Five Days, Five Atrocities

On family, transphobia, & ableism.

Saturday (Day One of Family Vacation)

Provincetown, MA is a gorgeous place packed with gay culture. I don’t yet know enough about the town to definitively dub it queer culture, but it certainly has plenty of gay-owned businesses, a gay art scene, and most importantly, tons of gay people, either as temporary tourists or vacationers year-round.

My extended biological family vacations to Cape Cod annually, although I haven’t tagged along in several years. I’ve agreed to stay in the same hotel as my parents from Saturday through Tuesday, giving us two long travel days (my travel time to the Cape is about 4 hours) and two Real Vacation Days, during which I plan to spend as much time alone as possible. This is my first time in Gay City, USA as an adult as well as my first time as a queer person, so rather than be with the two most heterosexual people in the whole world (my parents), I’d rather be drinking mimosas and experiencing queer-as-fuck art!

I’m currently reading two books: “Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century”, a series of essays edited by Alice Wong, and “Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex” by Angela Chen. During my drive to our hotel, I alternate between listening to music and listening to chunks of the front half of “Ace” on audiobook. A lot of it is review for me, as someone who’s already published on ace issues, but a lot of it is gut-wrenching revelations about my own history with asexuality, gender, and relationships. I feel seen. It won’t last.

Our hotel appears to be a smaller, family-owned motel that was bought up by rich developers and turned into an Instagrammable (derogatory) version of itself, nice to look at but just as barebones under the surface once you look hard enough. I’m initially enthralled by the fact that, by pure luck, I’ve been given their “ADA room” which promises enhanced accessibility features. I recently became a cane user due to my chronic long-COVID leg pain, so I was interested in seeing what the differences between rooms were. It turns out that all this amounted to was having handle bars next to the toilet and shower; welcome additions to be sure, but daunted by the bed frame that was about one foot off the ground and the numerous places in the main room where I could—and did—strike my ankle against on accident. (Also, no closet and no coffee maker; 2/10.)