Gays In Provincetown Are Barking at the Straights

For decades Provincetown has been one of the nation's most tolerant communities, making it popular with gays.

But now, according to the town's police chief, gays are showing disturbing signs themselves of intolerance and he wants to address it before the situation escalates.

Chief Ted Meyer tells the Cape Cod Times that he has received complaints of gay people calling straights ''breeders'' as well as racial epithets directed at Jamaican workers and a verbal attack directed at a resident who signed an anti-gay-marriage petition.

Meyer acknowledges that the complaints number only a handful and than none of them constitute hate crimes but he is nonetheless concerned.

''We don't have hate crimes, but we do have hate and nasty comments,'' Meyer told the Times.

''We've got gay guys yelling out to straight people, 'you breeders coming here and bothering us,' and that sort of stuff. So it's kind of a reverse discrimination. And they worked so hard to prevent that from happening to gay folks in town.''

Meyer said that he is determined to insure the incidents don't escalate. He's has called a public meeting of the town's ''No Place for Hate'' committee. The meeting will take place Friday afternoon.

In one incident, detailed to the Times by Meyer, a woman who signed an anti-gay-marriage petition was verbally accosted last week by a man ''who was screaming about her being a bigot.''

That man was Rick Hines, publisher of Provincetown Magazine. He has expressed regret but says "how would you feel if you were discriminated against on a daily basis?''

''If you were treated as a second-class citizen? If you were told you can't get married because of who you're with, by your neighbors? And then you run into someone, who you know sees you as a second-class citizen, someone who is trying to stop you from having a normal life together."

Meyer said he believes the push for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in Massachusetts has acerbated the situation and he said he's hoping to keep a lid on things.
(Source:365gay.com)