History
ONE, Inc. was founded in 1952 by Dorr Legg and Don Slater, in part to produce the nation’s first national homosexual periodical, ONE magazine. In 1953, ONE Inc. became the first gay organization to open a public office.
In 1956, ONE Inc. created the ONE Institute, an academic institute for the study of homosexuality under the then guise of “Homophile Studies.”
In 1957, marking the first time the United States Supreme Court explicitly ruled on homosexuality, ONE Inc. fought to distribute its magazine by mail, and prevailed. The ruling in the case, One, Inc. v. Olesen, not only allowed ONE to distribute its magazine but paved the way for other controversial publications to be sent through the U.S. mail. The case also ensured that emerging gay issues would be covered in the national media.
Also during the 1950s ONE Inc. became an ad hoc community center and began a library. Jim Kepner was involved in adding material to this library.
As the burgeoning Gay Liberation movement took off and became more closely intertwined with the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, ONE Inc., Jim Kepner and a growing group of activists were poised to collect original materials from that critical time period. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, ONE obtained crucial documents chronicling the establishment of the “gay community” and its established and increasingly diverse groups and organizations.
Since the 1980s, the archival collections have grown substantially as gay issues and gay culture became more integrated into the mainstream culture of the United States.
Read more about this topic: ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.”
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“The second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more”
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“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)