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Rehoboth excited about Biden presence in Delaware beach town
Popular resort becomes first presidential retreat known as ‘gay destination’
Lori Kline, owner of Lori’s Café in Rehoboth Beach, is one of many LGBTQ people who own and operate businesses in the popular Delaware resort town that has become known at least since the 1970s as a “gay destination” in the nation’s mid-Atlantic region, especially for LGBTQ people in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia.
Kline, whose café is located in a courtyard next to CAMP Rehoboth, the local LGBTQ community center, says President-Elect Joe Biden and soon-to-be first lady Jill Biden have been regular customers at Lori’s Café.
“I saw Jill a lot this summer,” Kline told the Washington Blade. “She would come in. She would pick up their order. I have met Joe Biden as well,” she said in referring to the president-elect’s past visits to Lori’s.
“I have a picture with him,” she said. “They’re wonderful, wonderful people.”
Kline is among the many Rehoboth business owners and residents as well as summer visitors, including those from D.C., who have seen the Biden family during the Bidens’ visits to Rehoboth for more than 20 years.
Three years ago the Bidens bought a house in the North Shores neighborhood located just outside the Rehoboth city limits, which is expected to serve as the presidential retreat for the next four years.
Gay Rehoboth resident Joe Mack, owner of Double Dippers ice cream shop located about a block away from Lori’s Café, said Joe Biden has been coming to his business for nearly 20 years going back to when Biden was a U.S. senator.
“He loves chocolate ice cream and a waffle cone,” Mack said. “That’s his go-to. He’s always very friendly. He’s had his grandkids in and his niece.”
Mack said Biden sometimes offered him quotes from people Biden respected, including his grandfather and great grandfather as well as former presidents during his visits to Double Dippers. “This one was from Harry Truman and I wrote it down,” Mack told the Blade. “It says, ‘I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.’ And that’s the Harry Truman quote he gave me that I thought was really, really good.”
Mack said Biden did not stop by his shop this past summer or this fall, most likely because he was busy campaigning for president. Mack said business owners in the town believe that Biden and many others may also be keeping a distance from businesses and other indoor locations because of the COVID pandemic, which Mack says has hurt his and many other businesses in Rehoboth.
Longtime Rehoboth residents and regular summer visitors say they are hopeful that with a COVID vaccine expected to become available in the coming months and the interest in Rehoboth generated by the Bidens, the sharp decline in business brought about by the epidemic will quickly reverse itself.
“He’s always been a very avid supporter of businesses in town,” said gay D.C. diversity consultant and executive coach Wesley Combs, who with his husband has been working remotely at the couple’s Rehoboth home.
Combs said that in the recent past Biden has been a regular customer at Browseabout Books, the popular Rehoboth bookstore that added more LGBTQ-related titles to its collection after Rehoboth’s gay bookstore closed three years ago.
Biden greeted people on the sidewalk in front of Browseabout Books in July 2019 when Jill Biden appeared at the store for a book signing event to promote her recently published memoir.
“Whenever the Bidens are in town there’s a buzz in town,” Combs said. “He goes to the Starbucks to get his coffee. And so when they are in town they often frequent the businesses and the town loves him and Mrs. Biden for that reason.”
Combs and others who have been in Rehoboth when the Bidens have come to town after the presidential election say they have observed the presence of Secret Service agents accompanying the Bidens. They expect more staff and presidential aides to join the Bidens during his upcoming visits after he becomes president on Jan. 20, a development they believe will give a needed economic boost to the town and surrounding areas.
Others have expressed concern that if the Bidens arrive in town in an expected presidential motorcade, the already frequent traffic jams on U.S. Route 1, the main road going into Rehoboth from other parts of Delaware, will become far worse.
D.C. gay Democratic activist Peter Rosenstein, who also has a Rehoboth home, points out that Route 1 is nearly always backed up in traffic during the peak summer months as visitors and summer residents travel to Rehoboth.
“There’s loads of traffic anyway,” said Rosenstein. “And the other thing is he can come in by helicopter. He can land at the Rehoboth elementary school or at Cape Henlopen State Park,” Rosenstein noted, which is located just outside Rehoboth.
