I recently read The Stonewall Reader1, an anthology of primary sources from the decades before, during, and after the Stonewall Riots in 1969, drawn mostly from the New York Public Library Archives and published by Penguin Books in 2019 (fifty years later). Several reflections emerged from my reading, especially about how these primary sources might relates to my own little corner of the LGBTQ+ world: the Side B community (that is, Christian sexual and gender minorities who submit to what is often called a “traditional sexual ethic,” and who therefore pursue either opposite-sex marriage or lifelong celibacy).
…
Craig Rodwell, from The Gay Crusaders
The gay activist Craig Rodwell was a member of the New York chapter of the Mattachine Society, and also founded his own organization, Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods (HYMN). He is perhaps best known for helping to organize Christopher Street Liberation Day 1970 (the first commemoration of the Stonewall Riots) and for launching the first LGBTQ+ bookstore: the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, which opened on Thanksgiving Day in 1967.
The selection featuring Rodwell’s story in The Stonewall Reader is an excerpt from from The Gay Crusaders by Kay Tobin Lahusen and Randy Wicker,2 which explores the stories of key players in the homophile movement. In the excerpt, Rodwell speaks at length on the philosophy guiding his bookstore and the content of the books he chose to sell there. Perhaps surprisingly, Rodwell early on made the decision to not sell pornography.
“I didn’t even want to carry that book [Richard Amory’s Song of the Loon] because it had ‘dirty words’ in it, I thought then. Because up until then, people thought of gay book shops as porno book shops. I wanted to have literature that presented homosexuality in a good light.”3
While Rodwell admits eventually decided to sell erotica “in order to survive economically” (although even then, he was very particular), he describes his vision for his bookstore as one which does not exploit its LGBTQ+ customers:
“My general policy was to have a shop where gay people didn’t feel they were being exploited either sexually or economically. People call me a puritan, and in a sense I have to agree with them. I don’t mean I’m a puritan sexually—far from it. But the reason I’m against most of the highly sexual magazines, for example, is not the content particularly—although it’s done rather leeringly—but the whole sexploitation angle. A ten-dollar price on something that makes sex look dirty and furtive.4
Rodwell’s vision did not stop with a bookstore; he also envisioned a gay bar that did not exploit its customers the way he saw most gay bars do (it is easy to see the Mafia-run Stonewall Inn and other bars like it in the background here). The characteristics Rodwell identified as a part of the ideal gay club would make them more like gathering spots for a real community, rather than a business merely concerned with making money off LGBTQ+ people:
Craig sees a similar need for a gay bar that will be as different from the usual gay bar as his bookshop is from the traditional gay bookshop, “a bar which says in its atmosphere, its management, its ambiance—we’re glad to have you, we’re one of you, we’re with you.” Such a bar, if successful, would be pressured by the syndicate, Craig feels, “but if it was up-front and closely connected with the gay movement, it could get by.” Craig is adamant in his view that gay people “should have indignation about the way they are exploited financially and health-wise” by gay bars.5
Exploitation is still familiar to LGBTQ+ folks today: a token LGBTQ+ character (or one merely coded as LGBTQ+, but never made explicit) that gets little screen time in a movie or television show, but whose appearance is advertised as groundbreaking inclusion, widespread normalization of drug and alcohol abuse in LGBTQ+ communities, slapping rainbows on cheaply made products (and corporate logos, Pride booths and floats, etc.) to signal toleration and acceptance with minimal risk or investment, only to step it back when controversy threatens to negatively affect sales.
And even the most conservative of Christians could follow Rodwell in his condemnation of the exploitation inherent in pornography and other “highly sexual” media, even if they would likely go further than he does: this media ends up harming both those who consume it and those who produce it.
But there is a kind of exploitation I see in my own little corner of the LGBTQ+ Christian world (the Side B community) that is perhaps even more nefarious than that mentioned by Rodwell, because it masquerades as holiness.
It is no surprise that Side B folks tend to find ourselves in more conservative religious environments, even if they are oftentimes uncomfortable; many of us long to be supported in our sexual ethics by our faith communities, and not all of us would feel at home in spaces that espouse a more progressive vision of sexuality. When Side B people are not pushed to the margins in these conservative faith communities (as we often find out, even having the same sexual ethics may not be enough; some people will not stop until we go back into the closet), we are sometimes platformed as examples of costly obedience. Of course, this is encouraging and flattering, and part of that is fine! But in my experience, it can easily morph into something uglier.
Side B folks can become “inspiration porn,” or be simultaneously lauded and subtly dismissed as exceptional saints rather than ordinary followers of Jesus spurring our fellow siblings in Christ to their own exemplary holiness. I am so inspired by your bravery; you have so much faith. I can’t imagine living the way you do. I think of the quote attributed to Dorothy Day (whose life has long been an immense encouragement to me): “Don’t call me a saint; I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” Robert Ellsberg, editor of Dorothy Day’s journals and collected letters recalled Day something similar to him at the kitchen table in St. Joseph’s Catholic Worker house after Time magazine described Day as a “living saint”: “When they call you a saint, it means basically that you are not to be taken seriously.” I want to be taken just as seriously—no more, no less—as a disciple of Jesus as my non-LGBTQ+ siblings in Christ.
Side B folks can also be used as weapons against other LGBTQ+ Christians who are simply trying to follow Jesus the best way they know how. Look at this LGBTQ+ person who checks off this and that box (speaking and acting the “right” way, whatever that means in any particular community); they are not like those other LGBTQ+ folks who do not measure up. I don’t appreciate being used in this way, made to function as another gear in the church machine that consistently makes LGBTQ+ feel respectability is the threshold through which they must pass in order to encounter Christ. On this point, I find it helpful to frequently remind myself of an indisputable historical fact: my ability to live openly as a gay man, in both my church and broader society, was made possible by LGBTQ+ folks who disagree with me about sexual ethics, many of whom did not share my faith, either. Frankly, I owe them.
The first step to defying this kind of exploitation is noticing when it happens; the second is to (lovingly, but prophetically) call it out when it does. After these initial steps comes the much more difficult work of structuring our lives and our faith communities so that this kind of exploitation ceases. And perhaps counter-intuitively for many, we might look to Craig Rodwell—and his defiant Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop—for inspiration.
Jason Baumann, ed., The Stonewall Reader: Edited by the New York Public Library (New York: Penguin Classics, 2019).
Kay Tobin Lahusen and Randy Wicker, The Gay Crusaders (Paperback Library, 1971).
The Stonewall Reader, p. 90
The Stonewall Reader, p. 90
The Stonewall Reader, p. 91