About the time the playwright Lorraine Hansberry returned home to New York from Provincetown in the summer of 1957, a package arrived wrapped in plain brown paper. She had been waiting for it. Inside were copies of One: The Homosexual Magazine. One was sold mainly by subscription, because not many newsagents would have dared sell it, and even fewer people would have dared buy it. It was considered “obscene material” by the US Post Office; hence the nondescript wrapping.

One was produced every month in a small loft office in Los Angeles by several men who had been members of the Mattachine