Dorr Legg at a drafting table at Oregon State College (OSC), where he worked between 1936-1942. The article also provides additional details about Legg’s life. A 2010 article from the Gay & Lesbian Review set out to uncover the history of the little-known Knights of the Clock, of which Legg was an early member. According to Legg in his original MGH interview, his then lover’s name was Marvin Edwards. Please note that the bio misidentifies Legg’s lover at the time Legg moved to Los Angeles as “Merton Bird,” who was the founder of an early gay organization called the Knights of the Clock. Credit: ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.įor a biographical sketch of Dorr Legg from the GLBTQ Archives, go here. Dorr Legg (left) standing next to Bailey Whitaker and others, undated. The quote reads, “A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.” Dorr Legg credited Guy Rousseau, an African American school teacher whose real name was Bailey Whitaker, with finding the quote and suggesting the name. ONE got its name from a quote from the 19th century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle. It features the voices of Jim Kepner and Edythe Eyde, the subject of this season one MGH episode. In 2010 NPR’s Tell Me More did a short piece on the archives, which you can listen to here. To explore the ONE Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, go here. The website has other useful LGBTQ educational links as well. Please explore the resources that follow below, which will help you decide whose memory is closest to the historical record (but please bear in mind that the historical record offers differing versions of ONE’s history).įor a historical overview of ONE magazine, ONE, Inc., and the ONE Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries go here. So in this episode of Making Gay History you get to hear history as it happened, as it was remembered, and perhaps as Dorr, Martin, and Jim wished for it to be remembered. And early on I decided that I’d let the people whose stories I recorded speak for themselves. Who to believe? This wasn’t the first time I’d interviewed people for my oral history book whose memories differed in ways big and small. Credit: ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Key members of ONE Inc., (from left to right) Don Slater, Dorr Legg, and Jim Kepner, Los Angeles, 1957 or 1958. Supreme Court case-their equally passionate recollections of the magazine and its founding didn’t line up. They couldn’t have been more different: Dorr Legg, the patrician landscape architect from Michigan Martin Block, the self-described Jewish anarchist New Yorker and Jim Kepner, the one-time communist who was found as an infant under an oleander bush in Galveston, Texas, wrapped in newspaper.Īnd while all three were passionate about their pioneering work on ONE magazine-a monthly publication that attracted the attention of the FBI and was at the heart of a landmark U.S. Episode Notesįrom Eric Marcus : Over the course of one week in August 1989, I interviewed three of the men who played key roles in the publication of ONE magazine, the first national pro-gay magazine, which first hit the newsstands in January 1953. Credit: Courtesy ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.