WASHINGTON – For two men on a street corner in Delaware, it was a simple goodbye kiss.

For young Joe Biden, it was an awakening to the then-taboo issue of gay rights.

The future president was a young man fresh out of high school when, one day in the early 1960s, his father drove him into Wilmington to pick up an application for a summer job as a lifeguard at one of the city’s public pools. As Biden got out of the car, he saw two men dressed in suits kissing each other goodbye.

“I hadn’t seen that before,” Biden recalled during a CNN Town Hall in Los Angeles in 2019. “I looked at my dad, and he just looked at me. He said, ‘It’s simple. They love each other.’”