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Located at the tip of Cape Cod, Provincetown has overlapping — and sometimes competing — identities: one of America’s oldest art colonies, nature preserve, thriving LGBTQ+ resort and historic Portuguese fishing village. Among the few points of agreement in P-town, as locals call it, is that soaring housing costs and a creeping sense of Hamptons-­style gentrification present an existential threat to this self-styled bohemian idyll that has over the years inspired literati. Yet while everybody likes to complain about how Provincetown is changing, filmmaker and summer resident John Waters wrote in his 2019 “Mr. Know-It-All” collection of essays, “I feel that if I dropped a piece of gum on the corner of Bradford and Court in the late ’60s, it would still be there today.”