Young Men in Photo Booth, PGE Exhibition, Vancouver, British Columbia ca. 1953. Courtesy of the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, Los Angeles, California.

Senator McCarthy on the cover of Time Magazine 1954. Courtesy of Google Images.

Typical newspaper clipping from the time. Courtesy of Google Images.

Don Slater, W. Dorr Legg, and Jim Kepner, core ONE, Incorporated staff, ca. 1957-58. Courtesy of the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, Los Angeles, California.

After a period of euphoria, a belief in American exceptionalism inspired by the victories of World War II began to crumble in the face of the spread of communism.

It was a period of irrational and intense fears of communists and Soviet spies, espionage, government corruption, homosexuals, and the decline of traditional American morals. These fears were gleefully stoked by the press, as well as by partisan political maneuvering, propaganda, and gossip.

As such, throughout the 1950s Congress, the federal government, and the American public participated in merciless and unconstitutional witch hunts; purges that were carried out against those they considered “security risks” to American hegemony and family values. These purges were famously directed at communists, however in reality were intensely focused on gay men and lesbians, and the President, Congress, the federal government, and ultimately countless citizens and business owners nationwide dedicated themselves to rooting out and purging homosexuals from their midst.

Combined, these experiences produced a harrowing period in American history for tens of thousands, as an increasingly paranoid public witnessed the rising power in the Soviet Union, the consolidation of communism in eastern Europe and China, and the early stages of the Cold War; a public whose fears were manifest in a vicious national anti-gay paranoia of homosexuals in the 1950s.

It was this paranoia and fear; the cruel, humiliating, and unjust attacks by police, the government, and a large segment of American society, that inspired a group of early gay activists to establish the first gay magazine in America, called simply ONE, The Homosexual Magazine, which was dedicated to creating a sense of community for gays for the first time, and to dispelling widespread feelings of shame and fear for gay men and lesbians.

Further, ONE magazine was dedicated to establishing an ongoing dialogue, indeed a common language for gay people, and to helping their readers make sense of the increasingly aggressive and often terrifying police state they faced every day.

It is the bizarre paranoia of American society in the 1950s, the senseless government purges, the place ONE magazine holds in the earlstages of the fight for T equalitfor gay men and lesbians, and d the landmark Supreme Court victory ONE magazine won against government-sanctioned censorship that are the subjects of this exhibition.