ous areas and years), Daughters of Bilitis Newsletters, ONE Confidential, Interim, Vector, League for Social Understanding Newsletters, Demophil Newsletters, Janus Society Newsletters, Drum, Dionysus Newsletters, and a number of miscellaneous publications.

The earliest homophile organization reported as being documented lasted only briefly during 1925 in Chicago. The fully documented story of the Homophile Movement begins in Los Angeles in 1947-48 with the little lesbian magazine, Vice Versa, which was privately circulated. It contained very much the same assortment of articles, stories, poetry, news items, book reviews and letters found in most of the homophile press today. In that sense Vice Versa was the "Vineland Map" of the American Homophile Move-

ment.

Even more original perhaps was the unique organization, The Knights of the Clock, a non-profit California corporation founded in Los Angeles about the time that Vice Versa ceased publication. Its originality lay in its avowed intention to enroll men and women alike and their parents and other relatives on an interracial basis.

Its meetings and large social gatherings appear not to have been matched in attendance until this present year by a few social events staged in San Francisco as the joint effort of several homophile organizations in that city. The Knights continued for three or four years but eventually found themselves overshadowed by another Los Angeles development.

IT STARTED IN L. A.

This was the Mattachine Society which, with its Curia, The Mattachine Foundation, came into being in Los Angeles late in 1949 with a membership of five. Between then and 1953 its growth was so meteoric that to date no other homophile organization has

even begun to match it. Records show that there were a total of twenty-seven regional Mattachine centers in California. Within four short years, or slightly less, these had conducted more than five hundred public Discussion Group meetings with a cumulative attendance in excess of ten thousand men and women. In addition there had

been conferences, seminars, picnics, hikes, dances, benefit sales and officially sponsored committee meetings in the hundreds for which attendance records apparently were not kept.

By the spring of 1953 this "homophile explosion" appears to have gotten out of hand. Contention reached such a pitch that the original Mattachine Society (and Foundation) dissolved. The name and assets were then handed over to the present Mattachine Society, Incorporated. In 1957 this body moved its headquarters from Los Angeles to San Francisco, where it is still located. Within a few years Society expansion had extended to Chicago, Boston, Denver, New York, Philadelphia and Washington.

A COUP ATTEMPTED

Not long after the troubles which forced the dissolution of the early Mattachine Society, internal struggles plagued another part of the Homophile Movement in this country, breaking forth within the ranks of ONE, Incorporated. This organization had been formed, also in Los Angeles, in 1952. By midsummer of 1954 its Members felt emboldened to "invade" New York and sent one of the Editors of ONE Magazine there to conduct a meeting of persons who wished to hear about ONE's accomplishments and plans.

Nearly two hundred people were at the meeting called together by ONE. It was later discovered that a number of well-to-do New Yorkers had invited the young Los Angelean to move to New York and edit ONE Magazine

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