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Under Rodwell’s guidance, they made regular trips to New York, pushing shopping carts up the aisles of wholesale bookstores like Bookazine in the West Village, paying cash for books by Radclyffe Hall, Walt Whitman, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes.
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#12 st gay bar philadelphia pa windows#
At a time when gay bars were masked by painted over windows and hidden in side streets, Giovanni’s Room was was a clearly visible gay street presence in the city. When the bookstore opened its doors on the dilapidated, abandoned strip that was South Street in the early 70s, it was one of the few storefronts on the block that was not boarded up-but rent was an affordable $85 a month. Boyle, Wilson Weinberg and Sherbo were fearless young radicals, with no business plan or experience, but with plenty of enthusiasm and optimism. The three men were inspired by Craig Rodwell‘s Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore in New York, the first gay bookstore in the country. They named the business after James Baldwin’s 1956 novel-joking that Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness” sounded a bit bleak and foreboding. It was a time when gay liberation was new and the air was electric with possibility. Its three original founders, Bernie Boyle, (now deceased), Tom Wilson Weinberg and Dan Sherbo, left, had been members of the Gay Activists Alliance and worked on The Gay Alternative, a gay literary magazine published in Philadelphia. The first store, above, opened at 232 South Street on August 1, 1973.
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Giovanni’s Room has always been more than just a bookstore, it’s been a meeting place, a community center when there was no community center, a safe haven for those just coming out, and a resource for finding information on all things LGBT. At the time, it was the oldest existing LGBT bookstore in the country a real treasure for Philadelphia’s LGBT community. What was to be a celebratory entry here turned into a memorial when the bookstore closed in May of 2014.īEGINNINGS: BOYLE, WILSON WEINBERG AND SHERBO Bacardi and the Paris based Pernod Ricard are entangled in a decade-long fight over who owns the rights to the brand in the United States.In 2013, Giovanni’s Room Bookstore, at 12th and Pine Streets, turned forty. In 1993, the Cuban government established a joint venture with France's Pernod Ricard to exploit the brand, however in 1997 Bacardi bought the rights to the brand name from the Arechabala family, and registered the name in the US.
#12 st gay bar philadelphia pa registration#
In 1976, after the Arechabala family's Havana Club trademark registration expired, Cubaexport registered the brand in the US through a loophole in the trade embargo.
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Originally the Havana Club rum was created in Cuba by the Arechabala family in 1935, and was exported to the US and other countries until the 1960s, when Fidel Castro's government confiscated the brand and other assets without compensation. MIAMI BEACH, UNITED STATES: TO GO WITH AFP STORY-AFPLIFESTYLE-US-CUBA BY PATRICK MOSER- A bartender pours from a Havana Club rum bottle as he prepares a mojito cocktail at a local jazz club in Miami Beach,Florida 17 August 2006.