A review of “Insist That They Love You, Craig Rodwell and the Fight for Gay PRIDE” by John Van Hoesen
by: Charles Francis
All history, the saying goes, is contemporary history.
It is difficult to read the new biography of Craig Rodwell, a founding activist of the LGBTQ movement for civil equality, without a thrill and a shudder. How far we have traveled since he opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in Greenwich Village—“A Bookshop of the Homophile Movement”—in 1967. Thrill to stand with Rodwell across the street from the Stonewall yelling “Gay Power” then sprint to a pay phone with him to alert the media. Geek-out on America’s first queer “bookshop” that became Rodwell and his partner Fred Sargeant’s base to organize the first PRIDE parade and the spirit of Gay Liberation itself. Then shudder to realize how we are heading back to where all of this began facing the same scale political assault. It is never over. Rodwell’s earliest, primal battles fighting invisibility, defending free speech and books, and ending discrimination replay today with a new ferocity. “Insist That They Love You, Craig Rodwell and the Fight for Gay PRIDE” (University of Toronto Press, 2025) by John Van Hoesen is not a trip to a tinted queer past. It is a passage through the DNA helix of our community’s success and survival.
Rodwell got his start in New York in 1959 working for the Mattachine Society’s flagship publication ‘The Mattachine Review”. He ran the literature table at meetings, worked on the monthly newsletter, and founded the Mattachine Young Adults group to expand the organization beyond the circle of wan white guys in their fifties. It all came together at the infamous “sip-in” at Julius’ Bar captured by the New York Times with Rodwell at the bar demanding to be served. Thank goodness “sip-ins” could never be enough. Committed at age six by his very troubled mother into eight years in a Christian Science boarding school, Rodwell remembered the concept of the Christian Science reading room, “a place where lives can be changed”. In the American way, he processed this rough upbringing into a big idea: a sunny, storefront bookshop named after Oscar Wilde with a big window display of pamphlets, books and a sign that said, “Gay is Good!”
Van Hoesen’s research delivers tick-tock reality. Rodwell’s partner Fred Sargeant decades later would become Van Hoesen’s life partner. So, there is an almost en famille familiarity with the subject matter, and it shows. For example, on a Saturday morning at the bookshop, two hours before the Christopher Street Liberation Day parade was to commence, there were thousands of people gathering at the staging site on Waverly Place in the Village. Rodwell had still not received the parade permit for a Central Park “Gay-In” that he and Fred had applied for from the New York Police Department. At last, a cop knocked on their door with the permit. “We would have marched anyway,” Rodwell insisted.
This first PRIDE parade from the Village to Central Park was all Rodwell: his idea, his organizing, his team’s full execution operating out of the bookshop. The biography brings the moving pieces into dramatic focus beginning with Rodwell’s impatience with gay pioneer Frank Kameny, the founder of the original Mattachine Society of Washington, DC. At the annual Reminder’s Day 1969 picketing demonstration in Philadelphia, Kameny spotted two lesbians in the line holding hands. “None of that!”, Kameny barked separating them with a “karate chop-style movement”. Rodwell, having played a key role just days before in the Stonewall riot, was in no mood for Kameny’s old-school rules of dress and comportment while picketing. Thus was born the Christopher Street Liberation Day parade to mark the first anniversary of Stonewall. Van Hoesen’s biography takes the story to a next level of reporting through the prism of Rodwell’s growth and development as a young man building the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop into “the nerve center of the movement.”
Rodwell and his team trained the parade’s marshals on crowd control strategies. Gay Quakers were invited by Rodwell’s march leaders to become involved. According to a new history of the Quaker Religious Society of Friends by historian Brian Blackmore,1 the Quakers were invited to address over one hundred parade marshals with instructions on what to do if violence occurred. The Quakers trained the marshalls in techniques they had successfully learned from Bayard Rustin in the civil rights movement. “One parade marshal volunteered to perform the part of the violent bystander. “Cocksucker!”, the Quaker Friend yelled at another member. The Quaker trainers explained what typically comes next in the role playing, teaching the value and “how-to” of non-violence during acts of protest and civil resistance.” You can see the hand of Rodwell in this kind of innovative outreach beyond the old picket line-up.
Mattachine Society of Washington member Lilli Vincenz produced and directed the twelve-minute documentary entitled “Gay & Proud” (1970) of the Christopher Street Liberation Day march.2 Decades later, Vincenz asked us (the new Mattachine Society of Washington, DC) to help her donate the 16mm film footage and materials stored in her attic to the Library of Congress. “Gay & Proud” may now be viewed online on the Library’s website with the Rodwell-inspired chants “Gay Power” and “Out of the closets and into the streets!” Mike Mashon, Director the the Library’s film division at the time, wrote that “Lilli’s films are “revelatory…recording a seismic shift of such proportions that we’re still feeling the reverberations today.” Those reverberations began with Craig Rodwell’s leadership as we now know thanks to Van Hoesen’s biography.
It will always be inspiring that there was an intellectual locus for the movement at Rodwell’s bookshop even though there were weird touches there like his display of a Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) multi-volume biography on Christian Science. Despite Rodwell’s effort to win over Eddy’s “Mother church”, Christian Scientists remain dedicated to the proposition of homosexuality as an illness in need of Christian Science “healing”.
A happier anecdote about the bookshop, Van Hoesen tells the story of gay historian and author Jonathan Ned Katz’ first visit to the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in 1970 when he was still closeted. Six years later, Katz was signing copies of “Gay American History” at the shop’s new location on Christopher Street. Katz’ inscription was his longtime motto: “Love and Struggle”. That struggle rages on fighting organized challenges to books in libraries across America. This year the American Library Association reports 2,452 unique titles were challenged by mostly Christian extremists, Christian Nationalist and far-right groups, or simply banned, almost double the number reported in 2022.3 No surprise that most of the top ten attacked titles are queer: “Gender Queer” is number one; followed by “All Boys Aren’t Blue”; “This Book is Gay”; “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”; and “Flamer”. We know every single one of these titles would be in the big window of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, Craig Rodwell out front with his trademark pamphlets, handouts, leaflets and flyers. This is who he was. This is where Gay Liberation began in the Village and must begin again in that spirit.
- Brian T. Blackmore, “Quaker Approaches to Queer: Gay and Lesbian Inclusion in the Liberal Tradition of the Religious Society of Friends”, 2023 ↩︎
- https://lesbianpioneer.org ↩︎
- https://uniteagainstbookbans.org/2024-book-bans/ ↩︎
Charles Francis 