Having built his wealth through oil investments and other entrepreneurial endeavors, in 1964 engineer and philanthropist Reed Erickson founded the Erickson Educational Foundation, a charitable organization primarily created to support transgender, transsexual, and gender identity research and services. Erickson himself was a female-to-male transsexual individual born in El Paso, Texas, in 1912. Born female-bodied, Erickson began his transgender transition under the care of sex realignment surgery pioneer Dr. Harry Benjamin in 1963, and lived fully as male by 1965.
In addition to overseeing the Erickson Educational Foundation, throughout the late-1960s and 1970s Erickson supported a variety of progressive causes and donated money to organizations including the Harry Benjamin Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic, and ONE, Incorporated. Shortly after his initial donat ion to ONE, Erickson aided the establishment of a charitable sector of ONE, called the Institute for the Study of Human Resources (ISHR). This allowed ONE to maintain research study programs, a library, and gay and lesbian studies courses and lecture series. Subsequently, ONE became a California state-accredited institution in 1981, providing graduate-level education in gay and lesbian studies. The first homophile studies degrees were given in 1982, and the ONE Institute of Graduate Studies presented Erickson with an honorary doctoral degree that same year. By 1983, however, Erickson's relationship with ONE began to dissolve due to a legal dispute over a real estate property known as the Milbank Mansion, ONE's former headquarters. Due in part to gifts from individuals in the LGBT community, the Reed L. Erickson Papers are now available for research at ONE Archives. Materials in the collection include records from the EEF, research material on gender identity, personal writings, and a photo album, as well as papers documenting Erickson's rocky relationship with ONE, an organization he supported financially for nearly 20 years. For more information on this or any other historic materials, visit the "Collections" page of our website at www.onearchives.org/collections. |
in Los Angeles, 1945-1980, part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time initiative, we would like to invite you to participate in a survey on the arts in Southern California.