Combs said he believes the Biden motorcade can take some alternate routes to avoid traffic backups in Rehoboth itself. He also appears to share the view of many Rehoboth residents who say they are willing to put up with additional traffic caused by the Bidens.
“I am totally fine with any inconvenience his presence in Rehoboth Beach creates to have a more hopeful future for LGBTQ Americans and for all those who have been disenfranchised during the Trump administration,” Combs said.
Gay activist Peter Schott, a Rehoboth area resident who serves as president of Delaware Stonewall PAC, an LGBTQ advocacy group, said Rehoboth could soon have the distinction of being the only known presidential retreat that’s also known as a LGBTQ destination.
Longtime Rehoboth residents and visitors say Rehoboth became known as a vacation and summer home destination for LGBTQ people in the mid-Atlantic region at least since the 1970s if not earlier. Sources familiar with Rehoboth say the large number of LGBTQ D.C.-area residents who have vacationed in Rehoboth in the summer months contributed to Rehoboth’s reputation as the “Nation’s Summer Capital.”
There currently are six gay bars in Rehoboth, most of which also operate as restaurants. Activists say many other bars and restaurants are LGBTQ friendly and draw a significant LGBTQ clientele. For close to 20 years, at least one lesbian or gay man has won election and served on the Rehoboth City Commission, which acts as the city’s legislative governing body.
The famous presidential retreats of Presidents John F. Kennedy in Hyannis Port, Mass.; George H.W. Bush in Kennebunkport, Maine; and Barack Obama in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. are not known as gay destinations.
Schott said the only possible comparison to Rehoboth’s role as a presidential retreat could be the former home of President Gerald Ford and his wife Betty Ford in Rancho Mirage, Calif., which is in the vicinity of Palm Springs, a well-known vacation and residential destination for LGBTQ people. But the Fords did not move into their Rancho Mirage house until 1977, shortly after Ford lost the 1976 presidential election to Jimmy Carter.
According to Vogue magazine, a gay male couple bought the house from Gerald and Betty Ford’s heirs in 2012 after the Fords had passed away.
Biden, who has a longtime record of support on LGBTQ issues, has enjoyed strong political support in Rehoboth and nearby Lewes, Del. But the two small cities stand out as progressive exceptions in Sussex County, where they are located and which President Donald Trump won in the Nov. 3 election, although Trump lost the statewide race to Biden.
Rehoboth homeowner Jeffrey Slavin, the mayor of Somerset, Md. near D.C. who’s gay, said Biden’s longstanding support for LGBTQ equality is likely to result in there not being much of a “gay angle” to his presence in Rehoboth.
“They’re so open to gay people and everybody knows how much better Biden and the Democrats are for gay people,” said Slavin. “I think there is no question there will be gay people all over his administration and they will do everything possible to right the wrongs of the past four years,” he said.
“So I just think it’s so much of a non-issue for him. We’re in a whole new era,” said Slavin. “We’re already post-Trump the way I look at it. Let’s stop talking about it and move on.”
Kline of Lori’s Café said she was moved that Jill Biden took the time to respond to an email Kline sent her after it was announced that Biden won the election.
“When Jill Biden orders she orders with a personal email,” Kline said referring to Jill Biden’s food carryout orders submitted to Lori’s Café. “And I will never use it except when it was announced that they won,” Kline recounted. “And I emailed her to congratulate her from the café. We were all behind them and they were now going to the White House,” said Kline.
“That was on Saturday night when they said Biden won. And she actually emailed me back that night and said love hearing from you,” Kline continued. “They’re just remarkable people. They’re friendly. They’re real. What you see is what you get.”
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Honoring the legacy of New Orleans’ 1973 UpStairs Lounge fire
Why the arson attack that killed 32 gay men still resonates 50 years later
On June 23 of last year, I held the microphone as a gay man in the New Orleans City Council Chamber and related a lost piece of queer history to the seven council members. I told this story to disabuse all New Orleanians of the notion that silence and accommodation, in the face of institutional and official failures, are a path to healing.
The story I related to them began on a typical Sunday night at a second-story bar on the fringe of New Orleans’ French Quarter in 1973, where working-class men would gather around a white baby grand piano and belt out the lyrics to a song that was the anthem of their hidden community, “United We Stand” by the Brotherhood of Man.
