August 17, 2010.
Windy City Times has done a great service to its readers by being, as far as I know, the first of the LGBT media to actually try to give a short history of the community/movement attitudes on same-sex marriage.
It has been ignored by most of the general press and the LGBT press that there has been controversy about how to view marriage from the very start of the movement to gain equal rights for homosexuals — in 1950 with early/first Mattachine, the Foundation.
And when members of Mattachine realized that they were only reaching local people, despite the tremendous expansion of the organization from one to dozens of meetings each week, some members (Mattachine founder Dale Jennings and “Bill Lambert” (later W. Dorr Legg) most notably) moved to become public and publish a magazine to educate everyone — homosexual and non-homosexual — on the issues.
Thus, despite the wording in the article, “A History of Marriage Equality,” ONE was the first public publication, not “among” the first. And although the magazine was the reason/impetus, from the start it was realized that if successful, there would be a need for educational efforts and social service efforts and work to push research on the subject, so in each of these fields ONE, Inc., was first.
And, from the start, founders being human, there was tension over which of the parts was the more important, and that led to a separation of the organization in 1965. Windy City Times published a review of the only book/record (Pre-Gay L. A., by C. Todd White) of the history of this organization, which published these articles on marriage and held discussions about it.
So it is misleading for the unknown author of this article to fail to mention that although the ONE Institute/Archives at USC deserves all the credit given in the article, it is only a part of the original ONE Inc. archives/library, which was renamed the Blanche M. Baker Memorial Library in 1965. There is no way an article about ONE Archives can be covered without covering the other part of the collection, that of the Homosexual Information Center, which houses its collection at CSUN.
If the article merely limited itself to the issue of marriage and referred to the ONE magazine articles, perhaps it would not be valid or relevant to point this historic fact out. But you and the people at ONE Archives open the issue when they claim to be founded in 1952 — which they were not. ONE, Inc., was, and they are not and have never been ONE, Inc. They were given the collection that the Dorr Legg faction of ONE had, which was in the care of ISHR, the organization that absorbed ONE, Inc., through formal merger.
And they were, in a sense, taken over by the third part of the collection, that of Jim Kepner who had left ONE and formed his own archives, called the International Gay and Lesbian Archives (IGLA), which after Dorr’s death was left in the care of Walter L. Williams at USC. Williams was on the Board of both Kepner’s organization and ISHR, so he was able to combine ISHR’s archives, that it had inherited from ONE in 1994, with IGLA.
This is why at first IGLA changed its name to ONE/IGLA — and for a short time the ONE/ILGA/HIC Collection, because for a time it reunited all parts of the original ONE Library, which was created and maintained first by Don Slater and later Kepner.
ONE National & Gay Lesbian Archives was not incorporated in 1952, as your article proclaims. And it is not the oldest ongoing LGBT organization in North America. They can say this a million times, but it that will not make it any more true.
ONE, Inc., was, and in about 1965 the directors of ONE, Don Slater and Dorr Legg, helped to created a tax-exempt organization, ISHR — the Institute for the Study of Human Resources — which eventually absorbed ONE, Inc., after Dorr Legg’s death in 1994. ISHR was founded because ONE was not recognized as a non-profit organization, and philanthropist Reed Erickson’s Foundation could only channel funds to a nonprofit. Reed’s Erickson Educational Foundation would give to ISHR, then, and ISHR would in turn support ONE, Inc.
Today, neither ONE nor ISHR exist, except for as possible errors in the state of California records. (ISHR recently closed shop and handed its resources over to The Williams Institute at UCLA.) But those public records show when ONE National & Gay Lesbian Archives was incorporated, and that was not in 1952. It was after the Homosexual Information Center was incorporated, in 1967, and the date should coincide with the legal founding of Kepner’s International Gay & Lesbian Archives, which historically speaking is what that organization calling itself ONE truly is.
It is strange that there is no mention of the editor of ONE magazine, Don Slater, co-founder ONE and main co-founder of the Homosexual Information Center (and ISHR), along with Jim Schneider, who was kicked out as board member of ONE for his futile efforts to keep the organization whole and then became a board member of ONE/IGLA when they needed him to help get the new facility, on 909 West Adams, open. Schneider is probably the main reason ONE Archives was able to actually get the building housing the Archives available for occupation — before he was kicked out again due to political wrangling, as was this writer.
Perhaps, in a sense, both parts of the archives can claim to be “founded” in 1952, as that is when the original collection began — though it should be remembered that the HIC acquired the entire Baker Collection in 1965, when ONE forever divided. Many of these materials are now stored at CSUN, as a part of the Vern L. Bullough Collection on Sex and Gender. It is not the organizations controlling them today that were established then, but the collection — material which all three men — Kepner, Legg, and Slater — should get credit for.
They are not mentioned in the article. Yet it is they who got these articles you reference published.
