THE OSCAR WILDE Memorial Bookshop, founded in the pre-Stonewall year of 1967 and a fixture in New York’s Greenwich Village for 42 years, closed its doors for good on March 29, 2009. It was by most accounts the first bookstore in the United States to carry serious (non-pornographic) gay literature. Having survived the Stonewall Riots and the disco era, the AIDS epidemic and the GLBT publishing boom, in recent years the store’s survival had been threatened a number of times.
The Oscar Wilde was founded by Chicago native Craig Rodwell (1940–1993), a precociously gay youth and activist. Rodwell had his first same-sex relationships while at a Christian Science boarding school and actively sought out same-sex relations while in high school.
The Oscar Wilde’s first home was at 291 Mercer Street (now a tailoring establishment called Village Alterations), where its earliest decorations included a “Gay is Good” sticker and a sign that read “A Bookshop for the Homophile Movement.” In the words of Toby Marotta, who wrote an entry about Rodwell in the Encyclopedia of LGBT History in America, “its shelves bore three copies apiece of the 25 most positive books about homosexual behavior he could find. A countertop display card offered gay political buttons for sale.” A few months after opening, Rodwell started a bookshop-based group, Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods (HYMN), which had its own newsletter called The New York Hymnal and produced leaflets calling for an end to Mafia and police presence in gay bars.
Rodwell helped organize a June 1970 march to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, from which all subsequent marches developed. In 1973, he moved the store to 15 Christopher Street, a few doors from the Stonewall Inn. The New York Public Library is the home of the Craig Rodwell Papers, detailing his life’s work. In an interview in Gaytoday.com, editor Michael Denneny is quoted as saying that Rodwell had “a kind of cultural genius, so that his idea to celebrate the Stonewall Riots annually nailed it to the hide of history.”
After Rodwell’s death from cancer in 1993, the store passed through the hands of Bill Offenbaker, who bought the shop in 1993; Larry Lingle, who purchased it in 1996; Deacon Maccubbin, who saved it at the last minute in 2003; and, in 2006, Kim Brinster, who had managed the operation since 1996. Even with below-market rent, the store couldn’t bring in enough business to survive. The current economic situation, the rise of electronic books and online sales, and big chain bookstores carrying GLBT literature all played a part in forcing the store’s closure.