“United we stand,” the men would sing together, “divided we fall” — the words epitomizing the ethos of their beloved UpStairs Lounge bar, an egalitarian free space that served as a forerunner to today’s queer safe havens.
Around that piano in the 1970s Deep South, gays and lesbians, white and Black queens, Christians and non-Christians, and even early gender minorities could cast aside the racism, sexism, and homophobia of the times to find acceptance and companionship for a moment.
For regulars, the UpStairs Lounge was a miracle, a small pocket of acceptance in a broader world where their very identities were illegal.
On the Sunday night of June 24, 1973, their voices were silenced in a murderous act of arson that claimed 32 lives and still stands as the deadliest fire in New Orleans history — and the worst mass killing of gays in 20th century America.
As 13 fire companies struggled to douse the inferno, police refused to question the chief suspect, even though gay witnesses identified and brought the soot-covered man to officers idly standing by. This suspect, an internally conflicted gay-for-pay sex worker named Rodger Dale Nunez, had been ejected from the UpStairs Lounge screaming the word “burn” minutes before, but New Orleans police rebuffed the testimony of fire survivors on the street and allowed Nunez to disappear.
As the fire raged, police denigrated the deceased to reporters on the street: “Some thieves hung out there, and you know this was a queer bar.”
For days afterward, the carnage met with official silence. With no local gay political leaders willing to step forward, national Gay Liberation-era figures like Rev. Troy Perry of the Metropolitan Community Church flew in to “help our bereaved brothers and sisters” — and shatter officialdom’s code of silence.
Perry broke local taboos by holding a press conference as an openly gay man. “It’s high time that you people, in New Orleans, Louisiana, got the message and joined the rest of the Union,” Perry said.
Two days later, on June 26, 1973, as families hesitated to step forward to identify their kin in the morgue, UpStairs Lounge owner Phil Esteve stood in his badly charred bar, the air still foul with death. He rebuffed attempts by Perry to turn the fire into a call for visibility and progress for homosexuals.
“This fire had very little to do with the gay movement or with anything gay,” Esteve told a reporter from The Philadelphia Inquirer. “I do not want my bar or this tragedy to be used to further any of their causes.”
Conspicuously, no photos of Esteve appeared in coverage of the UpStairs Lounge fire or its aftermath — and the bar owner also remained silent as he witnessed police looting the ashes of his business.
“Phil said the cash register, juke box, cigarette machine and some wallets had money removed,” recounted Esteve’s friend Bob McAnear, a former U.S. Customs officer. “Phil wouldn’t report it because, if he did, police would never allow him to operate a bar in New Orleans again.”
The next day, gay bar owners, incensed at declining gay bar traffic amid an atmosphere of anxiety, confronted Perry at a clandestine meeting. “How dare you hold your damn news conferences!” one business owner shouted.
Ignoring calls for gay self-censorship, Perry held a 250-person memorial for the fire victims the following Sunday, July 1, culminating in mourners defiantly marching out the front door of a French Quarter church into waiting news cameras. “Reverend Troy Perry awoke several sleeping giants, me being one of them,” recalled Charlene Schneider, a lesbian activist who walked out of that front door with Perry.
Esteve doubted the UpStairs Lounge story’s capacity to rouse gay political fervor. As the coroner buried four of his former patrons anonymously on the edge of town, Esteve quietly collected at least $25,000 in fire insurance proceeds. Less than a year later, he used the money to open another gay bar called the Post Office, where patrons of the UpStairs Lounge — some with visible burn scars — gathered but were discouraged from singing “United We Stand.”
New Orleans cops neglected to question the chief arson suspect and closed the investigation without answers in late August 1973. Gay elites in the city’s power structure began gaslighting the mourners who marched with Perry into the news cameras, casting suspicion on their memories and re-characterizing their moment of liberation as a stunt.
When a local gay journalist asked in April 1977, “Where are the gay activists in New Orleans?,” Esteve responded that there were none, because none were needed. “We don’t feel we’re discriminated against,” Esteve said. “New Orleans gays are different from gays anywhere else… Perhaps there is some correlation between the amount of gay activism in other cities and the degree of police harassment.”
