A Catskills Camp by Singers, a Bed-Stuy Queer Bar

For the nearly 9,000 loyal followers of the rapidly successful Bed-Stuy queer bar Singers, its Instagram announcement of an upstate “Camp Singers” was a huge deal. Nearly 100 comments poured in, with more than one person asking to ride the donkeys and drink the hot-tub water at its renovated 19th-century farmhouse in Delhi, New York.

Managing a small inn (and the 88-acre property it’s on) is certainly a big pivot for a Brooklyn bar that has made its name running more ad hoc ventures. Over two years, what Singers is perhaps best known for is its one-of-a-kind (some would call deranged) programming, like the Pride Month Twinks Versus Dolls cage match, the Doggy Drag show, and a sauna rave. Owners Brooke Peshke and Mike Guisinger hope to program similarly original events at their new lodge in Delaware County, which has six bedrooms, a full kitchen, a cedar-barrel hot tub, and plenty of roaming donkeys. I spoke with Peshke and Guisinger about the origins of the project, and it turns out that the idea for the camp predates the bar, but they quickly found that running a wildly popular queer bar is easier than renovating a run-down farmhouse. We talked at length about what people can expect from the Borscht Belt–inspired property.

How did Camp Singers come to be?

Brooke Peshke: Mike and I are both from Michigan. I grew up going to a YMCA summer camp from when I was 6 until my mid-20, and then I worked as a counselor and a director. Once I moved to New York, I always wanted to try to do something like it — it certainly was not going to be a kids’ summer camp, but it was going to have some similar themes of community consistency and tradition. Our third business partner, who’s more of a silent partner, started looking around for some places in the Catskills in 2020. Through that process, we hit this point where we found all these beautiful properties, but we really needed to find the people we were trying to bring up before we opened a camp upstate. Mike and our other business partner, Peter, had the amazing idea to open a queer bar first in Brooklyn as a way to make our own YMCA down there. We said, “Well, we have all these great ideas. But who is going to come up from the city?” And so we flipped it and said, “Let’s build our audience in the city first. Let’s figure out what we’re about. Let’s try to start building some connections and relationships down there and then come in with part two.” The camp ended up being part two.

Mike Guisinger: I lived next to this vacant former restaurant, and I’ve always loved throwing parties. I threw a couple of big parties at my house. I think what started as a joke about Brooke opening a lesbian bar led to us opening Singers. The upstate idea kind of did come first. That was something Brooke and Peter had been working on for a couple of years.

Does the idea of summer camp inspire the programming you have at Singers?

Brooke Peshke: Absolutely. At the end of the day, we sell drinks to be able to pay our rent and to have that space at the bar. But it’s always been part of our plan, in the beginning, to do a lot of extra activities and competitions, as you’ve seen, and things that really put the bar almost on the back burner in terms of the creative things we’re trying to pull together.

How did you come across this land — 88 acres in Delaware County — and what was the process to get it ready for guests?

Brooke Peshke: Ahead of opening Singers, we had spent some time looking at some places, and our third partner, Peter, found this property. It needed a lot of work, but it had a lot of the pieces in terms of acreage, and it had a pond and several outbuildings. It has the camp infrastructure already in place. But I wouldn’t say we jumped in blindly. Peter is an architect, so I think we all had a lot of optimism about being able to cobble something together and be able to dress it to work for our needs.

The timing was pretty intense. We opened the bar at the end of May 2022, and the farm was purchased at the end of July 2022. We were kind of taking a leap of faith, and I think there was some … I think “ignorance is bliss,” for sure, is a way to put it at that stage. The plan was really like, “Okay. Mike, you’re going to figure out how to run a bar. And then, Brooke, you’re going to go upstate and figure out how to open this camp … Okay, break. Let’s go.”

So did the house need a lot of work?

Brooke Peshke: It was owned by the same family since the ’30s. We think there’s a lot of evidence of parts of the house going back to the 1870s. Once we started peeling back the necessary things, it was a gut renovation. Everything was replaced. I would say 50 percent of the house was down to the studs. But once we got into upgrading the electricity, which in itself took an electrician a year to do, we thought two months would probably be the timeline. [It ended up taking a year.]

