How to use the ESP32 WROOM GPIOS above #18 with arudino ide?
Found the answer, albeit a simple one. This is my first go around with arudino so it will look ridiculous to those who program microprocessors (including myself)

You need to declare the pin to be an output before use. The inconsistent thing is, this only happens sometimes. For some of the pins you don't need to use pinMode for them to work.

  pinMode(relayPin1, OUTPUT);