An attitude of nihilism and disavowal descended upon the memory of the UpStairs Lounge victims, goaded by Esteve and fellow gay entrepreneurs who earned their keep via gay patrons drowning their sorrows each night instead of protesting the injustices that kept them drinking.
Into the 1980s, the story of the UpStairs Lounge all but vanished from conversation — with the exception of a few sanctuaries for gay political debate such as the local lesbian bar Charlene’s, run by the activist Charlene Schneider.
By 1988, the 15th anniversary of the fire, the UpStairs Lounge narrative comprised little more than a call for better fire codes and indoor sprinklers. UpStairs Lounge survivor Stewart Butler summed it up: “A tragedy that, as far as I know, no good came of.”
Finally, in 1991, at Stewart Butler and Charlene Schneider’s nudging, the UpStairs Lounge story became aligned with the crusade of liberated gays and lesbians seeking equal rights in Louisiana. The halls of power responded with intermittent progress. The New Orleans City Council, horrified by the story but not yet ready to take its look in the mirror, enacted an anti-discrimination ordinance protecting gays and lesbians in housing, employment, and public accommodations that Dec. 12 — more than 18 years after the fire.
“I believe the fire was the catalyst for the anger to bring us all to the table,” Schneider told The Times-Picayune, a tacit rebuke to Esteve’s strategy of silent accommodation. Even Esteve seemed to change his stance with time, granting a full interview with the first UpStairs Lounge scholar Johnny Townsend sometime around 1989.
Most of the figures in this historic tale are now deceased. What’s left is an enduring story that refused to go gently. The story now echoes around the world — a musical about the UpStairs Lounge fire recently played in Tokyo, translating the gay underworld of the 1973 French Quarter for Japanese audiences.
When I finished my presentation to the City Council last June, I looked up to see the seven council members in tears. Unanimously, they approved a resolution acknowledging the historic failures of city leaders in the wake of the UpStairs Lounge fire.
Council members personally apologized to UpStairs Lounge families and survivors seated in the chamber in a symbolic act that, though it could not bring back those who died, still mattered greatly to those whose pain had been denied, leaving them to grieve alone. At long last, official silence and indifference gave way to heartfelt words of healing.
The way Americans remember the past is an active, ongoing process. Our collective memory is malleable, but it matters because it speaks volumes about our maturity as a people, how we acknowledge the past’s influence in our lives, and how it shapes the examples we set for our youth. Do we grapple with difficult truths, or do we duck accountability by defaulting to nostalgia and bluster? Or worse, do we simply ignore the past until it fades into a black hole of ignorance and indifference?
I believe that a factual retelling of the UpStairs Lounge tragedy — and how, 50 years onward, it became known internationally — resonates beyond our current divides. It reminds queer and non-queer Americans that ignoring the past holds back the present, and that silence is no cure for what ails a participatory nation.
Silence isolates. Silence gaslights and shrouds. It preserves the power structures that scapegoat the disempowered.
Solidarity, on the other hand, unites. Solidarity illuminates a path forward together. Above all, solidarity transforms the downtrodden into a resounding chorus of citizens — in the spirit of voices who once gathered ‘round a white baby grand piano and sang, joyfully and loudly, “United We Stand.”
Robert W. Fieseler is a New Orleans-based journalist and the author of “Tinderbox: the Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation.”
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New Supreme Court term includes critical LGBTQ case with ‘terrifying’ consequences
Business owner seeks to decline services for same-sex weddings
The U.S. Supreme Court, after a decision overturning Roe v. Wade that still leaves many reeling, is starting a new term with justices slated to revisit the issue of LGBTQ rights.
In 303 Creative v. Elenis, the court will return to the issue of whether or not providers of custom-made goods can refuse service to LGBTQ customers on First Amendment grounds. In this case, the business owner is Lorie Smith, a website designer in Colorado who wants to opt out of providing her graphic design services for same-sex weddings despite the civil rights law in her state.
Jennifer Pizer, acting chief legal officer of Lambda Legal, said in an interview with the Blade, “it’s not too much to say an immeasurably huge amount is at stake” for LGBTQ people depending on the outcome of the case.
