ONE, Inc.
ONE, Inc. was an early gay rights organisation in the USA. It emerged from amicable split from The Mattachine Society in October 1952, and included founders of The Knights of the Clock, a support group for inter-racial gay couples that had begun in Los Angeles in 1950. ONE's founders were Merton Bird, W. Dorr Legg, Dale Jennings, and Martin Block - the latter two also having been Mattachine founders. In January 1953 ONE, Inc. published ONE Magazine, the first U.S. pro-gay publication, and sold it openly on the streets of Los Angeles. In October 1954 the U.S. Postal Service delared the magazine 'obscene'. ONE sued, and finally won in 1958. The magazine continued until 1967. ONE also published ONE Institute Quarterly (now the Journal of Homosexuality). It began to run symposiums, and contributed greatly to scholarship on the subject of same-sex love (then called 'homophile studies'). ONE admitted women, and ONE and Mattachine provided vital help to the Daughters of Bilitis in the launching of their newsletter The Ladder: a lesbian review in 1956. The Daughters of Bilitis was the counterpart lesbian organisation to the Mattachine Society, and the organisations worked together on some campaigns and ran lecture-series. Bilitis came under vicious attack in the early 1970s for 'siding' with Mattachine and ONE, rather than with the new seperatist feminists.
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