EDITORIAL

"Too aggressive! Just asking for trouble!" Comments such as these have been thrown at ONE many times over the years by the timorous. As, for instance, the criticisms back in 1953 over an editorial which vigorously proclaimed, "ONE is not grateful." The Los Angeles Postmaster had just released copies of an issue he had been withholding from the mails. The editorial continued, "ONE thanks no one for this reluctant acceptance. . . Never before has a governmental agency of this size admitted that homosexuals not only have legal rights but might have respectable motives as well. The admission is welcome, but it's tardy and far from enough."

Whether or not this was "too aggressive" it has always been ONE's position that homosexuals are, first of all, citizens, and entitled to exactly the same rights and privileges accorded all citizens. Neither second-class citizenship nor discrimination could be tolerated, we devoutly believed. It was our indignation over police brutalities, the peepholespying, and other such incidents which supplied us with the energies and "recklessness" that kept ONE going in the face of all obstacles.

We have always felt sad, even a little ashamed, for those who “just couldn't afford to be associated with such a group." For this attitude showed how many Americans were forgetting that Constitutional freedom also included the freedom from being pushed around by public officials, and that if one class of citizens is deprived of its rights, all can and eventually would be.

However, in trying to be "the voice of U. S. homosexuals,” ONE Magazine had to steer a course between what only a rare few were discerning as an issue of the highest moral order, and the all-too-evident inability of most homophiles to get out from under the crushing load of guilt imposed upon them by a society which hated queers, laughed at fairies, or gladly beat-up homos, all with the deepest feelings of self-satisfied virtue. This same society could not and would not listen to the proposition that homosexuals were, by and large, no better or no worse than other people. "Preposterous," they snorted, while the homophiles themselves rather pitifully asked, "Do we dare claim this?" or else struck back at ONE for even proposing such a heresy.

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