ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives - History

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.