"IN 1953, WHEN A GROUP OF brave souls in a seedy garment district of Los Angeles launched the nation's first gay magazine, gays and lesbians were thought to be as dangerous and sneaky as communists, lurking everywhere and threatening the nation's moral foundation. Not surprisingly, a year after it started, the Postmaster General dubbed ONE magazine obscene and banned its distribution.

Tame by modern standards, ONE hardly matched the girlie magazines of the time and only delicately talked about sex. (In one short story, a lesbian couple touched each other four times before living happily ever after--which was apparently the story's real crime in the eyes of the government.) But that didn't stop the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals from branding the October 1954 issue of ONE "morally, depraving and debasing."

When ONE decided to fight the L.A. postmaster over its decision, even the ACLU wouldn't represent it, having defended the constitutionality of laws that made homosexual behavior criminal. But ONE's editors did manage to find a lawyer, and much to their surprise, in 1958, the U.S. Supreme Court took up their case, its first ever dealing with homosexuality. Even more shocking, without even hearing arguments in the case, the court ruled in ONE's favor, giving life to the country's gay rights movement more than a decade before the Stonewall Riots."