Tribute to Jeanne Manford, founder of Parents & Friends of Gay and Lesbians (PFLAG) who has died at 92

I’m covering CBS/Showtime day at the TV Critics Assn. Press Tour today in Pasadena and on the drive over, I was listening to John Rabe’s terrific Off-Ramp show on LA’s KPCC station. John replayed a wonderful 1997 interview he did with Jeanne Manford, who founded the straight ally group Parents and Friends of Gay and Lesbians (PFLAG) in 1972.

She sounded like a most wonderful person.

Jeanne died on Tuesday at the age of 92 after having been in declining health for some time.

She really made a difference in so many lives of LGBT people and their families.

‘All of us – people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and straight allies alike – owe Jeanne our gratitude,’ PFLAG officials said in a statement. ‘She paved the way for us to speak out for what is right, uniting the unique parent, family, and ally voice with the voice of LGBT people everywhere.’

She was an elementary school teacher living in Flushing, Queens in the early 70s when her activism began.

Manford got a call in April 1972 from a hospital where her gay activist son Morty was taken after being beaten. He had been distributing flyers inside the fiftieth annual Inner Circle dinner, a political gathering in New York City.

She wrote a letter to the New York Post complaining about police inaction and began giving interviews to radio and television shows in several cities. In June of that year, she participated with her son in the New York Pride March, carrying a hand-lettered sign that read ‘Parents of Gays Unite in Support for Our Children.’

The reaction to them was so strong that she decided to form Parents of Gay (POG) which became PFLAG in 1993. The group is meant to be ‘a bridge between the gay community and the heterosexual community.’

At PFLAG’s annual gala in 2010, Oscar winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk) said of Manford’s activism: ‘This was a really new, brave idea in 1973. This wasn’t happening. she set out to create an organization with the message that we as parents have to unite behind out gay and lesbian children and she formed this organization PFLAG to do just that, to bring allies to this cause.’

Morty Manford, who became an assistant New York State attorney general, died from AIDS in 1992. In the KPCC interview, his mother said that when she learned he was gay, it didn’t change at all how she felt about him. She also felt that it must be okay because he was such ‘a superior person.’

To her daughter, Suzanne Swan, she was always still mom.

‘She is known to thousands of people as the mother of the straight ally movement, but to me, she was my mother,’ Swan said in a statement Tuesday. ‘She was someone who would always do the right thing, the good thing. She supported all people, and that meant so much to us growing up.’