In the beginning, we were scrappy and brought up the crew that we used for most of the renovation at Singers. They’re great, but it’s a city crew. The reality of them being able to adapt to an over-100-year-old farmhouse in a rural part of New York State — it only took a couple of weeks to figure out that wasn’t going to work. After four or five months of spinning our tires and flailing a bit, our neighbor Larry, who is, for the most part, retired, sort of watched me scratch my head one too many times and basically said, “Yeah. I will do this project for you.” He had family ties to it. His mother was married to the son of the family that owned the house. So his family had been there for decades, and he had watched it sit on the market, and he wasn’t sure how it was going to go, who it was going to go to? I think, at some point, there was an emotional element to it, but we also really sort of clicked in terms of the vision. He has been working in all different types of carpentry and trades for his entire life, and he pretty much saved the project. Most contractors up there are booked two to three years out, and you’re always bidding against a city person who is going to outbid you, certainly with our budget. In terms of electricians and plumbers and all sorts of other contractors, they won’t call you back unless you might know someone. I think we would’ve probably called it quits if he was not a full-on hero, taking on a year of 80-hour weeks to complete the house.

That’s amazing. That said, when you shared the news, some commenters were concerned that the camp would be contributing to the gentrification of the Catskills. So many of the developments in the area are either Airbnbs or glammed-up motels, not in line with the tradition of the region. Are there other ways that the local community is involved or integrated into the project?

Brooke Peshke: That’s a tough one and something that we’re thinking about a lot. Having ambassadors like Larry has made a night-and-day difference for us. He’s the golf instructor for the high school in town, and he’s kind of like the mini-mayor in Delhi. In general, we’re always trying to recognize that we’re latecomers here. Even though we have longtime residents as neighbors supporting us, we’re treading lightly in terms of how we use the space and our relationships with our neighbors.

We also hope to use the space and its amenities during the day in ways that might be interesting to the community. Through Larry and some other friends that we’ve made, it’ll be interesting to see what the response is when we do things that are more directly for people just during the day who are local.

I think our neighbors respected that we came there to really get our hands dirty and get involved. There’s a lot of upstate language and farm-to-table glamorizing of really tough rural areas and tough, hardworking people, and the friction can be very visible. Part of what we’re trying to do, noticing that some of this wave is happening, is invite this group of, let’s say, our followers, 8,500 people who have mutual respect and trust for each other, to share one space.

You mentioned that your other partner at Singers is an architect. What are you trying to do regarding the design of the space, and what inspired it?

Mike Guisinger: Brooke is modest, but she’s an exceptional designer. She did a lot of the design at the bar and pretty much all of it up at the farm. A number of people who have come up to the farmhouse have commented that it feels like Singers. It’s a lot of fun and whimsy, and Pee-wee’s Playhouse is mixed in there, too.

Brooke Peshke: I hope it feels cohesive and we all have a similar eye. For the most part, our strongest references are from the ’60s and ’70s social clubs or even tiny little record bars or listening labs. I feel like this is a similar idea in terms of these old bungalow colonies or these great camps that were in the Adirondacks. There’s a mixture of old, I hate to say primitive, sort of design in there. There’s also some fun mod stuff that feels similar to what you might see in Singers. We’re trying not to take ourselves too seriously, but we blow all of our money on lamps. That seems to be the issue.

We were all very obsessed with the lamps. Are there any designers you’re working with who are exciting and new to you?

Brooke Peshke: A lot of this was working with local craftsmen. We had a local guy build many of the shelves, dressers, and kitchen cabinets. There was another local guy up there who did all of the plasterwork. At a certain point, we realized closer is better, so it got geographically tighter with who we were working with. And so it’ll be nice to get to that next phase of what collaborations look like because I feel like we stuck to this very rigid “let’s get to the finish line” plan. Some of the fun stuff, like those lampshades, made it in there. In general, including appliances, there were less than five things in that renovation that were new outside of materials like lumber or bolts. Almost all of the wood was salvaged for the ceilings. Almost all of the furniture is secondhand.

