These lofty objectives having been established there still remained the awkward fact that they had no money. Not a penny! So each one was delegated to visit the various Mattachine Discussion Groups to enlist support. Someone came forward with a check for ten dollars. That is the way the funds began coming in.

Those familiar with the history of publishing well know that many large enterprises with ample funds have yet failed, and that others have stayed in the red for years. What then of a little publication, quite unable to afford any professional help at all, to be staffed entirely by unpaid volunteers, unable to build up circulation through ordinary channels, and disbarred by most advertisers (whereas advertising is the very lifeblood of most magazines today)? What then?

The group was willing to try almost anything that promised to bring in funds. A benefit party was proposed. Someone offered the use of a huge Renaissance salon, with balcony, vaulted ceiling, great tapestries and eight-feet-high candelabra. On the appointed evening over two hundred guests grew progressively more inebriated and more happy. The party was a tremendous success-socially.

The following day the committee wearily did what it might to restore the villa to its original condition. No doubt the host had firmly resolved never again to weaken under a philanthropic impulse. The final outcome of the evening has been chronicled briefly, but with a rather grim effectiveness in the minutes of the meeting of December 16, 1952, which read, "A report was read of the financial return from the party. Net profit, thirty-five dollars." That was both the first and the last benefit party ONE ever gave!

Small contributions slowly came in. These as large as ten dollars were few. It may well be imagined that when the Mattachine Foundation offered a gift of one hundred dollars, the amount seemed almost princely. But then they wanted to meet with the staff to see with what kind of an outfit they were dealing, and it was foreseen how dangerous such gifts, or even the well-meant support of prominent persons, might be.

So, it was at a meeting many weeks before there was a magazine, or a corporation, that a cardinal principle was affirmed, a principle quite uncompromising in its statement and intent, and one that has not been altered since that day: That ONE could be beholden to no group or person; that its policies must, and would be, entirely of its own making; that even if this meant the loss of both friends and money, the policy would stand. At whatever cost ONE must maintain its intellectual integrity, its freedom from outside entanglements of any sort.

III

Meanwhile, work was slowly and awkwardly moving along: manuscripts; the question of column widths; page sizes; paper stock to be used; general format. At long and tiresome meetings editorial policies were hammered out, and with so little to use for precedent. For at that time the various European homofile publications were just names to the staff, and the only publication in English (a much

one

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