“This contrived idea that making custom goods, or offering a custom service, somehow tacitly conveys an endorsement of the person — if that were to be accepted, that would be a profound change in the law,” Pizer said. “And the stakes are very high because there are no practical, obvious, principled ways to limit that kind of an exception, and if the law isn’t clear in this regard, then the people who are at risk of experiencing discrimination have no security, no effective protection by having a non-discrimination laws, because at any moment, as one makes their way through the commercial marketplace, you don’t know whether a particular business person is going to refuse to serve you.”
The upcoming arguments and decision in the 303 Creative case mark a return to LGBTQ rights for the Supreme Court, which had no lawsuit to directly address the issue in its previous term, although many argued the Dobbs decision put LGBTQ rights in peril and threatened access to abortion for LGBTQ people.
And yet, the 303 Creative case is similar to other cases the Supreme Court has previously heard on the providers of services seeking the right to deny services based on First Amendment grounds, such as Masterpiece Cakeshop and Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. In both of those cases, however, the court issued narrow rulings on the facts of litigation, declining to issue sweeping rulings either upholding non-discrimination principles or First Amendment exemptions.
Pizer, who signed one of the friend-of-the-court briefs in opposition to 303 Creative, said the case is “similar in the goals” of the Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation on the basis they both seek exemptions to the same non-discrimination law that governs their business, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, or CADA, and seek “to further the social and political argument that they should be free to refuse same-sex couples or LGBTQ people in particular.”
“So there’s the legal goal, and it connects to the social and political goals and in that sense, it’s the same as Masterpiece,” Pizer said. “And so there are multiple problems with it again, as a legal matter, but also as a social matter, because as with the religion argument, it flows from the idea that having something to do with us is endorsing us.”
One difference: the Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation stemmed from an act of refusal of service after owner, Jack Phillips, declined to make a custom-made wedding cake for a same-sex couple for their upcoming wedding. No act of discrimination in the past, however, is present in the 303 Creative case. The owner seeks to put on her website a disclaimer she won’t provide services for same-sex weddings, signaling an intent to discriminate against same-sex couples rather than having done so.
As such, expect issues of standing — whether or not either party is personally aggrieved and able bring to a lawsuit — to be hashed out in arguments as well as whether the litigation is ripe for review as justices consider the case. It’s not hard to see U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, who has sought to lead the court to reach less sweeping decisions (sometimes successfully, and sometimes in the Dobbs case not successfully) to push for a decision along these lines.
Another key difference: The 303 Creative case hinges on the argument of freedom of speech as opposed to the two-fold argument of freedom of speech and freedom of religious exercise in the Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation. Although 303 Creative requested in its petition to the Supreme Court review of both issues of speech and religion, justices elected only to take up the issue of free speech in granting a writ of certiorari (or agreement to take up a case). Justices also declined to accept another question in the petition request of review of the 1990 precedent in Smith v. Employment Division, which concluded states can enforce neutral generally applicable laws on citizens with religious objections without violating the First Amendment.
Representing 303 Creative in the lawsuit is Alliance Defending Freedom, a law firm that has sought to undermine civil rights laws for LGBTQ people with litigation seeking exemptions based on the First Amendment, such as the Masterpiece Cakeshop case.
Kristen Waggoner, president of Alliance Defending Freedom, wrote in a Sept. 12 legal brief signed by her and other attorneys that a decision in favor of 303 Creative boils down to a clear-cut violation of the First Amendment.
“Colorado and the United States still contend that CADA only regulates sales transactions,” the brief says. “But their cases do not apply because they involve non-expressive activities: selling BBQ, firing employees, restricting school attendance, limiting club memberships, and providing room access. Colorado’s own cases agree that the government may not use public-accommodation laws to affect a commercial actor’s speech.”
Pizer, however, pushed back strongly on the idea a decision in favor of 303 Creative would be as focused as Alliance Defending Freedom purports it would be, arguing it could open the door to widespread discrimination against LGBTQ people.
