Last week I visited my beach home-away-from home – the Rehoboth Guest House in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. I try to go every spring and fall for the best weather and rates, and more tolerable crowds crowds. This B&B is stylish and charming inside but the exterior is best of all, the front being a destination in October when it sports the most outrageous Halloween decorations in town.

Like these guests, I love the front porch for hanging out and greeting people on their walk down Maryland  Avenue to the beach.

I love the back garden even with no blooms yet. Those red maples with the yellow umbrellas are perfect with the grey and white of the building.

In the before-and-after above (from its Facebook page) yellow was in the original but everything else has changed for the better.

From the balcony.

When I visited in mid-May the annuals had just been planted, due to our unusually cold spring.

Photo by Tom Kelch.

Above and below, the back garden in summer.

Photo by Tom Kelch.

I want a B&B that has great outdoor spaces to hang out and this one has many to choose from. The upper deck is the most private, and I like to settle down here with my laptop. Planters recently filled and lit for evening drama. 

I was a little too early to catch the rhododendrons in bloom.

The Innkeeper who Uncovered a Notorious History

Meet the friendliest, best-omelette-making, most creative B&B manager you’ll ever meet – Tom Kelch, who’s manned the Rehoboth Guest House since 2013. Tom and owners Frank Colonnello and Garrett Wood have transformed it inside and out.
 

I knew that about Tom but what I learned last week is that he’s unearthed the B&B’s amazing history, which was published in a first and then second installment in a local publication and soon in a book.

He learned that in 1979, it became the town’s very first openly gay-owned and operated gay business for gay men, going by the name “Paradise Guest House.” As the name implies, it was a place of sexual freedom for gay men.
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(And yes, it was weird hearing from Tom and learning from his articles the wild shenanigans that had gone on in the very room I was staying in! Though really, do we ever want intimate details about what’s happened in the hotel rooms we stay in? The hotel beds we sleep in? I think not!)

But it’s a story about more than just sex. In Tom’s words, while it “seemed at face value to be a big party scene filled with debauchery….After extensive research, I find instead it’s a place of sanctuary and self-acceptance. A trailblazing, history-changing, incredible business that provided a unique safe haven, in a very unlikely location…”
 
There’s lots more to the “amazing story of pride, sex, diversity, protest, scandal, drama, comedy, race, origin, determination, pandemic, growth, and sadly loss,” including the shockingly anti-LGBT people still running this beach town thought to be so gay-friendly.
Maybe by telling the whole story, Tom can help to change that.