Located seventy miles north of Boston and 40 miles south of Portland, Ogunquit's unique history highlights the differences between rural and urban queer space building practices. As a one-time art colony now a modern beach town, Ogunquit, I argue, cultivated “spaces of difference” for queer individuals to forge a community, establish businesses, and create prosperity. However, these spaces of difference came under fire by local heterosexuals who feared a “queer takeover” of their town, fears which were exacerbated by newspapers like Gay Community News who proudly celebrated the formation of a “new Provincetown” in Maine. But heterosexuals were not the only ones who took issue with this claim—the queer business owners did, as well, wanting to retain Ogunquit’s distinct character, separate from Provincetown or Fire Island. Print publications, in this instance, caused more division among gay and heterosexual community members than what histories often depict.
This poster draws on research from collections within the University of Southern Maine’s Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine, which include both printed publications and oral histories on Ogunquit and New England queer activism. It also uses Queer History Boston’s collection of gay travel guides and their records on Gay Community News, as well as archives from the Harvard Schlesinger Library and the Boston Public Library documenting the Ogunquit Art Colony. My poster uses text, photographs, and art from these archives to demonstrate comparative histories of Ogunquit and Provincetown, examining the rhetoric, language, and imagery used by outsiders and contrasting this to what the local community members, queer tourists, and business owners were saying about Ogunquit.
What my research reveals is that Ogunquit served as a major site of contention among, not just heterosexuals and queer individuals, but between fellow queer community members. As media outlets based in Boston began interpreting the gay-hetero relations in Ogunquit using their own frameworks, they turned Ogunquit into a proxy battleground for the urban-based activism that was occurring in Boston. Through this interpretation, I argue that Ogunquit disrupts common narratives of how rural queer spaces exist separately from urban spaces, and instead directly inserts them into nation-wide gay rights activism movements.