Let's Love One Another Cream

Red text on a cream-colored background.

The slogan “Let’s Love One Another” echoes 1 John 4:7 in the New Testament, which begins, “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God.” This button was produced by Randolfe Hayden “Randy” Wicker for the Homosexual League of New York in the early 1960s. Wicker, an outspoken gay rights activist, journalist, and writer, was among the first in the United States to publicly campaign for homosexual visibility and acceptance. In 1962, he became one of the earliest openly gay people to appear on East Coast radio and television programs, and in 1963 he organized a picket at the Whitehall Street Induction Center protesting the U.S. military’s exclusion of gay men.

Using a Bible line like “Let’s love one another” allowed Wicker and other early LGBTQ organizers to do several related things at once: appeal to a broadly Christian public by invoking familiar moral language; reframe homosexuals not as social deviants but as people appealing to the same ethical standards as their neighbors; and push back against religiously grounded condemnations by asserting that Christian teachings about love could support tolerance. That strategy—occasional engagement with religious language and direct outreach to clergy and religious communities—appears repeatedly in histories of the gay rights movement, which combined visibility, appeals to civil-rights language, and outreach to sympathetic religious leaders and congregations.

The Randy Wicker papers (including correspondence, clippings, and organizational material) are held in manuscript collections and document his work with the Homosexual League of New York and later groups; researchers can consult those files for more on distribution and intended audiences for ephemera like this button.