“One way to put it is art tends to be in the eye of the beholder,” Pizer said. “Is something of a craft, or is it art? I feel like I’m channeling Lily Tomlin. Remember ‘soup and art’? We have had an understanding that whether something is beautiful or not is not the determining factor about whether something is protected as artistic expression. There’s a legal test that recognizes if this is speech, whose speech is it, whose message is it? Would anyone who was hearing the speech or seeing the message understand it to be the message of the customer or of the merchants or craftsmen or business person?”
Despite the implications in the case for LGBTQ rights, 303 Creative may have supporters among LGBTQ people who consider themselves proponents of free speech.
One joint friend-of-the-court brief before the Supreme Court, written by Dale Carpenter, a law professor at Southern Methodist University who’s written in favor of LGBTQ rights, and Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment legal scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, argues the case is an opportunity to affirm the First Amendment applies to goods and services that are uniquely expressive.
“Distinguishing expressive from non-expressive products in some contexts might be hard, but the Tenth Circuit agreed that Smith’s product does not present a hard case,” the brief says. “Yet that court (and Colorado) declined to recognize any exemption for products constituting speech. The Tenth Circuit has effectively recognized a state interest in subjecting the creation of speech itself to antidiscrimination laws.”
Oral arguments in the case aren’t yet set, but may be announced soon. Set to defend the state of Colorado and enforcement of its non-discrimination law in the case is Colorado Solicitor General Eric Reuel Olson. Just this week, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would grant the request to the U.S. solicitor general to present arguments before the justices on behalf of the Biden administration.
With a 6-3 conservative majority on the court that has recently scrapped the super-precedent guaranteeing the right to abortion, supporters of LGBTQ rights may think the outcome of the case is all but lost, especially amid widespread fears same-sex marriage would be next on the chopping block. After the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against 303 Creative in the lawsuit, the simple action by the Supreme Court to grant review in the lawsuit suggests they are primed to issue a reversal and rule in favor of the company.
Pizer, acknowledging the call to action issued by LGBTQ groups in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, conceded the current Supreme Court issuing the ruling in this case is “a terrifying prospect,” but cautioned the issue isn’t so much the makeup of the court but whether or not justices will continue down the path of abolishing case law.
“I think the question that we’re facing with respect to all of the cases or at least many of the cases that are in front of the court right now, is whether this court is going to continue on this radical sort of wrecking ball to the edifice of settled law and seemingly a goal of setting up whole new structures of what our basic legal principles are going to be. Are we going to have another term of that?” Pizer said. “And if so, that’s terrifying.”
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Kelley Robinson, a Black, queer woman, named president of Human Rights Campaign
Progressive activist a veteran of Planned Parenthood Action Fund
Kelley Robinson, a Black, queer woman and veteran of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, is to become the next president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s leading LGBTQ group announced on Tuesday.
Robinson is set to become the ninth president of the Human Rights Campaign after having served as executive director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund and more than 12 years of experience as a leader in the progressive movement. She’ll be the first Black, queer woman to serve in that role.
“I’m honored and ready to lead HRC — and our more than three million member-advocates — as we continue working to achieve equality and liberation for all Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer people,” Robinson said. “This is a pivotal moment in our movement for equality for LGBTQ+ people. We, particularly our trans and BIPOC communities, are quite literally in the fight for our lives and facing unprecedented threats that seek to destroy us.”
The next Human Rights Campaign president is named as Democrats are performing well in polls in the mid-term elections after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, leaving an opening for the LGBTQ group to play a key role amid fears LGBTQ rights are next on the chopping block.
“The overturning of Roe v. Wade reminds us we are just one Supreme Court decision away from losing fundamental freedoms including the freedom to marry, voting rights, and privacy,” Robinson said. “We are facing a generational opportunity to rise to these challenges and create real, sustainable change. I believe that working together this change is possible right now. This next chapter of the Human Rights Campaign is about getting to freedom and liberation without any exceptions — and today I am making a promise and commitment to carry this work forward.”
The Human Rights Campaign announces its next president after a nearly year-long search process after the board of directors terminated its former president Alphonso David when he was ensnared in the sexual misconduct scandal that led former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to resign. David has denied wrongdoing and filed a lawsuit against the LGBTQ group alleging racial discrimination.