Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware has a long history of LGBTQ+ advocacy and community-building, but dedicated physical spaces for queer residents are limited. As concerns grow over policies from the Trump administration and their impact on LGBTQ+ people, a new community space opening in Delaware’s largest city aims to provide a place for connection, support, and belonging.
For years, Delaware’s LGBTQ+ history has lived in fragments, scattered throughout the state.
Stories from the community have been found in shared memories, archives, temporary exhibits, small businesses, annual Pride events and community spaces.
Now, the Delaware Sexuality and Gender Collective is trying to give that history a permanent home in the state’s largest city.
By the end of this year, the organization plans to open The Collective, a 3,200-square-foot facility on Market Street in downtown Wilmington. It would serve as an LGBTQ+ visitor center, museum, co-working space, and community hub.
Organizers say the project would create Delaware’s first queer history museum. It would also create the first brick-and-mortar LGBTQ+ community space in northern Delaware in over 35 years — following the closure of the Griffin Community Center in Wilmington.
Similar centers exist in Sussex County and Philadelphia.
For Noah Duckett, co-founder of the Delaware Sexuality and Gender Collective, the space’s purpose feels vital. He emphasized that while there have been “incredible events” in Wilmington, there is not a single space “to showcase all of that in a permanent way.”
“It felt like now was the most important time to have a space that was created by us, created for us, that is not going to go away,” Duckett said.
Duckett’s plans come after LGBTQ+ rights were thrust into the center of national political debates amid President Donald Trump’s second term.
Since taking office, Trump issued an executive order to recognize two sexes — male and female. His administration also issued a string of directives and orders aiming to alter health care for transgender individuals by pulling federal dollars from hospitals nationally and in Delaware that provide gender-affirming care.
Meanwhile, some states and conservative groups have called for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn its decade-old ruling, legalizing same-sex marriage.
Duckett said those government actions only increase the need to build a community center.
“We have sponsors that are pulling away, we have hospitals and agencies and government practices that are really just trying to minimize their support as much as possible,” Duckett said.
Inspired by the Griffin
Duckett and his mother, Julissa Coriano, founded the Delaware Sexuality and Gender Collective in 2018. Both are clinical social workers, sexuality therapists, and advocates in the queer community.
Duckett said their organization began as a provider of family therapy, and clinical education and training, among other things. It then expanded into social programming and direct support services. Those included hosting the Pride Closet clothing drive, and offering recovery support for people healing from gender-affirming surgery.
A brick-and-mortar space had long been part of the conversation, Duckett said.
The Collective is expected to include a visitor center highlighting LGBTQ+ businesses, organizations, and events across Delaware; a gift shop featuring local queer artists and makers; a co-working space with offices and day-pass work areas; and a community room available for meetings, events, and programming.
It will be located on Market Street in Wilmington, but Duckett said the exact address will not be announced until the lease is finalized. It will be near the historical location of Wilmington’s previous LGBTQ+ community center, the Griffin, Duckett said.
Duckett’s organization is raising $500,000 to help cover upfront rent, construction, buildout and long-term sustainability. He said the goal is to make sure the space can last.
“We don’t want to have a really great idea and then it burns out in two years because we run out of funding,” he said.
‘Not just a temporary exhibition’
At the center of the project will be a permanent museum curated by Carolanne Deal, a longtime historian focused on Delaware’s LGBTQ+ history. Deal previously led research for the state’s first digital exhibit on LGBTQ+ history.
Deal noted that queer history is rarely represented in a permanent way in Delaware museums or archives.
“It’s so incredibly important for us to have a permanent space that’s not just a temporary exhibition that comes out once a year for Pride month,” Deal said.
According to officials at the Delaware History Museum, the only active physical exhibit in their space is a certificate for the first gay marriage signed in Delaware.
The LGBTQ+ museum will feature graphics, visuals, text, as well as reproductions of newsletters and panels discussing various historical events, such as the founding of one of the first queer student union groups in the country at the University of Delaware, Deal said.
Deal plans to bring a wide scope of historical events and information about important figureheads in Delaware’s LGBTQ+ community, including Ivo Dominguez Jr. and James Welch, the pioneers who founded “The Griffin,” the state’s first queer community center, in 1986.
Building on a legacy
During the height of the AIDS epidemic, the Griffin Community Center served as a meeting place for organizations, such as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Delaware, or GLAD, and the state’s first HIV/AIDS service agency, now known as AIDS Delaware.
The center also hosted meetings for various other community organizations.
Dominguez and Welch, who are longtime partners, began their activism in the late 1970s, a time when the community’s advocates across the country were gaining visibility, but also facing a conservative backlash.
Over the years, they organized HIV/AIDS education and fundraising events, founded GLAD, Delaware’s first statewide gay rights organization, and opened Hen’s Teeth, the state’s first queer bookstore, in Wilmington.
The Griffin closed just four years after it opened. Dominguez said burnout contributed to its closure.
Today, apartments stand where the small row building once existed. But Dominguez and Welch said the need for a physical gathering space for Delaware’s queer community never disappeared.
Dominguez and Welch have been assisting with the creation of The Collective by attending planning meetings and doing outreach. As activists who have done the work before, Dominguez says his biggest advice to Duckett and Coriano in establishing the space is to “live as if you are free.”
“We have the benefit and the privilege right now of living in a state that is relatively kind and good to our people; we’ve got to keep it that way,” Dominguez said.
