"6 Reasons Why Your Little Magazine Won't Last"

6 Years After..

With this issue ONE Magazine enters its sixth year of publication in the realm of the homosexual. Six years is an impressive record for such an undertaking considered here or abroad for even in Europe where we Americans imagine tremendous freedoms exist, there are only two magazines with our subject still continuing today with longer histories than our own Vriendschap and Der Kreis.

Since the time when ONE first began to appear on the newsstands for readers there has been the addition of The Mattachine Review, The Ladder and several foreign periodicals in Europe all frankly patterned after ONE. We might not ordinarily mention the matter except that only the other day the editors received a blast from a long and continuing subscriber, Miss Geraldine Jackson, who will be remembered by early readers for her "As For Me" in our very first issue, January 1953, and also as the author of the poem published in the March issue of the same

year.

ONE's editors have always judged the value of the Magazine by the type of response it arouses. They have often given space to severe critics and even welcomed the acid attentions of Jeff Winters and Donald Farrar. Miss Jackson's criticism, therefore, recalled the most savage attack of all, when, in July of 1953, after the magazine had barely gotten started, A. X. predicted doom for ONE in his article entitled "Six Reasons Why Your Little Magazine Won't Last.” In his introduction A. X. had this to say: "Rational people dislike the spectacle of wasted energy. ONE is just such a spectacle in 3D, color and on the big screen. It has rushed in where even fools walk with caution. It has mistaken brashness with bravery and made a series of blunders which almost surely number its days. Tactless as it may seem to present a dying invalid with embalming fluid, a short listing of these errors may save other would-be publishers as many ulcers as dollars and hours." He then went on to list the six crushing ills as being, 1. no policy, 2. no known writers, 3. limited subject matter, 4. no advertisers, 5. need for statistics, 6. not worth the bother. That many of the faults referred to by A. X. are still with us must be acknowledged. However, others have been corrected and still others have proved to be virtues.

The timeliness of Miss Jackson's criticism coming as it does at the beginning of our second 5 years of homosexual publishing prompted us to publish it for all to see. What she has to say would be infuriating were its invective not crammed with careful thoughts and points well taken. As to whether Miss Jackson's observations foretell the doom that failed to materialize in the wake of A. X.'s prediction, we only ask that she continue to faithfully read the magazine for the answer.

one