The curiosity of a professor emeritus becomes “Queering Rehoboth Beach”
Take a ride back in time on Rehoboth Beach’s “Wonder Horse”
The classic coin-operated children’s carousel “Champion, the Wonder Horse” at Funland in Rehoboth Beach dates back to the 1950s and costs just a quarter.
Patricia Talorico, Delaware News Journal
When James T. Sears first visited Rehoboth Beach in 2016, he was impressed by the city’s gay-friendliness: the gay pride flags along Baltimore Avenue, the LGBTQ+ community center, and the gay and lesbian-owned shops and restaurants.
Even though he is now a retired professor—the former Fulbright scholar has taught everywhere from Harvard University to Penn State University—his still-vivid intellectual curiosity awoke and he wondered how this beach town became a major meeting place for the coexistence of heterosexual families/vacationers and the LGBTQ+ community.
Soon, Sears, also an author, was asking locals questions and doing research at the Rehoboth Beach library to understand how Rehoboth Beach became one of the most popular LGBTQ+ places in the country.
“There are, of course, numerous books about Rehoboth Beach, but there was none that looked in depth at how Rehoboth became queer, and that was basically my question,” Sears says.
His curiosity soon culminated in his latest book, Queering Rehoboth Beach: Beyond the Boardwalk (Temple University Press, $30), which took two years of research and interviews with more than 40 people, plus a year of writing.
It is available online and at independent bookstores in Delaware, including Browseabout Books (133 Rehoboth Ave., Rehoboth Beach) and Huxley & Hiro (419 N. Market St., Wilmington).
The result is a lively yet detailed 325-page look into the history of Rehoboth Beach, dating back to the late 19th century while detailing the history of Delaware’s LGBTQ+ community, with a primary focus on how Rehoboth Beach became the unofficial home of the state’s queer community.
The birth of queer Rehoboth
While researching his book, Sears became interested in the role Louisa Carpenter played in Rehoboth Beach’s early years as a gay destination.
Carpenter, a lesbian, tuxedo-wearing socialite from the du Pont family, hosted queer friends at her family’s Rehoboth Beach residence from the 1930s through the 1940s. And although no one dared mention the “L-word” at the time, Sears writes, her meetings are some of the first well-documented evidence of an active LGBTQ community in the city.
“So there was already a gay scene in Rehoboth back then,” says Sears.
In the years that followed, the number of gay and lesbian visitors and residents grew steadily. At first they met in private homes, usually out of sight of the beach town’s more conservative heterosexual population.
Sears, author of books such as “Growing Up Gay in the South” and “Lonely Hunters: An Oral History of Lesbian and Gay Southern Life, 1948-1968,” says the queer community slowly became more visible in the late 1970s, as LGBTQ+-friendly bars and restaurants increasingly became public gathering places.
The transition to today’s Rehoboth Beach, where the queer and heterosexual community lives in the city without much friction compared to the past, has not always been smooth.
As the LGBTQ+ community became more public and grew in size, it caused some division, most evident in the late 1970s and 1980s, says Sears, an Indiana native. That’s when gay people began running for city council and gay meetings became more public, sparking an ugly homophobic reaction from some.
A “tremendous turning point,” as Sears puts it, came in 1991, when Steve Elkins and Murray Archibald opened the CAMP Rehoboth Community Center in Rehoboth Beach, challenging the heterosexual community to work together on civic issues where the two groups shared common goals.
“Their philosophy was, ‘Where is the center?’ How can we connect with the city, and they did that through churches, city council meetings and things like that,” Sears says. “And if you look at Rehoboth today, there really is no separation between the city and the queer community. And that’s largely thanks to CAMP.”
And while not everyone agreed with her strategy, including some LGBTQ+ people who celebrated the existence of diverse communities, Sears believes she helped build a better Rehoboth for everyone.
