Early gay rights activist dead of stomach cancer in new york

NEW YORK (JUNE 19) UPI - Craig Rodwell, a pioneer of the modern gay
liberation movement and the original owner of the country's first gay
bookstore, has died, his successor at the Oscar Wi de Memorial Bookshop
said Saturday.  He was 52.

The lifelong gay activist died Friday morning after fighting stomach cancer
since May 1992, said William Offenbaker, who purchased the bookshop last
March when Rodwell learned his illness was terminal.

Rodwell was born in Chicago Oct.  31, 1940, and moved to Greenwich Village
in the late 1950s.  He quickly became one of the most radical and
controversial figures in an early gay rights group, the New York Mattachine
Society.

He was jailed after staging his own picket against his local draft board
and for resisting police sweeps at a popular gay cruising area at Jacob
Riis Park beach in Queens, N.Y.

Rodwell formed the Mattachine Young Adults in 1964 to promote his belief
that gay visibility was the key to ending oppresssion, and in 1965 helped
organize the East Coast Homophile Organizations' protest of the exclusion
of gays from federal employm nt and the military.


He staged a "sip-in" in 1966, to challenge the state Liquor Authority's
refusal to license bars that served liquor to gay men and lesbians, a ban
that allowed police to raid gay bars and led to days of rioting in 1969,
when gays resisted a police crackdown at the Stonewall Inn.

Maxine Wolfe of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn said Rodwell
rallied the crowd with shouts of "Gay Power," and the next year helped
organize the first gay pride march.

Even before Stonewall, on Nov.  27, 1967, he opened the Oscar Wilde
Memorial Bookshop, named for the 19th century Irish playwright jailed for
being gay.

Rodwell is survived by his mother, Marion Kastman, and his brother, Jack
Rodwell.  He was to be cremated with no funeral service but plans were
pending for a memorial service in July, Offenbaker said.

Donations in Rodwell's memory were to be sent to the Hetrick Martin
Institute for Lesbian and Gay Youth.