Hot Vax Summer Crumbled Before My Eyes
The first time I heard there was a problem, I was hanging out in a leather bar.
A friend texted with news that Provincetown, Massachusetts, the queer beach town where I’d been vacationing, had experienced a spike of COVID-19 cases among vaccinated people. He asked about the mood in town. I looked around the room and saw burly guys—it was Bear Week—chatting over beers. I remembered what another friend had told me about how many leather bars are designed as long, corridor-like spaces to enable cruising and casual brushes. I thought about the vaccines’ well-publicized efficacy rate, and the articles saying that occasional breakthrough infections were nothing to panic about. I texted back that the mood in town was jubilant.
[Read: Vaccines are great. Masks make them even better.]
It really was. A visit to Provincetown, that comes in the summer there. Visitors spend the day lolling on beaches and then glam themselves up for the high-energy happy hour known as Tea. Later, many of them dance in the same that Tennessee Williams once hung out in. When closing time comes, throngs congregate outside one scruffy pizza joint and then keep the party going within the town’s many nautically decorated lodgings.
