During 1964 and 1965, Craig Rodwell represented the Mattachine Society, Inc. of New York at each of the pioneering homophile-movement picket lines held in Manhattan, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia. By the summer of 1966, he was ready to abandon the Mattachine, pronounced matta-sheen, in order to pursue his dream of organizing a mass movement of self-affirming homosexuals. With this end in mind, on the day after Thanksgiving in 1967, in Greenwich Village, Rodwell opened the first bookstore in the world devoted to serious materials about homosexuality. He called it the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop. Shortly after its first ad, with the heading "Gay Is Good," appeared in the Village Voice, Fred Sargeant became a regular visitor. Upon becoming lovers – Rodwell then 27 years old, Sargeant, 19 – the two decided to live and to work together. Sargeant’s supervision of the bookstore freed Rodwell to develop a mail-order sideline in their apartment on Bleecker Street. At the same time, he started an affiliated group, the Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods, or HYMN. An announcement in the first issue of HYMN’s monthly newsletter, The New York HYMNAL, summarized this group’s movement-building ambitions: "We will make no pretense of speaking to the heterosexual in rying to persuade him to ‘accept’ homosexuals. HYMNAL is solely concerned with what the gay person thinks of himself. The community...TobyMarotta.com CD, TobyMarotta CD. Copyright 2004. Toby Marotta, Ph.D. All rights reserved.