Does understanding matter when you’re still blocked from housing, work, and medicine? At these times, ONE’s consistent transparency is equally admirable. Bird.) However, it’s still easy, now, to discount chunks of ONE magazine as tepid white moderate takes. Edwards sometimes used the name Merton L. (Both were connected to Knights of the Clock, a social club open to Black and white cis gay men. It’s stunning, now, to have a resource that so plainly documents the spiral and compromise of a long fight, down to advertisements from gay European magazines and hints at genuine intersectional support, for example the occasional appearance of Marvin Edwards, a Black accountant who was the lover of ONE co-founder W. These battles can be sexy from an aerial view, but on the ground, they’re often also exhausting and violent. ONE fought just one of many fights for visibility (which is one step towards acceptance, which is the first step towards health and security), that have happened, are happening, and will happen in this country. The cover of Volume 2, Issue 8 of ONE via JSTOR Charles writes in “From Subversion to Obscenity,” in this way ONE began to challenge the F.B.I.’s “strategy for silencing the homophile movement by prosecuting it as a purveyor of smut.” The risqué cover of this ultimately particularly deviant issue? About thirty fall leaves, tumbling on a diagonal in low-resolution. A good example can be found in rule #5, which said ONE wouldn’t print “descriptions of homosexuality as a practice which the author encourages in others, or waxes too enthusiastic about.” In an era when pride is consistently messaged as brave, normal, and good, it’s important to remember the limits of words without action, but also how radical ONE was for simply stating the rules it couldn’t break, if it wanted to be in the mail. Other rules showed how obscenity along a binary (i.e., either X is obscene, or it isn’t) nearly always risks shame in its wake. Maybe it also projected some readers into a luminous, disembodied ache. permissible: ‘John was my friend for a year.’ Not permissible: ‘That night we made mad love.’” Today that rule seems like a wink, and maybe it did then, too. Consider rule #4: “ Descriptions of experiences which become too explicit, i.e. The October 1954 issue of ONE featured six “You Can’t Print It!” rules, in an attempt to chill both the Post Office and readers who said the magazine was too tame. (Maybe someone politically powerful somewhere was missing their magazine.) That issue went out, but its delay caused a dip in finances that meant August and September 1954 were never printed, and subscriptions were extended. Come 1953, however, the Post Office froze an issue about homosexual marriage for three weeks before officials in Washington, D.C. Luckily, the employers largely ignored the notices, which surprised the FBI so much they shifted public attention elsewhere, for a while. Even so, within a few months of the first ONE, the FBI identified everyone and wrote their employers, calling all staff “deviants” and “security risks” in a middle-school-style attempt to destroy health and security. For safety and longevity, ONE’s all-gender board of editors often used pen names, and always depended on other jobs for food and rent. The magazine was mailed internationally in unmarked brown envelopes. It’s a record of endurance, legal and emotional labor, new and inherited trauma, tenderness, and joy.
1960S EBONY GAY PORN ARCHIVE
The digital archive of ONE, the monthly magazine published by ONE, Inc., reflects the contradictions of the time. So much was hopeful, but at times everything felt broken and hopeless too. The following year Dwight Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, which said gays and lesbians were perverts, criminals, mentally ill, and must be blocked from any kind of federal employment. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz hosted the show from the Cocoanut Grove Lounge. for the first time (before that, the awards just went to L.A. That same year, a 7.2 earthquake shook Southern California along the White Wolf Fault, and the Emmys were awarded to shows made across the U.S. groups like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, as well as Swiss magazine Der Kreis. It was founded in Los Angeles in 1952 with money and leadership from U.S.
ONE, Inc., was one of the first gay rights organizations in the United States.