Forty-Eight Years of Carnival Themes

The parade steps off at three o'clock this afternoon at the East End, moves west down Commercial Street, and finishes at Franklin.

Somewhere around forty floats. If recent years hold, close to a hundred thousand people watching — organizers' estimate, not a turnstile count — in a town whose off-season population doesn't reach four thousand. This one is called Deep Sea Disco. It's the forty-eighth.

The first was called A Night in Rio, and it lasted a single evening.

It was invented to fix a slow week

In 1978, a group of gay innkeepers and business owners had a problem with a nickname: August-itis.

The third week of August was the sag. School was coming, Labor Day hadn't arrived, and the town went quiet at exactly the moment nobody could afford it to. The Provincetown Business Guild was brand new. Carnival was its fundraiser, and the pitch was simple — market Provincetown directly to LGBTQ travelers and make it the destination.

That's the whole origin. A trade group with a cash-flow problem picked the deadest week on the calendar and threw a party in the middle of it.

Forty-eight years later, the deadest week is the busiest week of the year.

Trevor Pittinger, the Guild's executive director, put it this way: "Carnival began in 1978 as a way of welcoming more LGBTQ people to Cape Cod… now it is one of the most diverse-looking groups… This event is and will always be for everyone."

Eleven years of just showing up

Here's the part of the list people don't expect.

After that first night in Rio, Provincetown ran Carnival for eleven consecutive years without naming a theme. Not a slow start — the Guild's own retrospective says it plainly: 1979 to 1989 — No specific theme was named. Eleven Augusts of a parade that was simply the parade.

Themes start in 1990, and they haven't stopped since.

Everything from 1978 through 2009 comes from the Business Guild's own pages, archived at the time. The six years marked † rest on a single later Provincetown source, so treat them as likely rather than certain. Spellings are the ones the Guild used that year — that's why 2006 reads Gay Paris and not Gay Paree.

Read it as a list and the town shows up

The nineties borrow from television and Broadway. Sitcoms, musicals, the big top — the decade takes its costume cues from the mainstream and sends them up.

The 2000s go mythic: heroes and villains, gods and goddesses, fairy tales twice in seven years.

The 2010s are almost pure nostalgia. Vegas. Comic books. Candyland. The eighties. A town that spent the decade dressing up as its own memory of other decades.

And then 2024 lands on Renaissance x Revolution, which the Provincetown Independent observed at the time was testing the edge of what a vacation town wants its fantasy to be.

Forty-eight years of costume, and it turns out to be a record of what Provincetown thought it was.

The two Augusts that aren't on the list

2020 and 2021 are the gap, and they're not the same gap.

In 2020 the Select Board voted to cancel town-sponsored events and pull permits through the end of the year. Carnival went virtual. Whether a theme was even named that year, we can't tell you — the Guild's own site has no surviving capture from 2020, and we'd rather leave the line blank than guess at it.

2021 has a theme and no parade. The Guild called it Somewhere Over the Rainbow, the 43rd Carnival, August 15th to 21st. The parade application was denied, and a scaled-down version — bikes, pedicabs, carts, about a thousand people on foot — was denied too. What ran instead, in the Guild's own words on the page at the time: Express Yourself Day in place of organized parade. Proof of vaccine at official events. Indoor masks through Saturday.

2022 was the first real parade in three years. The theme was Monsters, Myths & Legends, which after two years of that felt about right.

If you're going this afternoon

No parking on Commercial Street, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., from the split in the East End to Franklin Street in the West End. Don't attempt it.

A few more, from the Guild's own parade-day notices:

• MacMillan Pier lot — no vehicles may exit between 3 and 5 p.m. during the parade. If you park there, you are staying there.

• Jerome Smith lot — closed from 6 a.m. Thursday, reopens Friday.

• 26 Shank Painter Road / Browne Street lot — $35 flat rate for the day.

• The public library is closed all day Thursday.

• Water stations are set up around town.

The parade runs the length of Commercial, so the crowd thins toward the ends. If you'd rather watch it than watch four rows of backs, work away from the middle.

Carnival 2026 — what's left
"The Last Bass" closing party with Dee Diggs — Friday, August 21, 9 p.m., Club Purgatory at the Gifford House.
Provincetown Business Guild · ptown.org

Eleven years of no theme at all, then thirty-six years of increasingly elaborate ones. Somewhere in there a town stopped throwing a fundraiser and started keeping a diary.