How Rehoboth Beach Turned Gay
Queering Rehoboth Beach: Beyond the Boardwalk, James T. Sears recounts an incident at a local restaurant in the Rehoboth Beach area where he and his husband dined out one night.Following their meal, Sears and his husband, a Nicaraguan green card holder, were confronted by a trio of straight couples from a neighboring table who accused them of being “cheap” when they upbraid their waitress for wrongly telling them that a discount would be applied to their meal.From there, the situation escalated to the point where Sears flipped the middle finger at the couples, one of the men hurled a string of epithets at Sears’ husband, and a second man told them to go home because this is a “family” restaurant.While Sears initially believed that the incident was motivated by racism, xenophobia, and homophobia, he wondered what led the couples to become confrontational.
The incident brought about a realization of how people can view the same scenario differently based on their own perspectives, experiences, or sensitivities.The realization informed how the historian approached his book — and the variety of different perspectives he includes in it –- as he sought to retell the story of how Rehoboth Beach, initially a small, heavily Methodist, largely rural outpost on the Delaware coast, morphed into a queer resort for people from the D.C.
and Philadelphia areas, rivaling other LGBTQ resort towns like Fire Island, Provincetown, and Key West.“I began to think about, ‘Well, how Queer is Rehoboth, beyond just the surface?'” he says.
