The Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in New York
A History of America's First Gay and Lesbian Bookstore
© Kat Long
Mar 27, 2009
After 41 years in Greenwich Village, the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop closed in March 2009, a victim of the poor economy and, ironically, greater mainstream acceptance of gay and lesbian culture. The bookstore predated the Stonewall rebellion, the 1969 protest against police harassment of LGBT people at the Stonewall bar that sparked the modern gay rights movement.
When activist Craig Rodwell first opened the store in its original location on Mercer Street, New York City was an alternately intimidating and exhilarating place for gay men and lesbians. Gay culture was well established in places like Greenwich Village, Times Square and the Upper West Side. Bars, restaurants, drag clubs, and other businesses catered to gay consumers; “homophile” organizations like the Mattachine Society argued for gay rights based on the model of the African-American civil rights movement; and lesbians took part in the nascent women’s liberation movement.
But public gatherings of gay people were illegal. Gay men could easily be arrested for disorderly conduct or entrapped by police inside bars if they were open about their sexual orientation. Any homosexual person could be fired from his or her job simply for being gay, and consensual sex between adults of the same gender was grounds for arrest and public humiliation. A climate of fear was pervasive--yet gay men and women continued to forge their own communities.
Resource for the Gay Community
The Oscar Wilde Bookshop, named after the witty Irish playwright, emerged in this tumultuous time as a source of information and support for its customers.
Rodwell was active in East Coast Homophile Organizations, the coalition of gay rights groups from New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. He opened the bookstore in 1967 to distribute the burgeoning amount of books, newspapers, underground magazines and other materials dedicated to gay liberation and feminist ideology.
Two years after opening the store and moving it to its permanent location on Christopher Street, Rodwell joined the patrons of the Stonewall Bar in their protests against police abuse, and helped organize the first Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade in 1970 to celebrate the first anniversary of the riots. The Parade evolved into the current annual Gay Pride March.
The bookshop played an important role in the formation and longevity of gay liberation in New York City. It carried literature for LGBT consumers that was difficult, if not impossible, to find in mainstream bookstores. Customers did not need to fear ridicule or homophobia when requesting books. Oscar Wilde also provided a distribution point for the explosion of LGBT magazines and community newspapers, political information and event notices in the 1970s and early 1980s. Perhaps not coincidentally, customers would often find a date while cruising the aisles.
Oscar Wilde Bookshop Closes After Forty Years
In the 1980s, Oscar Wilde provided information about HIV, AIDS and safer sex to the gay community in the throes of the AIDS epidemic. But in the 1990s, several factors conspired to render the bookshop more and more obsolete.
One, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s campaign against “quality of life” offenses unfairly targeted gay bookstores as “adult establishments” and tried to shut them down as a nuisance abatement measure. Two, the Internet negatively impacted sales at brick-and-mortar bookstores--especially independent shops. Three, and most ironically, the increased visibility and civil rights gained by the LGBT community meant that products that were once sold only at gay bookstores were now available at mainstream bookstores. It was no longer necessary for consumers to patronize a gay bookstore for gay books.
After several years of financial instability and a succession of owners, and the death of Craig Rodwell from stomach cancer, Oscar Wilde’s manager announced that the shop would close, ultimately done in by the depressed economy. With its demise, the LGBT community lost a piece of cultural history and a testament to the courage of early gay rights pioneers.
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