ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives

Mission

ONE Archives' mission statement reads as follows: “It is the mission of ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries to collect, preserve, and make accessible LGBTQ historical materials while promoting new scholarship on and public awareness of queer histories."

History

ONE, Inc. was founded in 1952 to publish the nation’s first wide-circulated, national homosexual periodical, ONE Magazine. In 1953, ONE Inc. became the first gay organization to open a public office in Downtown Los Angeles. The original founders include Martin Block, Tony Sanchez (aka Tony Reyes), and Dale Jennings. The corporation's original core members included Martin Block, Tony Reyes, Dale Jennings, Guy Rousseau, Merton Bird, Don Slater, William Lambert (aka W. Dorr Legg), Eve Elloree (aka Joan Corbin), and Ann Carll Reid (aka Irma "Corky" Wolf).

In 1955, ONE Inc. held the ONE Midwinter Institute, the first in a series of conferences to bring together experts and community members to talk about gay and lesbian topics.

In 1956, ONE Inc. created the ONE Institute, an academic institute for the study of homosexuality under the name 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 also paved the way for other controversial publications to be sent through the U.S. mail.

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 movements for civil rights 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.

In October 2012 ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives celebrated the 60th anniversary of its founding and the printing of ONE Magazine.

Organizational timeline

The institutional history of ONE reveals a set of complex, overlapping and groundbreaking activities that provided a wide variety of pioneering services to LGBT Americans:

Collections

The collections at ONE Archives are primarily national in scope, with special focus on LGBT histories in the Los Angeles region. The archives also include a number of international materials, such as archival records and rare publications.

Archival collections

ONE houses over 600 archival collections of personal papers from activists, artists and ordinary citizens, as well as records from LGBTQ political, social, educational and cultural organizations. The collections include a wide array of materials such as manuscripts, photographs, letters, graphics, and other historically significant materials.

Important archival collections of note include:

Books and periodicals

ONE’s main library collection comprises over 30,000 volumes of books and monographs; as well as over 8,000 titles of periodicals, such as magazines, newspapers and newsletters. From issues of the earliest American LGBT publications to the most recent LGBT titles, the collection includes many rare and unusual titles, some of which may be the only copies in existence. The library also includes foreign publications in more than 25 different languages.

Audiovisual

ONE’s collection of audiovisual materials includes over 4,000 films, 14,000 videos (including 10 years of recorded lectures from ONE, Inc.), and 3,000 audio recordings. Many of ONE’s films and videos are stored and preserved in conjunction with the Outfest Legacy Project at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

Art and photography

ONE Archives’ art collection include over 4,000 paintings, drawings, works on paper, photographs, and sculptural objects, the majority of which date from the 1940s to the present.

Posters, textiles, and objects

ONE Archives also collects and houses over 3,500 posters; textiles, such as T-shirts, banners and flags; and memorabilia such as buttons, matchbooks, dolls and other three-dimensional objects.

ONE Archives Gallery & Museum, West Hollywood

Since 2008, ONE Archives has operated an exhibition space in West Hollywood, California dedicated to presenting temporary exhibitions on LGBT art and history. The gallery is located in a city owned building that also houses the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives.

In 2011, ONE Archives participated in the region-wide Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980 initiative with the exhibition Cruising the Archive: Queer Art & Culture in Los Angeles, 1945-1980 which was presented at the ONE Gallery in West Hollywood, as well as at ONE Archives' main location on West Adams Boulevard and in the Treasure Room at the Doheny Memorial Library at the University of Southern California Libraries. The exhibition included works by Steven F. Arnold, Don Bachardy, Claire Falkenstein, Anthony Friedkin, Rudi Gernreich, Sister Corita Kent, and Kate Millett, among many other less known or anonymous artists. The only exhibition dedicated to queer content within the PST initiative, this exhibition marked the most comprehensive exhibition of materials from the collections at ONE Archives to date and was accompanied by a scholarly catalogue. The publication included contributions by Ann Cvetkovich, Vaginal Davis, Jennifer Doyle, Jack Halberstam, Catherine Lord, Richard Meyer, Ulrike Müller, and Dean Spade.

The ONE Gallery has presented solo exhibitions of artwork by Steven F. Arnold and Joey Terrill, exhibitions of historical materials from the collections at ONE, and highlights from the collections of the Tom of Finland Foundation and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics.