A Different Soup & Salad For Craig Rodwell

This soup and salad combination meal is dedicated to Craig Rodwell: the parent of the modern LGBT rights movement. Allow me to enlighten you with a short article after the recipe. This hearty soup can be stretched along with you budget. Just add more liquid and heat. The Creamy Fruit salad is not too sweet but a wonderful balance to the stew-type soup.

This is a school cafeteria favorite: hamburger soup, a pantry basic, and teamed with a creamy fruit salad. 

 

Soup

Ingredients:

1 lb lean (at least 80%) ground beef

1 chopped onion

1 potato diced peeled

1 bag (12 oz) frozen mixed vegetables

3 cups V8 Juice

1 can (10 1/2 oz) beef broth

1 28-oz can diced tomatoes, undrained

1 pkg onion soup mix

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

½ tsp salt + pepper to taste

2 tbs of Italian seasoning

½ box large elbow Macaroni

Directions:

Chop the onion and peel and dice the potato.

In a dutch oven on stove top, heat 2 tbs of oil and brown the ground beef along with the chopped onion.

Cook about 8 minutes. Drain it well.

Add the diced potato and tomatoes, and 

thawed mixed vegetables.

Sprinkle the soup mix on top with the salt, 

pepper, and seasonings.

Pour in the V8 and beef broth, stir in the 

Worcestershire sauce.

Heat till bubbling, then reduce to a slight 

simmer and cover for 30 minutes.

Pour in the uncooked macaroni, replace the 

lid and continue to cook for a second 30 

minutes.

Taste and adjust any seasonings you prefer.

Serve this with a side of a cool creamy fruit 

salad and maybe a hot from the oven bread.

 CREAMY ORANGE FRUIT SALAD

Ingredients:

• 2 (3.5 oz) pkgs. instant vanilla pudding mix
• 1 cup milk
• ½ cup frozen orange juice concentrate, thawed
• 1 cup vanilla Greek yogurt
• 1 (20 oz) can pineapple tidbits, drained
• 1 (11 oz) can peach chunks, drained
• 1 quart fresh strawberries, hulled, sliced, and sugared.
• 2 bananas, sliced

Directions:

Rinse and hull the strawberries.

Cut into chunks and sprinkle 1 or 2 Tbs of sugar over them. Cover and place in refrigerator for at least 4 hours or best overnight.

This draws out the natural juices and sweetness of the berry! It is a trick my great-grandmother taught me. Believe me she never did anything in cooking that she didn't feel she HAD to!

In a large bowl, combine the pudding mix with the milk and orange juice concentrate.

Mix with an electric mixer for 1-2 minutes.

Stir in the yogurt and then add the pineapple, peaches and strawberries. 

If serving immediately, add the bananas, but if you will be serving the salad later, store in the refrigerator and add the bananas just before serving.

You could possibly substitute seedless grapes for strawberries or even blue berries. Or try melon bites in place of bananas.

What a great new combination for your table.

For our music:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB0HICPWlrk

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB0HICPWlrk

So happy to be serving my Master Indy

socialslave

To satisfy and restore.

To nourish, support and maintain.

To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,

to nurture, assist, and sustain

…..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White

 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTMvia @amazon

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We tend to link great movements with people:

Martin Luther – reformation

Gandi – civil disobedience

Charles Darwin - evolution

Dr. Martin Luther King – African-American Civil rights

This is not in any way to diminish the thousands who also worked towards these goals.

Who do we look to in our LGBT rights movement? My I suggest Craig Rodwell and the parent of the modern LGBT rights movement. Allow me to enlighten you.

Craig Rodwell

Craig was born toward the end of 1940 in Chicago. As soon as he was old enough he was boarded out to daycare where he had to do kitchen and laundry work to pay for his keep. By the time he was six, his mother feared the authorities might take custody from her, so she arraigned for him to go to a school for "problem" boys. Conditions were like something you could read by Charles Dickens. Rodwell was described as both a “rebellious child” and a “sissy”. During his seven year stay there he discovered not only his sexual identity, but also that everybody else did not feel the same way!

He kept this in mind as he went off to high school. By 18 years old, he managed to get out and make his way to New York City. It is hard for us to imagine what it was like for a very young homosexual in 1958. Craig discovered the Mattachine Society.

Craig quickly became a controversial figure in that group. Being young and idealistic, he had not experienced the years of oppression others in the group had seen.

Rodwell did not care if J. Edgar Hoover did have a “file” on him. The fresh energy supplied by the likes of Rodwell spurred them to make bolder demonstrations. The success of the Civil Rights Movement, was itself empowering to the whole network of small clubs that Mattachine had sponsored and nurtured across the country. The framework of organization had been built over time and the political climate was changing. The kindling was drying as it were, and was waiting for the right spark.

