The 45-minute long performance will be followed by a discussion with the Playwright/Director, Josh Irving Gershick.
Dear ONE: Love & Longing in Mid-Century Queer America, by Josh Irving Gershick, illuminates the lives of ordinary Queer Americans as recounted through letters written between 1953 and 1965, to L.A.’s ONE Magazine, the first openly gay & lesbian periodical in the United States. Each month, ONE Magazine reached several thousand readers, a great many of them isolated and in search of community. In larger cities, the magazine was available on newsstands; in smaller towns, it arrived in mailboxes in a simple unmarked envelope. Readers from all over the globe wrote back to ONE. Looking for love, friendship or understanding, they wrote of loneliness and longing, of joy and fulfillment, and of their daily lives, hidden from history. The play is adapted from material from the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.
Dear ONE features the voices of more than 40 distinct, mid-century Queer people – real people who tell us first-hand about their lives. The correspondents – deeply but seamlessly edited – come from nearly every walk of life, from every part of the country and abroad.
Popular accounts place the start of the LGBTQ movement in 1969, with the Stonewall Riots in New York City. In truth, the first documented LGBTQ civil rights demonstrations in the U.S. were held in May 1959, at L.A.’s Cooper’s Do-Nuts, in which gender-nonconforming folk and sex workers rousted by police resisted; in August 1966, at San Francisco’s Compton’s Cafeteria, when police attempted to rout transgender patrons; and on Feb. 11, 1967, at the Black Cat café in Los Angeles, in response to a police raid. But Dear ONE suggests something else again – that the queer liberation movement – an awareness of community coupled with a galvanizing call to action – began long before, as many of its letters underscore. And ONE Magazine – whose mission was to “help homosexuals to understand themselves”– was there.
THE PERFORMERS
George Takei is a social justice activist, social media superstar, Grammy-nominated recording artist, New York Times bestselling author, and pioneering actor whose career has spanned six decades. He has appeared in more than 40 feature films and hundreds of television roles, most famously as Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek, and he has used his success as a platform to fight for social justice, LGBTQ+ rights, and marriage equality. His advocacy is personal: during World War II, Takei spent his childhood in United States internment camps along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans.
He now serves as Chairman Emeritus and a member of the Japanese American National Museum’s Board of Trustees, and a member of the US-Japan Bridging Foundation Board of Directors. Takei served on the board of the Japan-United States Friendship Commission under President Bill Clinton, and, in 2004, was conferred with the Gold Rays with Rosette of the Order of the Rising Sun by the Emperor of Japan for his contribution to US-Japan relations.