“It developed the idea of a shared public space where we can disagree on some issues but still be part of a larger community. That’s something that’s missing in today’s national politics,” Sears adds.
The role of Rehoboth Beach’s gay nightlife scene
Sears cites the opening of the fine-dining restaurant Back Porch Café (59 Rehoboth Ave.) in the mid-1970s with an ownership group that included a gay co-owner (Victor Pisapia) as a major moment for the city’s increased queer community presence.
It wasn’t a gay bar/restaurant per se, but it was open to everyone and valued acceptance.
As co-owner Keith Fitzgerald told the Daily Times in 2016, “Most of our employees were gay anyway, so there was never any prejudice. The bottom line was that we just wanted people to eat our food. Sexual orientation was not a factor for us.”
Before that, places like the Pink Pony helped open the door. The Pink Pony was one of the first gay-friendly bars in Rehoboth Beach and was open from 1950 to 1962. It was located on the boardwalk where Victoria’s Restaurant now stands in the Boardwalk Plaza Hotel on Olive Avenue.
When full-fledged dance club The Renegade opened in 1980, the city’s queer community was more visible than ever, and the hotspot hosted partygoers until 2003. A year later, Blue Moon (35 Baltimore Ave.) opened and changed everything, Sears said.
“Blue Moon is one of the most important places in this story because they had a porch by the second year,” he said. “That was the first time gay life spilled over into the streets of Rehoboth.”
In addition to Blue Moon, Rehoboth’s queer-friendly hangouts remain a heart of the community, be it bars and restaurants like Blue Moon, Purple Parrot Grill (134 Rehoboth Ave.), Aqua Bar & Grill (57 Baltimore Ave.), Diego’s Bar & Nightclub (37298 Rehoboth Ave Extension), Freddie’s Beach Bar and Restaurant (3 S. First St.), Rigby’s Bar & Grill (404 Rehoboth Ave.) or other hangouts like Poodle Beach, a popular stretch of beach for the queer community south of the Boardwalk.
The lively brunches, nightlife and drag volleyball games that take place in these places are the culmination of decades of growth for the LGBTQ+ community.
“These places really helped develop a sense of community,” Sears says. “It wasn’t just individual groups in private homes, back when there was no sense of community at all.”
Similar intersection: Rehoboth Beach in the 1880s and 1980s
One of the things that surprised Sears most when he began researching the history of Rehoboth Beach was the similarities he discovered between the intersections in 1870s/1880s Rehoboth and 1970s/1990s Rehoboth.
Even though a century lay between the two eras, he was struck by the parallels he saw as the city had to decide on a path forward.
In 1873, the Rehoboth Beach Camp Meeting Association of the Methodist Episcopal Church was established by the Reverend Robert W. Todd of St. Paul’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Wilmington. It was to be the meeting place for the Methodist Episcopal Church’s camp meetings, which were held according to Methodist principles – dancing and drinking were not allowed.
But there were other entrepreneurial-minded people from the north of the state who also eyed the area as a vacation investment destination and pushed for it to become more than just a quiet, contemplative religious retreat.
“Basically, the Methodists finally gave up,” Sears says, when the Camp Meeting Association dissolved in 1881.
The incorporation form was wrong, with strict rules such as the ban on shaving on Sundays. Instead, the city opened itself to the wider world, eliminating some of its more restrictive, conservative rules. On March 19, 1891, a law was passed incorporating the community as Cape Henlopen City. The name was officially changed to Rehoboth Beach in 1893.
“100 years later, there is a similar divide between the progressive-minded mercantilists, who this time were gays and lesbians, and the people who saw Rehoboth Beach as they had always seen it: as a small, ‘morally upstanding’ town,” Sears says. “It was the same conflict between secularists and sectarians.”
Have a story idea? Contact Ryan Cormier of Delaware Online/The News Journal at [email protected] or (302) 324-2863. Follow him on Facebook (@ryancormier) and X (@ryancormier).
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