People often ask what was special about that night …
![gay pride background hand gay pride background hand](https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/pride-flag-hand-print-painted-49134618.jpg)
There was no one thing that happened or one person, there was just… a flash of group, of mass anger. There was a very volatile active political feeling, especially among young people … when the night of the Stonewall Riots came along, just everything came together at that one moment.
![gay pride background hand gay pride background hand](https://image.freepik.com/free-vector/lgbt-pride-background-with-couple-flag_23-2147841430.jpg)
Rodwell who is actually verified as being present and a participant at the Stonewall Riots in 1969 said of that fateful night: A number of incidents were happening simultaneously. The resultant publicly led eventually to the end of the SLA rule. Rodwell and the others argued that the rule furthered bribery and corruption of the police. Rodwell had at an earlier date been thrown out of Julius for wearing an “Equality for Homosexuals” button. On April 21, 1966, Craig Rodwell, along with Mattachine President Dick Leitsch engaged in the infamous “Sip-In” at Julius, a bar in Greenwich Village, to protest the (NY) State Liquor Authority rule against the congregation of gays in establishments that served alcohol. On April 18, 1965, Rodwell led the picketing at the United Nations Plaza in New York to protest Cuban detention and placement into work camps of gays, with about 25 other protesters. This is the first recognized gay rights protest in American history. On September 19, 1964, Rodwell, along with Randy Wicker, Jefferson Poland, Renee Cafiero, and several others picketed New York’s Whitehall to protest the military’s practice of excluding gays from serving and, when discovered serving, dishonorably discharging them. Rodwell helped conceive the first yearly gay rights protest, the Annual Reminder picketing of Independence Hall held from 1965–1969 and the Homophile Youth Movement rallies in 1967. Rodwell opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in 1967, and began the group Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods (HYMN) and began to publish its periodical, HYMNAL. It was in New York that he first volunteered for a gay rights organization, The Mattachine Society of New York. Rodwell was born in Chicago, IL in 1940 and a former Christian scientist, He later studied ballet in Boston before finally moving to New York City in 1958. I am talking about Craig Rodwell, the Father of PRIDE. Over the past two decade with much of PRIDE’s focus being on trans and QPOC activists involved in the Stonewall Riots and PRIDE we continually overlook one of the most important gay activists of that era without whom the movement and PRIDE itself would not even exist.