"A social movement has to have a voice beyond its own members," he argued, and "before this time, homosexuals just spoke to themselves. They just talked—whispered, really—to each other. Talking to each other in little groups can't create a social movement, a mass movement. For the first time, ONE gave a voice to 'the love that dare not speak its name.' Nobody else had ever done that. The magazine was the beginning of the movement."

If this assessment of ONE's role is on target, its founders—like Don Slater-- couldn't have chosen a more appropriate motto, one taken from the Scottish essayist, Thomas Carlyle: "A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men ONE."

It was a motto on which Don Slater, ONE's longtime editor built his life's work. He was a sexual integrationist (actually quite different from current day assimilationists) who saw no reasons to make pointed distinctions between same-sex and opposite-sex lovers. "It is as individual human beings—as individuals," he taught, "that we win battles for free expression and free assembly."

In another definitive history, Straight News, a chronicle of mainstream media's treatments of gay issues, Slater is quoted as saying that he and other founders of ONE "certainly didn't want to institutionalize homosexuality, a la heterosexuality, or make ourselves into a special class or culture group."

Ken Gaul, a heterosexual reporter for GAY, America's first gay weekly newspaper, asked Slater (May 11, 1970) if he saw room in his worldview for every different kind of individual, but as individuals, not as members of a class. "Is there room in your movement for all types of homosexuals, from the very straight to the drag queen?" asked Gaul.

"Sure, " replied Slater, "let them all come. I like to treat everybody as an individual, from drag queen to hustler."

This response intrigued Ken Gaul, who was also the managing editor of SCREW. He asked Slater's opinion on hustlers.

"I'm not against hustlers," replied the pioneering journalist/activist, "If a man wants to pay that's his business…Frankly I'm domesticated. I don't pay. I don't like the idea of going to bed with somebody for money, but some people, that's all they have."

This year, on February 21, Badpuppy's GayToday reported the Valentines Day death of Don Slater, aged 73, calling him "a pioneering journalist and scholar who, "in the 1950s dawn of gay American activism, established an undeniable place for himself."

Slater's extraordinary contributions to gay liberation were made in the shadow of McCarthyism, a dark period in American history that erupted into an anti-gay witch-hunt conducted at the highest levels of the U.S. government. It had been only three months after ONE's founding that the FBI's investigators attempted to establish links between what the Bureau called gay "obscenity" and imagined Communist infiltration.

Jim Kepner, another pioneer, told press historian Streitmatter that the FBI's investigation was silly and amusing by today's lights. "Very very few of the people writing for the publications at that time could even be described as politically liberal, much less leftist," he explained.

Streitmatter writes: "In early 1954, U.S. Senator Alexander Wiley, a Republican from Wisconsin, became the first member of Congress—many would follow him in future decades—to attack the lesbian and gay press. Wiley, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (ed. note: shades of Jesse Helms), fired off a letter to Postmaster General Author Summerfield, saying, "The purpose of my letter is to convey the most vigorous protest against the use of the United States mails (ed. note: shades of former Republican Congressman Bob Dornan) to transmit a so-called 'magazine' devoted to the advancement of sexual perversion."

Later in the year postal officials confiscated the October 1954 issue of ONE, calling the proper little magazine "obscene, lewd, lascivious and filthy." A copy of ONE was sent to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's long-time companion Clyde Tolson who scrawled a comment at the bottom of ONE's purpose-statement page, a comment intended for Hoover, saying, "I think we should take this crowd on and make them 'put up or shut up' " Hoover endorsed the idea. "I concur," he added.

In the following years FBI agents used their boss' comments to justify continuing harassment of lesbian and gay journalists. Phyllis Lyon told of how she routinely got telephoned death threats from callers she believed were FBI agents, and told how those agents often showed up without invites at her home.

It was within just such an atmosphere of government intimidation and harassment that Don Slater began his career as a gay thinker, strategist, and journalist. Following the Post Office's seizure of ONE, he and his cohorts on the magazine defended their right to publish, and victoriously pushed forward against censorship at the Supreme Court level where, for the first time, the right in America to publish bold examinations of same-sex love was established.

ONE's victory, therefore, paved the way for those civil liberties and social rights we know today. "To take the measure of Don Slater's courage," writes Joseph Hansen in a memorial pamphlet dedicated to the pioneer, "it has to be remembered that when he launched the first openly-distributed gay magazine, ONE, same-sex acts were outlawed in every State of the Union…Arrested, a homosexual unable to bribe his way out of trouble faced jail, loss of his reputation, his career, all hope of a decent future. So far as homosexuals were concerned, this was literally a police state,"

In 1960, in company with Dr. Franklin Kameny, I made an inspection of newsstands in downtown Washington, D.C, searching for copies of the nation's three known gay and lesbian publications in that era, ONE, The Mattachine Review, and The Ladder. Two major newsstands carried ONE, and Kameny and I determined that we would see to it that others followed suit. In those days there were approximately 12 gay organizations in America, most of them lacking memberships and operated only by brave and far-sighted individuals.

