Just as Ovitz blames gay men in Hollywood for all of the evil that has befallen him, Manso condemns the changes in Ptown as the handiwork of a uniform phalanx of "gays." This presents something of a logistical problem because (as Manso himself notes) Provincetown has a long history of knitting gay men and lesbian into its culture from the 1920s onward — what arts colony and bohemian enclave hasn’t? He acknowledges that today, some gay residents are not at fault. However, he describes them as "gay but totally uncomplicated about it, like so many other longtime Ptown year-rounders." And he is unmerciful about the other — apparently complicated — homosexuals.

Even after distinguishing between good and bad homosexuals, Manso characterizes all gay men and lesbians as a monolithic group. Terms such as "they" and "these people," cast as walking clichés, are peppered throughout the book to remind readers of the common enemy. "They have a tremendous amount of talent [for fixing up and reselling homes]" notes one of Manso’s local informants. "I mean they can take a shithole and make it beautiful. It’s like they just say, ‘we’ll go in and sprinkle some fairy dust ands make it look fantastic."

Making matters worse, according to Manso, gay home-ownership has translated into institutional power: gay men and lesbians have taken over building, zoning, and permit committees. "‘The gays," another person tells Manso, ‘are by now the richest, most powerful people in Provincetown," he says, adding, "A lot of these people love being on these committees." And along with this "love" of power comes arrogance, bullying, and intimidation. "Who the fuck do you think you are" screams a drunken lesbian at two straight men in a local bar, "this is my town." So there it is, what Manso calls "the gay trump card."

There is no question that Provincetown has changed dramatically over the past 20 or 30 years — as has Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Hamptons. It is also true that once-depressed neighborhoods in many cities have been gentrified, including Boston’s South End and parts of Cambridge. Radical, high-rolling changes in the US economy over the past two decades created new wealth that wrought many changes in American culture — well chronicled in, say, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and the endless New York Post Page 6 stories about the rise and fall of rich-girl, PR flak Lizzy Grubman who last summer ran over Hampton townies with her SUV, calling them white trash — and many of them certainly were not for the better. But what Manso doesn’t acknowledge is that these cultural shifts are due to changing patterns in wealth and spending — not to homosexuality. Does anyone go on about how WASPs from Connecticut have ruined the Hamptons?

The fact is, in Manso’s world it doesn’t matter how many wealthy gay people have moved into Provincetown, or how many straight wealthy people, how many drag queens or men and women in leather are on the streets, or how many families with children come to town. Manso’s "proof" of the gay takeover of Provincetown is almost entirely anecdotal. There is no hard data, no demographic analysis, and not even any hard reporting. For in the end, the hard work of research might have punctured his self-enclosed, simple-minded explanation of why Provincetown has changed: it attracts affluent, obnoxious "gays" because there are too many "gays." Sartre argues in Anti-Semite and Jew that anti-Semitism is not based on reality or on an evenhanded assessment of fact, but is a deeply-felt, irrational belief — the idea that a mythically powerful group presents a decisive threat to the social order — that gives cohesion to a confusing world. Sartre’s classic anti-Semite always has an answer to why his negative characterization of Jews is wrong: he claims that Jews own all the banks, and when confronted with the reality that only a few banks are Jewish owned, he immediately responds that those are the most powerful banks. This is the same convulsed thinking that allows Ovitz’s gay mafia and Manso’s "gay real estate conspiracy" to include many heterosexuals. The problem, as Sartre points out, is not wealth but "Jewish wealth," not power but "Jewish power."

SO WHY ARE these liberals attacking the gay mafia and the gay power elite at this moment in time? Surely, one reason is that the gay movement has been successful. Gay people are more accepted now, more integrated into society, less likely to be viewed as pariahs and social outcasts. But with this acceptance comes — as it does with Jews, African-Americans, and other minorities who have negotiated new levels of acceptance by the mainstream — a confusion of endlessly changing social, political, and cultural boundaries. And certainly much of the new gay and lesbian visibility that has come from this acceptance is enjoyed — and even encouraged — by heterosexual culture. How else can you explain over the last two decades the overwhelming popularity of drag in films like La Cage aux Folles, Tootsie, and To Wong Fu, Love Julie Newmar, or the prevalence of gay-inspired leather and S/M fantasies in Madonna’s music videos and even on mainstream sit-coms? But the minute less-then-firmly-established boundaries are crossed — how many drag queens are too many in the movies or on Commercial Street? — cultural panic sets in. When gay people — no matter how nice — become too visible, too comfortable walking down the street, as has been increasingly the case in Provincetown, latent anxiety about queerness kicks in. Suddenly — as Manso so vividly captures in page after page of his book — there are more of them than us, and all the traditional worries about sexual difference and corruption begin roiling up. Surely, this is why Michael Ovitz can articulate that idea that the gay mafia would want to destroy his family.

When these fears become exacerbated and interwoven with economic fears, the flames are fanned even higher. Jews were less than one percent of the German population the 1930s, yet they were charged with all of the country’s economic problems. The economic changes brought about by the deep successive swings in the market economy over the past 25 years have been frightening, and they have been accompanied by new levels of anxiety and apprehension.

The changes in Provincetown during this time have not been unique, but have occurred across the map. Some changes in Provincetown have been made by lesbians and gay men — not because they were homosexual, but because they had money. The lie at the center of Peter Manso’s book is that it is homosexuality — not access to money — that is to blame for the changes that have occurred on the Outer Cape. And to blame some of the social and cultural manifestations of homosexuality for these problems is not only inaccurate, but as socially and morally wrong as is anti-Semitism for blaming all Jews for disruptive social change.

The fantasy promoted by Peter Manso’s book is that gay people have too much power, money, and control. They have taken over Provincetown, they want to get rid of straight people in town, they use rainbow flags to intimidate and exclude heterosexuals, they have all the power. Social acceptance — or toleration — of gay people has indeed taken place, and it has been a slow and often painful process for both homosexuals and heterosexuals. The attacks on gay money and power in Ptown: Art, Sex, and Money on the Outer Cape are simply one more indication that this new level of social acceptance is nothing more than a thin veneer that can be easily scratched to reveal the fear — often expressed with loathing and disdain — that still lies underneath.

An online archive of Michael Bronski's Phoenix writing is here. The man behind the work can be reached at mabronski[a]phx.com