In 1962, Rodwell had an affair with Harvey Milk, who went on later to become one of the first openly gay politicians elected to high office. It was Rodwell's first serious relationship. Rodwell's relationship with Milk ended in part due to Milk's conflicted reaction to Rodwell's early activism and his introduction to Milk of strange new ideas that tied homosexuality to politics, ideas that both repelled and attracted the thirty-two-year-old Milk.

April 25, 1965 An estimated 150 people participated in a sit-in when the manager of Philidelphia's Dewey's restaurant refused service to several people he thought looked gay. This is considered one of the first LGBT civil rights demonstrations. On hand was Craig Rodwell, helping and learning.

 By that July He had started “the Annual Reminder picketing of Independence Hall”.

He was also organizing “Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods rallies”.

Dick Leitsch had moved to New York City in 1959. He eventually agreed to run for president of the Mattachine Society as a way to spend more time with Craig Rodwell. The two would began a great love affair.

At the time the New York State liquor Authority had a rule making it illegal to serve a known homosexual or native American Indian an alcoholic beverage.

On April 21, 1966, Mattachine members staged a "sip-in" at a bar named the Julius. Dick Leitsch, president, Craig Rodwell the society's vice president, and fellow activist John Timmons planned to identifying themselves as homosexuals before ordering a drink.

The Mattachines then challenged the liquor rule in court and the courts ruled that gays had a right to peacefully assemble, which undercut the previous Authority's contention that the mere presence of gay person automatically was grounds for charges of operating a "disorderly" premise.

The National Park Service Register of Historic Places for Julius' Bar states: "Scholars of gay history consider the sip-in at Julius’ as a key event leading to the growth of legitimate gay bars and the development of the bar as the central social space for urban gay men and lesbians."

Craig Rodwell tried to get the society to start a book store where people could meet and organize. Finally when his efforts failed, he started one himself. By 1967 the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop opened. It was the first “homophile” book store in the country.

When Rodwell opened his store, Harvey Milk dropped by frequently, and after moving to San Francisco Milk expressed his intention of opening a similar store "as a way of getting involved in community work." Milk eventually opened a camera store that also functioned as a community center, much like Rodwell's bookshop had as a community gathering place.

Then in 1969, the right people with the right skills were in the right place and knew what to do when that spark happened.

The explosion of anger on the night of June 27th-28th in retaliation to the Stonewall Inn being raided could have been a flash in the pan. However that night, sitting on the steps watching this explosion happen was: Craig and a few of his friends. He recognized immediately the momentum and importance of the protests. Rodwell phoned the press and ran home to grab his camera and bull horn. This brought the only coverage that was allowed, even that was quickly clamped down on. He cheered the rioters on and gave them direction that kept the warfare going for six days.

Rodwell recalled: "A number of incidents were happening simultaneously. 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. People often ask what was special about that night ... There was no one thing special about it. It was just everything coming together, one of those moments in history that if you were there, you knew, this is it, this is what we've been waiting for."

Rodwell was quick to follow-up the very next morning with fliers calling for a specific list of demands, including ridding the bars of the mafia influence and ending the raids and harassment by the police!

His skills went to work day and night at the book store and by November his group proposed:

"That the Annual Reminder, in order to be more relevant, reach a greater number of people, and encompass the ideas and ideals of the larger struggle in which we are engaged-that of our fundamental human rights-be moved both in time and location.

We propose that a demonstration be held annually on the last Saturday in June in New York City to commemorate the 1969 spontaneous demonstrations on Christopher Street and this demonstration be called CHRISTOPHER STREET LIBERATION DAY. No dress or age regulations shall be made for this demonstration.

We also propose that we contact Homophile organizations throughout the country and suggest that they hold parallel demonstrations on that day. We propose a nationwide show of support.”

The first Pride March was held on Sunday, June 28th 1970. Officially titled the Christopher Street Liberation Day after the street on which Stonewall and other gay bars were located, hundreds of people marched for liberation. This time not only were gays picketing, but heterosexual women and their children were there marching alongside their allies. There were public displays of ‘homosexual affection’, hand holding, and a general feeling of relentless activism. In other words people were tired of being oppressed and it was possible because of a man named Craig Rodwell who realized that his “Annual Reminder” march could segue into something bigger and better: What we know today as Pride!

By 1973 Rodwell had met and became lovers with a young Dr. of Astronomy named Frank Kameny. Dr. Kameny had fought his homosexual discharge from the government all the way to the Supreme Court. Dr. Kameny along with Barbara Gittings were pivotal in getting the American Psychiatric Association to no longer classify homosexuality as a disease.

Rodwell died on June 18, 1993 of stomach cancer

As this years Pride season winds down Lets take a moment to reflect on just how much this one man had a part of our rights movement. Not quite 50 years since a time when you could be beaten to death for looking the wrong way in the restroom. When a frustrated police officer could hunt you down like an animal.

These conditions did not just disappear, they were not changed overnight. It took the hard and disciplined work by heroes like Craig Rodwell and hundreds like him for us to reach the path we are on now. So lets remember them and their protests as we march this month.