Like many New Yorkers, Craig Rodwell had a vision. He imagined a world where gay men would no longer be restricted to the bars and bathhouses in the city as the only places to congregate. A vice president of the Mattachine Society, a gay political group in New York, Rodwell wanted to open a store that would cater to the growing local gay community. “I was trying to get the Society to be out dealing with the people instead of sitting in an office,” Rodwell recalled. “We even looked at a few store-fronts. I wanted the Society to set up a combination bookstore, counseling service, fund-raising headquarters, and office. The main thing was to be out on the street.”

When the Mattachine Society rejected Rodwell’s vision, he resigned and decided to found a bookstore that would serve as a hub for the gay community. Rodwell had no experience in running a bookstore; his only training was in ballet. As he once explained, in a mix of humility and grandiosity, “I am not a bookseller businessman. I am a person who at the age of 13 set out to help change the world and primarily Gay people’s self-images.”

The books on the shelf forced them to come face-to-face with their sexuality. Once opened, however, these books could offer comfort.

Without the Mattachine Society’s support, he needed to finance the bookstore on his own. After working as a bartender on Fire Island for a summer to save money, Rodwell scheduled the grand opening of his bookstore for Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 1967. His mother flew in the day before from Chicago to help him set up the shop at 291 Mercer Street, between Waverly Place and East Eighth Street. He stocked books such as Edward Sagarin’s The Homosexual in America, published under Sagarin’s pseudonym Donald Webster Cory. At the time, the book ranked as the leading sociological manifesto for gay rights. Rodwell also included lesser-known gay titles, like D. H. Lawrence’s novella The Fox, set in the early-twentieth-century English countryside, as well as Oscar Wilde’s plays and Hart Crane’s poetry. Rodwell devoted a section of the store to periodicals that promoted the gay liberation movement, ranging from The New York Hymnal (which he founded to support the Homophile Youth Movement) to The Ladder, and the newsletter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian political organization.

Rodwell’s goal was to help establish a gay literary culture in New York City. At the time, most gay people’s access to collections of gay-themed books and materials was restricted to the smut stores near Forty-Second Street, which carried only pornography. In the mid-twentieth century, one could find books and articles by gay authors in libraries and mainstream bookstores, but they were never assembled together on the same shelf. The Daughters of Bilitis newsletter that Rodwell stacked in his shop had often circulated through clandestine networks; it was difficult to get a copy of a particular issue without knowing someone in those networks. Rodwell’s organization of these and many other scattered books, papers, and pamphlets into a single genre was revolutionary—it was the first time in American history that literature had been organized under the subject heading of “gay culture.”

Every inch of the store celebrated gay people. Even the name that Rodwell chose for the store reflected his vision and political commitment. “I wanted a name that would tell people what the shop is about. So I tried to think of the most prominent person whose name I could use who is most readily identifiable as a homosexual by most people, someone who’s sort of a pseudo-martyr. And Oscar Wilde was the most obvious at the time, so I called it the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop.” The name gave the bookstore credibility, evoked the gay literary tradition, and embodied Rodwell’s mission to promote positive images of homosexuality.