The magazine was mailed internationally in unmarked brown envelopes. For safety and longevity, ONE’s all-gender board of editors often used pen names, and always depended on other jobs for food and rent. Even so, within a few months of the first ONE, the FBI identified everyone and wrote their employers, calling all staff “deviants” and “security risks” in a middle-school-style attempt to destroy health and security. Luckily, the employers largely ignored the notices, which surprised the FBI so much they shifted public attention elsewhere, for a while. Come 1953, however, the Post Office froze an issue about homosexual marriage for three weeks before officials in Washington, D.C. demanded that distribution proceed. (Maybe someone politically powerful somewhere was missing their magazine.) That issue went out, but its delay caused a dip in finances that meant August and September 1954 were never printed, and subscriptions were extended.
The October 1954 issue of ONE featured six “You Can’t Print It!” rules, in an attempt to chill both the Post Office and readers who said the magazine was too tame. The rules were also codes. Consider rule #4: “Descriptions of experiences which become too explicit, i.e. permissible: ‘John was my friend for a year.’ Not permissible: ‘That night we made mad love.’” Today that rule seems like a wink, and maybe it did then, too. Maybe it also projected some readers into a luminous, disembodied ache. Other rules showed how obscenity along a binary (i.e., either X is obscene, or it isn’t) nearly always risks shame in its wake. A good example can be found in rule #5, which said ONE wouldn’t print “descriptions of homosexuality as a practice which the author encourages in others, or waxes too enthusiastic about.” In an era when pride is consistently messaged as brave, normal, and good, it’s important to remember the limits of words without action, but also how radical ONE was for simply stating the rules it couldn’t break, if it wanted to be in the mail. Plus, as Douglas M. Charles writes in “From Subversion to Obscenity,” in this way ONE began to challenge the F.B.I.’s “strategy for silencing the homophile movement by prosecuting it as a purveyor of smut.” The risqué cover of this ultimately particularly deviant issue? About thirty fall leaves, tumbling on a diagonal in low-resolution.
ONE fought just one of many fights for visibility (which is one step towards acceptance, which is the first step towards health and security), that have happened, are happening, and will happen in this country. These battles can be sexy from an aerial view, but on the ground, they’re often also exhausting and violent. It’s stunning, now, to have a resource that so plainly documents the spiral and compromise of a long fight, down to advertisements from gay European magazines and hints at genuine intersectional support, for example the occasional appearance of Marvin Edwards, a Black accountant who was the lover of ONE co-founder W. Dorr Legg. (Both were connected to Knights of the Clock, a social club open to Black and white cis gay men. Edwards sometimes used the name Merton L. Bird.) However, it’s still easy, now, to discount chunks of ONE magazine as tepid white moderate takes. Does understanding matter when you’re still blocked from housing, work, and medicine? At these times, ONE’s consistent transparency is equally admirable. There are contradictions in its pages, which means they echo life.