Asheville heartbreak: Will LGBTQ+ cocktail bar rise from the ruins?

After years of planning, nearly $200,000 in loans, and just one month in business, Brandon Davis' bar now sits in ruin.

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Day Trip, a cocktail lounge and event space, opened on August 22 in Asheville, North Carolina, fulfilling a dream held by Davis and his husband, Davie, to create an "inclusive, queer-owned safe space and meetup spot for the community." The two even had plans to expand by opening a connected coffee shop on Wednesday, October 2.

Now, after just 31 days in business, the space Davis and his husband worked so hard to curate looks "like a scene out of an apocalypse movie."

"The building is destroyed," Davis tells The Advocate. "Everything that we bought for the business is either gone, broken, or covered in sewage and mud."

Courtesy of Brandon Davis

Davis says he could hardly process the "unbelievable" scene when Hurricane Helene finally passed and he was able to leave his home to survey the damage done to his brand-new business. "To walk into a place that my husband and I have poured our hearts and soul and money and resources and all of our time into ... seeing it all covered in mud and ripped apart was a gut punch," he says.

Davis and his employees, some of whom were freshly hired and scheduled to begin working at the coffee shop Wednesday, are now without a means to support themselves. Davis also says he and his husband personally put "$190,000 worth of loans into the business" while they "didn't have any income," leaving them with credit card bills to pay off, but without their projected profits for the next two years.

In an even more cruel twist of fate, Davis says he and his husband had no choice but to purchase a new vehicle just a week before the storm after their previous car suddenly died.

"We now have a car loan. We can't pay our mortgage," he says. "We can't pay three credit cards, a personal loan for each of us."

Courtesy of Brandon Davis

As cellphone service and internet remains spotty in Asheville, Davis says he has not yet been able to contact his insurance holders, so he doesn't yet know how much of the losses will be covered. The process is also "really confusing and new" to the couple as "brand-new business owners who've never had to deal with insurance before, or a natural disaster."

Instead of the events Day Trip had scheduled, including "fundraising for the local queer community, dog adoptions, [and] a trash cleanup" along a nearby river "scheduled for next week," Davis' family and employees are now trying to figure out where they will take their next shower.

"We definitely need that trash cleanup now," Davis says. "It's crazy to think that a week ago I was scheduling all these events, and now the business isn't even there."

Over 200 people in the southeastern United States were killed in Hurricane Helene, according to the most recent estimates, including nearly 100 in North Carolina. Over one million are still without power. In Asheville, Davis says "there's no running water," and the "latest that I've heard is it will be over a month before we'll have safe running water again." Residents are currently "using buckets of water from the creek to wash our toilets."

Courtesy of Brandon Davis

Despite the "unbelievable" loss, Davis still considers himself one of the lucky ones. He says that his "staff is all safe, my little brother who lives with me and my husband is safe, and my pets are safe." While his house is without power or running water, and the street it's on is "inaccessible," it still stands.

"We may have lost our business, our livelihood, and any type of financial security, but we consider ourselves very lucky because so many people have lost their homes or their lives," Davis says. "There's power lines [and] telephone poles down, wires everywhere in the street, trees on houses. But our house is safe."

As the community recovers, Davis says his "immediate concern" is "to be able to give the employees money for food and gas," and help supplement the income they would have otherwise had. He has a GoFundMe for Day Trip's eventual rebuilding efforts, but donations via his Venmo, @Brandondavis227, will immediately and "directly help us pay our bills and for food."

In order to rebuild someday, Davis says they must "find a new location," since "we obviously can't rebuild where we were, and even if we could, that would be a bad decision on our part, seeing as these storms are just going to keep getting worse."

Courtesy of Brandon Davis

What's helped Davis persist through the "soul-crushing" loss is seeing the outpouring of "love and kindness from not only the queer community internationally, but from small business owners."

"The main thing that I think we need is we just need people following our story, but people also following the devastation around us, because so many people are in need right now," he says, adding, "I know I need to focus on my family and trying to rebuild our livelihood, but I don't want to be insensitive to anybody who has lost more than we have.

Davis stresses that what communities in Asheville need now is "water, food, baby formula, menstrual hygiene products, and just baby wipes for cleanliness." Several organizations providing resources to the devastated communities are also in need of donations.

Despite their losses, Davis and his husband haven't been deterred. "Day Trip 2.0" will be "come back stronger," he says, and will "be better than we ever could have imagined."

"If anything, it's made us even more determined to create an inclusive, safe space and cocktail bar of our dreams," Davis says. "And we know in our hearts that we not only need to rebuild, but we want to rebuild."

Courtesy of Brandon Davis