E-Mail This Article to a Friend Pilgrims’ progress Provincetown’s reputation as a gay mecca has eclipsed the richness and diversity of its past and present. Author Karen Christel Krahulik wants to change that. BY TAMARA WIEDER

ANYONE WHO’S EVER been to Provincetown — and many who haven’t — are well aware of its reputation as a bastion of gay culture. What isn’t as widely known — to the disappointment of the town’s permanent residents, who watch their narrow streets swell with summer visitors every year — is that Provincetown has long been far more than a tourist destination. The Mayflower Pilgrims first made landfall here, and it is here that artists and Portuguese fishermen established bustling communities over the years. For Karen Christel Krahulik, whose recently released Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort (New York University Press) tells the story of the coastal Cape Cod town, Provincetown’s historical appeal lies in its "mixture of people who differed by ethnicity, people who differed by sexual and gender orientation, people who differed by class." Try thinking about that next time you’re stuck in traffic on the way to "Land’s End."

Q: Why Provincetown? What made you interested in this town and this subject?

A: I had been working in Provincetown as a lifeguard for the Cape Cod National Seashore when I was in graduate school, and I worked there for one or two seasons before it even dawned on me that this might be, in fact, the ideal place to do a dissertation study. It seemed like the ideal location for an American historian to finally do a history of the town where the Pilgrims landed. And the thing that especially was critical for me is that I wanted to look at a place which had a mixture of all of the things that were important to me analytically. So, a mixture of people who differed by ethnicity, people who differed by sexual and gender orientation, people who differed by class. I’ve always been very interested in economic development. And so this town captured all of that, and at the time that I started doing the research, nothing had been written on it recently.

Q: Did that surprise you?

A: Yeah, I just thought I was lucky. But sure enough, after I started, then other writers started contacting me and saying, "I too want to write about Provincetown and can you tell me what you’re doing?" and this and that, so a few books beat me to the shelf. But as a professional historian, that’s just the way it’s going to be sometimes.

Q: When was your first visit to Provincetown?

A: My first visit was in 1994.

Q: Do you remember it pretty distinctly?

A: Oh yes, in fact in the first version of my [book’s] introduction, it was all about my introduction to Provincetown. Then I decided at the last minute that my readers would probably be much more interested in an introduction that talks about Provincetown instead of one that talks about me. But just like everyone else, I remember I drove there in my car, and one thing I remember is the traffic, because I drove there from New York. The second thing is going over the hill ... you go up a precipice, then you can see the monument, and you can see the town laid out before you. That image has burned in my mind.

Q: Tell me about the experience of living in Provincetown and researching the book. What was that like?

A: In some ways, my summers looked like everyone else’s summer [in Provincetown]. I worked three jobs just like most of the residents. I was a lifeguard during the day. I was a bouncer at a bar at night, and I also worked in the archive at Pilgrim Monument in the very early mornings. So my summers were incredibly busy, and that was a time for me to try to make a little bit of money while I had the chance. And then during the winters, when everyone got quiet, was actually the perfect time for me to do my oral-history interviews. So during the winters when I lived there, I would be out in the field, so to speak, contacting people and setting up interview dates. Other people had the time to give me because they didn’t have the demands of the tourist population, and it worked out extremely well. Then when I started to write, again it’s a beautiful, just perfectly tranquil place to write during the winters. So it was ideal for me in many ways. When the town became too busy for a researcher, when it became too busy just in terms of the energy and also in terms of the time commitment that people had, then I was out working with everyone else. I felt like I was in step with the rhythm.

Q: And there definitely is a rhythm, right? I mean, it’s pretty clear how the rhythm really changes season to season.

A: It changes season to season. The seasons were much more pronounced in terms of the tourist population prior to about the 1970s, where things were really extremely quiet during the winter, and the tale that people tell is of the local stores being boarded up getting ready for hurricane season and then just never taking the boards off. I try to bring out in the book how that changed, and it changed for a number of reasons. In part it changed because of some of the efforts of groups like the Women Innkeepers of Provincetown, who started holding their women’s week in October. So October was just a couple weeks after Labor Day, and I think it was an ideal time and quite fortuitous that the women decided, "Let’s pick October." Then it really started a trend. And now you have all the special weekends that take place over the holidays, Valentine’s Day, New Year’s, et cetera.