Photo Courtesy of HBarrison on Flickr

I’ve been coming to Provincetown — the gorgeous, gayish village at the tip of Cape Cod — for fifteen years, and every summer has had an unofficial theme: the summer everyone did drag, the summer everyone was on crystal meth, the summer all the rich gays bought up all the cottages on the West End and filled them with West Elm furniture. There was the summer I was totally in love, and the summer I was totally heartbroken. This year’s theme, strangely enough, is “themes.”

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Photo Courtesy of MC_One_R on Flickr

“I swear this wasn’t here, like, three months ago,” said Alison, my friend who has been living in Cape Town, as we walked past the new stadium in the Green Point section. Smooth and ovular, the stadium glowed like a fluorescent bar of soap. We were walking from the Table Bay Hotel, a very classy hotel on the V&A waterfront, where I was staying, to a restaurant in De Waterkant, the stylish/gayish section of town.

The whole area down along the waterfront had that slick pavilion feel to it — a big mall, paved plazas, huge parking structures. Most of it was new. It was late April when I visited, and there was a lot of construction going on in South Africa as they prepared for the World Cup — I would often see workers busily focused and quickly banging things into place like a scene from The Truman Show. Read more »

Anyone who assumes that fashion is frivolous should pay a visit to San Francisco. When I got there last week, my friend drove me up Third Street towards her apartment. School had just let out and the city kids were walking along the sidewalks, all in black t-shirts or hoodies and black baseball hats.

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/zenmama/2139142112/sizes/o/

It’s been like this for a while now, but walking up and down Newbury Street in Boston last week, I realized how strangely inauthentic our most cherished shopping corridors have become. Here was your H&M, your Urban Outfitters, Lush, Niketown, Patagonia, Juicy Couture — the same brands I could find in New York City’s Soho or Toronto’s Queen Street. There were even those ranting Italian tourists in sunglasses, holding tons of bags — you see them everywhere too.

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Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/jek-a-go-go

I made my annual trip to LA last month — this time without a car, because, like everyone, times are lean for me. I had the luck of staying with a friend in West Hollywood, relatively central, and I walked a lot — up and down Santa Monica Boulevard, along to Sunset, down to Melrose.

I was walking in LA, like that Missing Persons song, and I couldn’t stop humming it to myself. I was also like the beginning of “Party in the USA,” except I didn’t have a cardigan or a multi-million-dollar tv/movie/pop franchise.

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