Queering Rehoboth Beach: Beyond the Boardwalk

In Queering Rehoboth Beach, James T. Sears explores the social, religious, and political forces that transformed Rehoboth Beach from a Methodist Church camp to “The Nation’s Summer Capital” with one of the highest populations of LGBTQ+ people in the country. His main argument centers on how the conflict that emerged between the queer community in Rehoboth and the Homeowners Association in the 1980s to 1990s parallels Rehoboth’s historical conflict between secularized business “excursionists” and the conservative, religious property owners of the 1870s and 1880s (17). Sears’ experience in utilizing oral histories is evident in how he weaves first-hand accounts, some conflicting, with archival research to produce a never-before-compiled queer history of Delaware’s queerest town.Sears begins the book with a note on language where he defines his use of “queer,” namely employing it to “capture the fluidity of sexualities/genders” (xi). Following is a “Cast of Narrators” where Sears lists the individuals he interviewed for this project and then a list of frequently used abbreviations. The Preface describes Sears’s research methodology, which included conducting and referencing oral histories, viewing personal artifact collections, visiting local archives, and newspaper research. He concedes that the book is “a narrative history from a handful of individuals,” underlining his use of primary source oral history as a main component of this text (xxii). The book is divided into four parts with sixteen chapters that are arranged in loose chronological order, with some stories jumping back and forth in time as Sears introduces his cast of “narrators.”The Prologue includes Sears’ own encounter with homophobia in Rehoboth Beach in 2020 as he was out to dinner with his partner. Having moved from DC to Rehoboth in 2019, he uses this story to frame the question, “Does this beach town’s portrait of inclusivity match reality?” (xxvii). In the introduction, he gives demographic information on the extraordinarily White, affluent vacation town of Rehoboth Beach, which provides integral context into why most of the narrators in the text, like most narrators in history at large, are White, middle-to upper-class and cisgender. Jumping past the Indigenous occupation of the land that is Rehoboth, Part 1 recalls the settlement of the Rehoboth Camp Meeting Association of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1873. In chapter 1, Sears details the challenges the Methodists settlers faced and how almost immediately, secularized business folk saw Rehoboth as a lucrative destination for vacationers, which conflicted with the Methodist vision of Rehoboth as a town of Christian morality. After internal disagreements and a crusade against “amusements” such as dancing and drinking, the camp meetings were discontinued in 1881 (20).Chapter 2 is about queering the first decades of the twentieth century, starting with the women who funded Rehoboth’s infrastructure and invigorated the town with culture with the Village Improvement Association and the Rehoboth Art League. A unique case was the “butch bohemian” Louisa D’Andelot Carpenter, whose queer parties in the 1930s brought Broadway and Hollywood stars to her family home in Rehoboth (27). World War II led thousands of men and women to Fort Miles, an army base north of Rehoboth, “some of whom found momentary sexual solace with a comrade in arms” (28). With the opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in 1952, closeted DC politicians and their staff could more easily visit Rehoboth Beach. The 1960s and 1970s in Rehoboth saw a growing number of gay men purchasing homes and opening businesses in town. In turn, queer-friendly businesses began to open, capitalizing on the new clientele, like Joss and the Nomad Village south of Rehoboth. In this part, Sears draws from primary sources like Delaware laws and newspaper articles, and other secondary literature to illustrate how Rehoboth Beach became a popular tourist destination for people coming by train from cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Wilmington, Delaware. By part 2, which picks up in 1971, Sears weaves in oral history accounts with articles in local papers and queer newsletters such as “Letters from CAMP Rehoboth.”Part 2 introduces the book’s antagonist, the Rehoboth Beach Homeowners Association, and some of The Ensemble: Murray Archibald, Steve Elkins, Victor Pisapia and Glen Thompson, Ivo Dominguez Jr., and Joyce Felton. This section covers the 1970s with the opening of gay establishments, such as The Boathouse bar and the Back Porch Cafe, and even more by the 1980s, like The Renegade and the Blue Moon. Sears contrasts Rehoboth queer residents’ focus on opening businesses to northern Delaware’s years of queer activism, starting in 1968 with Robert Vane’s lobbying to decriminalize homosexuality. For example, the University of Delaware’s Gay Community student group, formed in 1972, evolved into the state’s first LGBTQ civil rights organization, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Delaware (GLAD), founded in 1982.Part 3 recounts the late 1980s and 1990s in Rehoboth, starting with the Strand dance club that outraged the conservative property owners of downtown Rehoboth, causing a conflict that Sears deems “the Battle for Rehoboth” (3). Sears posits this conflict reflects the late nineteenth-century battle between conservative Methodist camp members and the business owners opening “amusements” in town. The Rehoboth Beach Homeowners Association successfully prevented the Strand from receiving a liquor license and proposed so many ordinances that targeted nightlife that the club had to close by 1994. The increase in queer visibility, combined with fear of the AIDS crisis, caused a homophobic backlash in the town, with an increase in hate crimes and harassment. To combat this violence, CAMP (Creating A More Positive) Rehoboth, the second queer community center in Delaware, was formed to create better relationships between the queer and heterosexual communities. Sears details their early efforts and delivers a refreshing take on CAMP’s strategy of assimilation, rather than activism, which he described as “a middle-way political philosophy epitomized by the then-current Clinton administration” (226). CAMP in the early 1990s aimed to show Rehoboth that queer people can still fit in the conservative family resort town, rather than advocate for authenticity and acceptance of queer people. Part of this was avoiding discussion of taboo topics such as sex, racism, and addiction in the queer community in their free newsletter, “Letters from CAMP Rehoboth,” which Sears relied on extensively as a source for this book.Part 4 covers the late 1990s and early 2000s, beginning with a raid on a lesbian-owned store that sold sex toys and the closing of beloved gay-owned establishments such as the Strand, the Renegade bar, the Rehoboth Beach Gayzette newspaper, and the Sussex County AIDS Committee non-profit. The most discussion of the lesbian experience in the Rehoboth gay community appears in this part of the book, with CAMP Rehoboth and local businesses catering to the overlooked group. In Chapters 15 and 16, Sears uses the oral history of people of color like Hassan Sudler and Mark Aguirre to discuss the racism ingrained in Rehoboth Beach. Sears concludes chapter 16 with the ironic twist: Today, the Rehoboth Beach Homeowners Association is largely made up of gay, conservative men, replacing the “old guard” or the heterosexual, conservatives of the 1980s (280).Queering Rehoboth Beach is the first book-length documentation of Rehoboth, Delaware’s queer history. The cast of narrators were largely business or upper-class individuals, presenting a gap in the oral history of lower and middle-class queer people. Despite this, it is an important and vital contribution to Delaware history and to the growing field of American queer history. Sears managed to make the book both scholarly and accessible to a general audience. The extensive oral history quotes read as engaging historical gossip, while also providing much-needed primary-source material on the experiences of queer people who have lived or visited Rehoboth.