Family Week Comes to Provincetown

Family Week in Provincetown is America's largest gathering of LGBT families. It's a week every summer in PTown when families that may look a bit different from some other families can gather and spend time with families that may look more like their own. Some of these families may have two daddies, or two mommies, or a number of kids from many different ethnic backgrounds adopted into one big happy family. Some of these families will have a combination of more than two parents while some will have a single parent.
Click to visit the Family Equality Council website to find some very compelling videos and you'll see why this week is so very important to these families.
Click to visit the 2012 Family Week page of Colage, (Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere) to find out a bit about Family Week events which they will be sponsoring. Click to visit the site for Provincetown for Women to see more about this event and its importance to these families.
Information about Family Week events and activities can also be found at the old fire station on Commercial Street, right in the center of town, just west of Town Hall, which is found at 260 Commercial Street.
This wonderful little girl and her family are here during family week. I think she told me her name is Emma, and they have come from the state of New York. She had a butterfly painted on her face by Douglas Mason, who has been painting faces of kids and adults for about twenty years, and has worked on the streets of Provincetown for the last three summers. We had a conversation a couple of months ago about the awkwardness of the moment when a child wants to be painted as something that may make a parent a little uneasy. This typically happens when a little boy wants to have a butterfly painted on his face, or says he wants to be a fairy, and that is often when a very uncomfortable straight dad routinely goes into his ultra-macho mode and insists that his four-year-old will become a pirate instead. What a shame to crush the creative spirit of a child at such a very tender age.
I beamed from ear to ear this morning when I saw a young girl with a Batman mask painted on her face, and I remarked about what a great Batman she made, and her parents smiled along with me. You've gotta love a town like this, where kids can dream and express themselves and be creative, and where they can feel at home in the world, whoever they might be. Their families can be just like any other family on the street for at least one week out of the year.
Welcome to Provincetown, everyone, and happy Family Week!