Dear ONE: Love & Longing in Mid-Century Queer America, by Joshua Irving Gershick, illuminates the lives of ordinary Queer Americans as recounted through letters written between 1953 and 1965, to L.A.’s ONE Magazine, the first openly gay & lesbian periodical in the United States.
Each month, ONE Magazine reached several thousand readers, a great many of them isolated and in search of community. In larger cities, the magazine was available on newsstands; in smaller towns, it arrived in mailboxes in a simple unmarked envelope. Readers from all over the globe wrote back to ONE. Looking for love, friendship or understanding, they wrote of loneliness and longing, of joy and fulfillment, and of their daily lives, hidden from history.
The play is adapted from material from the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.
Dear ONE features the voices of more than 40 distinct, mid-century Queer people – real people who tell us first-hand about their lives. The correspondents – whose original letters I've crafted into monologues – come from nearly every walk of life, from every part of the country and abroad.
Popular accounts place the start of the LGBTQ movement in 1969, with the Stonewall Riots in New York City. In truth, the first documented LGBTQ civil rights demonstrations in the U.S. were held in May 1959, at L.A.’s Cooper’s Do-Nuts, in which gender-nonconforming folx and sex workers resisted police harassment; in August 1966, at San Francisco’s Compton’s Cafeteria, when police attempted to roust transgender patrons; and on Feb. 11, 1967, at the Black Cat café in Los Angeles, in response to a police raid. But Dear ONE suggests something else again – that the queer liberation movement – an awareness of community coupled with a galvanizing call to action – began long before, as many of its letters underscore. And ONE Magazine – whose mission was to “help homosexuals to understand themselves”– was there.