Mike Guisinger: Brooke is a master of Facebook Marketplace. If you said, “I need a dunk tank by 5 p.m.,” you’d have it. She picked out most of the furniture.

So, what are you guys envisioning programming-wise? 

Mike Guisinger: We were certainly inspired by Borscht Belt, Catskills resorts — more like communal-lifestyle living where you might just rent a room. Right now, we’re just trying to rent the house. The house has six bedrooms and sleeps 12 people, but we’d like to build cabins. We’d like to turn the main barn into a sort of bunkhouse. There are plans to make the property able to accommodate larger groups of people, more like a YMCA Lodge–style resort. We just wanted to get something off the ground because the house itself is done. So we figured we might as well just start getting people up there into the house and sort of see how it goes while we work on these little one-off camp weekends.

Brooke Peshke: For now, there are a few things we are testing out. We already have scheduled a few camp weekends with comedians, which will be kind of a mixture of traditional summer camp and a barbecue that is a couple of days long. There’ll be some traditional scary stories. There might be some light and easy competition. We’ve talked about doing a Survivor-like competition that’s maybe streamed at the bar or even a donkey cam. We rescued a few donkeys and maybe will have a live cam that plays at the bar. Or a confessional booth at the bar with a phone that only calls the farm. For the first few weekends, it’s about trying to get people comfortable with the idea of being in a much more communal environment. It’s getting away from the city, but it’s not getting away from everyone.

Can people expect Twinks Versus Dolls up in the Catskills?

Mike Guisinger: It’d be fun to have a retreat up there, maybe a pre-party with all the twinks and dolls or a boot camp.

Brooke Peshke: I’m telling you, Survivor.

Mike Guisinger: Our friend P.E. Moskowitz wanted to have a trans boot camp up there where you teach dolls how to shoot guns.

You talked about daytime programming and the house only hosting 12 people — but what do you envision for nightlife up there?

Brooke Peshke: Some of it is going to be “create your own fun.” There are 88 acres. There will be some communal bonfires every night that allow people to engage with one another easily. Beyond that, there might be some one-off things, but it’s really treating the lodge almost like you would like you’re at someone’s cottage at a house party. It will feel very personal when you’re there.

Mike Guisinger: I definitely would like to do some parties, too. We’ve already talked with some DJs who have been interested in throwing little parties up there. Certainly nothing at a large scale, but something like Sustain Release that happens in Monticello, the big techno festival, just way scaled down.

Brooke Peshke: Generally, we want a platform that feels like it falls under the Singers umbrella and isn’t alcohol driven. We’ve started trying to implement those ideas down at the bar. Mike doesn’t drink; our partner Peter doesn’t drink. I recently stopped drinking. I think there’s a world of things and people that we can offer upstate that have limitations at the bar.

Mike Guisinger: I’d also love to create an artist’s residency at some point that sort of pulls in people in Singers’s orbit and gives them studio space upstate.

Is that in line with the work/trade you mentioned in your initial posts? Does that mean people can stay in exchange for some duties on the camp?

Brooke Peshke: We have found that a lot of people are excited to do things like help muck a donkey stall or learn how to build a bench with Larry. We’ve opened that up to just see who’s out there. We’ve also talked about having potentially somewhat of a rotating innkeeper. Someone who is the innkeeper for a whole season and they learn the ropes, and they’re there for six months. I think a lot of people, including myself, when I jumped into doing Singers, the bar, and all of this, had just gotten laid off and was like, “There’s something I can offer.”

You also mentioned in the post that you can get there by bus from Port Authority. How was getting there on your mind throughout planning this?

Brooke Peshke: For now, if you’ve got a car, that’s the easiest way (about 3.5 hours). You can also take the Adirondack Trailways bus to Delhi. It’s pretty special because there are a lot of upstate towns where the bus does not come within five minutes to your property. I think we’re trying to aim for a capacity of 40 to 50 tops. If we start running some larger Singers-programmed camp weekends, we will probably get a charter bus that picks you up from Singers and drops you back off at Singers.

Mike Guisinger: Or a school bus. Brooke actually used to drive a school bus at her summer camp.

Brooke Peshke: I used to have a chauffeur’s license, so I could get it again.