To promote scholarship the leadership of ONE, Incorporated decided to offer college-level courses and also to compile a library of research materials.

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Legg was tireless in organizing and teaching classes at the ONE Institute of Homophile Studies. This pioneering institution in glbtq studies opened in 1956. In the same year, Legg, using the pen name Marvin Cutler, published a book on the nascent gay rights movement, Homosexuals Today: A Handbook of Organizations and Publications.

Under Legg's leadership ONE's course offerings were expanded and the prestige of the Institute gradually grew. In 1981 the state of California gave the ONE Institute a charter to grant master's and doctoral degrees. Legg, who had previously served as the Institute's director, was named its dean.

In addition to its regular classes, the ONE Institute offered various special programs, including public lectures. Among the speakers at ONE's Extension Lectures were activist Harry Hay, psychiatrist Evelyn Hooker, the Reverend Troy Perry, and novelist Ann Bannon.

Legg also organized and led the Institute's Overseas Tours, which, between 1966 and 1981, took ONE members to some two dozen countries in Europe, Asia, and South America to learn about gay and lesbian history and contemporary culture.

Legg also founded ONE Institute's Quarterly of Homophile Studies and co-edited the Annotated Bibliography of Homosexuality (1976), a pioneering interdisciplinary survey of gay and lesbian studies.

The establishment of a rich and varied library was a high priority for Legg. He constantly insisted on the need for interdisciplinary research, saying, "Homophile studies calls for nothing less than a field theory which will cut across the whole range of scholarly investigations, revealing their mutual actions and interactions." Legg oversaw the development of ONE's impressive collection.

Legg remained a vigorous activist and scholar until the very end of his life. In 1994 he published Homophile Studies in Theory and Practice, an exhaustive history of ONE, especially its educational endeavors.

Legg died shortly after the book's publication, on July 26. He was survived by his life partner of thirty years, John Najima.

Later that year the directors of the ONE Institute decided to focus on their mission as a research center. The Institute stopped offering classes and merged with the International Gay and Lesbian Archives. The new organization, ONE/IGLA, found a home for its collection at the University of Southern California.

ONE/IGLA's library, the largest glbtq archive in the world, holds books, periodicals, personal papers, films, photographs, sound recordings, items of memorabilia, and an art collection. Their Special Collections include the AIDS History Project and the Lesbian Legacy Collection.

This vibrant archive stands as an enduring monument to the vision of Dorr Legg.

The homophile movement of the United States refers to organizations and political strategies employed by homosexuals from the end of World War II to 1970.

The glbtq history of Los Angeles, the U.S.'s second largest metropolis, is replete with cultural, social, and political firsts.

In a series of five interlinked pulp novels set in Greenwich Village and its homosexual bars in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bannon provides an important record of lesbian life in a period when few women dared speak openly about homosexuality.

One of Canada's first gay activists, Jim Egan began demanding respect and equal rights in the late 1940s; in his later years he mounted a challenge to Canada's law on spousal retirement benefits.

Activist Harry Hay, an original member of both the Mattachine Society and the Radical Faeries, is recognized as one of the principal founders of the gay liberation movement in the United States.

American psychologist Evelyn Hooker's pioneering studies on male homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s challenged the "sickness" model of homosexuality then prevalent.

Editor and author Dale Jennings was a pioneer of the American gay rights movement, one of the co-founders of both the Mattachine Society and ONE, Inc.

Jim Kepner was both a pioneering gay journalist and a homophile activist who founded the International Gay and Lesbian Archives.

One of the earliest American gay movement organizations, the Mattachine Society was dedicated to the cultural and political liberation of homosexuals; but in the face of McCarthyism, it adopted conservative policies of accommodationism.

Troy Perry is the founder of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, a Protestant denomination devoted to ministering to the spiritual needs of glbtq people.

An early leader in the struggle for glbtq rights, Los Angeles activist Don Slater was sometimes at odds with others in the movement but never wavered in his devotion to the cause.