Camp Provincetown presents the 1st Annual Outsiders Festival
Thursday, May 8 – Sunday, May 11, 2025
We have a story to tell and the world needs to hear it!
Situated on the ancient lands of the Wampanoag Tribe – People of the First Light, this colonized frontier town and whaling port lured disparate visitors streaming in from all corners of the world: Newfoundland, fisher folk, Portuguese sailors from the Azores Islands, whaling crew from the Hawaiian and Pacific Islands. Not to mention, oddballs and misfits who made it here before the railroad in 1873, wanderers and wealthy visitors seeking the historic roots of our young democracy, and then, Bohemians.
“Artists are queer ducks” headlines a newspaper article in the early 1900s. Seemingly a contradiction to the heralded First Landing of the Pilgrims and the Yankee and Portuguese roots of this historic town, Provincetown’s colorful identity was indeed a magnet for both unconventional sojourners, outlaws, outsiders. On the edge of the American experiment – remote and ocean-locked – it forged its image as an outpost of extremes.
The Provincetown Outsiders Festival sets itself in the midst of these waves of outsiders, in a town that was never a binary culture, but rather, a queer one in the broadest sense of the word. The enormous tides that twice wash in and out of Provincetown Harbor extract and deposit the outlandish and the unruly, the pirates and the flamboyant, “confirmed bachelors” and “independent ladies”, fisherfolk and artists, writers and the unwieldy. Otherness.
As the town continues to welcome new residents and their families – Jamaicans and Eastern Europeans, the community is faced once again with the daunting, shape-shifting sea and our symbiotic destiny.
What can we decipher from the buried treasures being unearthed by rising sea levels? What is this fragile spiral spit of Land morphing into?
What is Provincetown’s relevance for the future?
Onward!
-Jay Critchley
Contact:
Chuck White
sedgwickx@gmail.com
508-837-9607
