, shallow baths to conserve water. Mashpee is, in my memory, pleasant and predictable: neat nuclear families and manicured homes with picture windows lined by purple hyacinths.

Then our little caravan would leave the old folks behind and drive down to Provincetown, that curling hook at the very edge of Cape Cod where things turned technicolor. The tidy order of Mashpee gave way to a three-mile stretch surrounded by water on three sides. There, colorful fishing boats with peeling paint and white yachts bobbed off wooden docks, while tourists—whether in search of art or whales or food or a bit of a party—flooded the narrow, charmingly chaotic streets hemmed in by shingled cottages, many of them converted into shops and galleries.