When you look back at its history, you can see a progression in Provincetown, things getting wilder and wilder, the outlaw element becoming the norm.... Provincetown, Cape Cod: This small Massachusetts enclave has long been home to pirates, commune-dwellers, artists, and other noble countrymen who value liberty over law -- from Norman Mailer and Tennessee Williams to John Waters, Robert Motherwell, and former congressman Gerry Studds. With one of the largest homosexual populations per capita of any town or city in the United States, and some of the highest beachfront real estate prices in the Northeast, Provincetown is a thriving tourist spot that attracts more than one million visitors each year. Here, acclaimed writer and longtime Ptown resident Peter Manso brings together all the celebrities and townsfolk, history and happenstance, and politics and gossip to offer an unparalleled account of this unconventional seaside society -- a place, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, where "one may stand...and put all of America behind him."