Don Slater—one such far-sighted person—along with his friends in Los Angeles-- represented one of the largest gay groups, which, by today's standards would be regarded as miniscule.

A decade later (1970) Slater told Ken Gaul that he had, in fact, been a part of the "old guard" of the movement. "You must remember," he said, "that we come from a time when the word homosexual was not even in the every day vocabulary, or in the vocabulary of the press. We come from a time when there were absolutely no homosexual public convictions. We come from a time when there was absolutely no homosexual discussion on campus…. so tremendous progress has been made it seems to me. Now we are going to have to change various laws, and methods, and I'm all in favor of the approach of the young people today."

A memorial service for Slater was held this year in April in which old friends, like Joseph Hansen, reflected that though Slater had been a born leader, he didn't seek the glare of publicity. "On the contrary," he'd once said, "I think of all the persons in the movement who have been continuously active as I have (and no one has) I am the least known or mentioned of any—and I want to keep it that way."

Hansen says that Slater was basically a gentlemanly conservative, but that even so he welcomed radicals into his domains. Their tactics may have shocked him," explains Hansen, "but they were fighting for the same civil rights as he was." Hansen describes Slater as "a slight, dapper, quick-moving fellow with a mischievous glint in his eyes." He found Slater, he says, "a remarkable and (for all his prickliness) lovable man who fought to make this a more tenable world for the despised and the rejected."

"He managed this," believes Hansen, "better I think than he even realized. Often he managed it in spite of himself, hating the limelight as he did, and distrusting the strings attached to government and corporate funding." Hansen says that if Slater were to have heard himself called a hero, it would have made him "very uncomfortable." But, he notes, "a hero is what he was."

A rift between another pioneer of ONE, the late W. Dorr Legg and Don Slater took place in 1965 when, according to ONE's then-contributors, Legg walked into ONE's offices and fired the entire staff. Following this occurrence, Slater founded a new magazine, Tangents, and established The Homosexual Information Center. The Center's newsletter, still publishing, tells how Slater gave focus to literature. Current events generally prompted the pioneer to editorialize in Tangents, and the men who worked with him, including Joseph Hansen and William Glover, continue today to give focus to Slater's views and contributions.

"What the Homosexual Information Center needs," wrote Glover in a September 29 letter to GayToday's editor, "is to let everyone know we exist…"

The individual who may have loved him best, perhaps, was Slater's companion of fifty years, Tony Reyes. "We both shared many wonderful, beautiful memories," recalls Reyes today. "I was very young when we met. Don was attending the University of Southern California at the time…We went through a lot together, but nothing seemed to bother us because we were too much in love to care about anything else."

The two men bought their first house in Angelino Heights in the Los Angeles area, and later bought a "fixer-upper farm" in Colorado.

"We both enjoyed every minute of our lives," recalls Reyes, "and stayed together to the very end of his life."

Slater's lover tells how the pioneer enjoyed country living, doing much of his writing and planning away from city smog. He tells also about the secrets of the longevity of their relationship, how Slater took an interest in the things that interested his loving friend. "He listened to my music and watched me do my folkloric dancing," Reyes remembers appreciatively.

William Glover, who has dedicated his life to advancing Slater's work and thought, thought the pioneer to have been the sharpest thinker he'd met in the movement. "In fact," he says, "of all the people in the gay rights movement I ever met, Don was the only real thinker. The motives of all of them were noble, but Don had the patience the others lacked, to analyze and research before taking a position and going into action. He spent a lot of time in law libraries."

"Nor did he ever claim," explains Glover, "that it was gays alone who had accomplished his aims. He gave full credit always to the many straights who helped along the way, lawyers, academics, journalists, radio and TV people, printers, landlords, magazine dealers, the list is long and he wanted to credit to go where it was due. He was always fair, always honest, always true to his beliefs. If he had mastered the art of hype, he'd be famous today. But he despised the art of hype. I was Don Slater's sidekick for most of my life, and I miss him terribly. Besides being a great man, he was a wonderful, warm friend. I hope his ideals will never die."

If, as I believe, it is a fact that the continuation of a person's best-loved values and ideals constitute the reality of his or her afterlife, a much- deserved immortality has been undoubtedly assured for Don Slater. Information about Don Slater and his contributions to history can be obtained through The Homosexual Information Center, P. O. Box 8252 Universal City, California, 91618. Telephone: 318-742-4709. A free memorial pamphlet is available for distribution in gay and lesbian bookstores. Slater's longtime friends have launched an ambitious publications program, including an anthology of his writings and a biography tentatively titled A Few Doors West of Hope.