Magazine cover courtesy of ONE Archives Foundation
In honor of LGBTQ History Month, we’re taking a deep dive look-back at the first gay publication in America—ONE magazine. Launched in Los Angeles in 1953, ONE was published by One, Inc., which grew from The Mattachine Society, the seminal gay-rights group founded by Harry Hay. Its editorial founders were Martin Block, Don Slater, and Dale Jennings. Produced on a shoestring and sold for 25 cents, ONE began to change the course of history with an unapologetic exploration of homosexuality and the largely unexamined societal taboo against it.
This is the ninth in our series of ONE magazine cover stories.
Volume 16, Issue 1: Future Styles of Life & Love
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Read Gus Dyer’s long think piece describing where he imagined society was headed in 1972 and you might wonder if the writer had a crystal ball. In the early days of the birth control pill and with headlines touting a population explosion, Dyer made some astute predictions:
- Stay-at-home wives were going out of style. Housewifery bored them, and two incomes were better than one.
- Not everyone would continue to feel compelled to have children. Those who did would see them as a joy instead of a burden.
- Easy birth control would succeed in separating sex, companionship, and procreation from each other under the umbrella of marriage.
And that’s just the first page of this prescient essay. Dyer goes on to predict the emergence of serial monogamy, non-monogamy, and more communal styles of child-rearing. He doesn’t get everything right. For instance, he sees the fear of venereal disease as lessening in the coming decades, but to be fair, how could he have possibly predicted HIV? And while his vision of everyone freely buying and selling sex on the open market hasn’t transpired in exactly those terms, you could say that dating apps have ushered in a “market” just as free-flowing but based on bartering.
Perhaps most alluringly, Dyer sees how all this plays out in the field of civil rights and the Supreme Court:
The emergence of a new concept of constitutional democracy – with emphasis on interpretations which implement the protection of minority interests – is almost certain to liberalize marriage and family arrangements. This trend is possibly being accentuated – slowly, of course – through biological evolution which, as among rabbits and dogs, appears to be producing a wider range of variations, each with its own special interests. To the extent that the Supreme Court recognizes and appreciates this diversity of interests, its interpretations will be more liberal.
If he could see us now, we think he’d be satisfied at the progress we’ve made.
Thanks to ONE Archives Foundation for making this series possible. ONE Archives Foundation provides access to original source material at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries—the largest such collection in the world.
Kangol2
Wow, he was very prescient! And, although it turns out that HIV was initially flagged well before the 1980s pandemic occurred, there was no way most gay and bi men, let alone anyone else, could have imagined the horrors to come, though it should be noted that Larry Kramer, in his novel F*ggots (real title doesn’t have the asterisk), does seem to bemoan the libertine attitude that had taken hold among many gay men of his milieu. The reality, though, was that it wasn’t just gay men, but that US and other Western societies had grown more socially liberated in the 1970s, after the social and political revolutions of the late 1950s and 1960s.
jsmu
Yo, Queerty? Why is there NO LINK TO THE ARTICLE??????
DeaconMac
“…the first gay publication in America…”? Not even close.
In 1947 and 1948, “Vice Versa: America’s Gayest Magazine” was published by “Lisa Ben” (an obvious pseudonym). It was aimed primarily at gay women (which is what most lesbians called themselves at that time).
And before that, in 1937, “Bachelor” published 9 issues. While it never used the word “gay” in its pages, the focus of the magazine was quite obvious: good looking men in the theater and arts, unmarried men, gay men.
Bulovaboy
I predicted all this when I was 8, but who listens to children. Please.