[In the sixties and seventies, fighting for the rights of queer
people was considered radical activism. To Jeanne Manford, it was just
part of being a parent. ]
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HOW ONE MOTHER’S LOVE FOR HER GAY SON STARTED A REVOLUTION  
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Kathryn Schulz
April 10, 2023
The New Yorker
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_ In the sixties and seventies, fighting for the rights of queer
people was considered radical activism. To Jeanne Manford, it was just
part of being a parent. _

When Manford’s son Morty came out, in 1968, homosexual acts were
criminal in forty-nine states. She never tried to change him; she set
out to change the world instead., Photo illustration by Tyler Comrie

 

The crowd along Sixth Avenue was losing its mind. It was Sunday, June
25, 1972, and Dr. Benjamin Spock was walking uptown with the
Christopher Street Liberation Day March, the scrappier, more
revolutionary precursor to the New York City Pride Parade
[[link removed]].
Although he had risen to fame as a pediatrician, Spock was almost as
well known for his support of left-wing causes—from legalizing
abortion to ending the Vietnam War—as he was for “The Common Sense
Book of Baby and Child Care,” which had already sold more than ten
million copies. Still, even by his standards, joining the Christopher
Street crowd was a radical act. Two years earlier, when the march was
held for the first time, its organizers had worried that no one would
come. Those who did were so hopped up on adrenaline and fear that the
fifty-block route, from the West Village to Central Park, took them
half as long as anticipated; afterward, they jokingly called it the
Christopher Street Liberation Day Run. Now here was Dr. Spock, one of
the most influential figures in America, joining their ranks. As he
passed by, the people lining the streets whistled and clapped and
screamed themselves hoarse.

But all this hullabaloo was not, as it turned out, for the famous
doctor; it was for a diminutive middle-aged woman marching just in
front of him. She was not famous at all—not the author of any books,
not the leader of any movement, not self-evidently a radical of any
kind. With her jacket and brooch and plaid skirt and spectacles, she
had the part-prim, part-warm demeanor of an old-fashioned
elementary-school teacher, which she was. She was carrying a piece of
orange poster board with a message hand-lettered in black marker:
“_parents of gays: unite in support for our children_.” She had no
idea that the crowd was cheering for her until total strangers started
running up to thank her. They asked if they could kiss her; they asked
if she would talk to their parents; they told her that they couldn’t
imagine their own mothers and fathers supporting them so publicly, or
supporting them at all.

The woman’s name was Jeanne Manford, and she was marching alongside
her twenty-one-year-old gay son, Morty. Moved by the outpouring of
emotion, the two of them discussed it all along the route. By the time
they reached Central Park, they had also reached a decision: if so
many people wished that someone like Jeanne could talk to their
parents, why not make that possible? The organization they dreamed up
that day, which started as a single support group in Manhattan, was
initially called Parents of Gays; later, it was renamed
Parents _flag_, for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays;
nowadays, it is known only as _pflag_. Just a handful of people
attended its first meeting, held fifty years ago this spring. Today,
it has four hundred chapters and well north of a quarter of a million
members.

That growth reflects a cultural change of extraordinary speed and
magnitude—a transformation, incomplete but nonetheless astonishing,
in the legal, political, and social status of L.G.B.T.Q. people in
America. Paradoxically, one consequence of that transformation is that
the moral courage of Jeanne Manford, so evident to everyone lining
Sixth Avenue that day, has become hard to fully appreciate. Parents in
general, and mothers in particular, have long been a potent political
force, from the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina to Mothers
Against Drunk Driving and Moms Demand Action. In such cases, the power
of parents derives from loving their children and trying to protect
them, among the most fundamental and respected of human instincts.
What made Jeanne Manford different—and what made her actions so
consequential—is that, until she started insisting otherwise, the
kind of child she had was widely regarded as the kind that not even a
mother could love.

Jeanne Manford was born Jean Sobelson in Flushing, Queens, in 1920;
her parents added the extra letters to her name when she started
school, to distinguish her from another Jean in her class, a little
boy. She was the middle of five daughters and, in a family of large
personalities, the quiet one—two facts that might have contributed
to her lifelong sense of being utterly average. Her father was a
salesman; her mother, a nurse, was so overprotective that, well past
the appropriate age, she would not let her girls cross the street
without holding hands. When it came time to go to college, Manford, a
New York Jew, chose the University of Alabama, a brief swerve in her
life that was cut short by the sudden death of her father. Devastated
by the loss—the first of many family tragedies that she would
face—she dropped out and returned to Queens.

Back home, she met Jules Manford, a dentist, and after she married him
they settled first into a small apartment and eventually into a modest
house in Flushing, less than a mile from where she had grown up. In
1944, they had a son, Charles, followed three years later by a
daughter, Suzanne. Morty, their third and final child, was born in
1950. By the time Jules turned forty, he had suffered multiple heart
attacks; he survived, but his health never fully recovered. As a hedge
against disaster, Jeanne went back to college and got a degree in
teaching. For the next three decades, she worked as an
elementary-school teacher at P.S. 32, down the block from her home.

By all accounts, Morty was the superstar of the Manford family. Kids
liked him, adults adored him, and his teachers predicted that he would
someday be a senator. Early on, he displayed an instinct for speaking
out, part sincere, part prankish. At fourteen, he wrote a letter to
the New York City Council about “co-ed socialization in the Junior
and Senior High schools”; later, after a can of Progresso tomato
paste exploded when he opened it, he sent the company a complaint,
detailing the damage it caused and requesting reimbursement, then
mailed carbon copies to, among others, the New York City Health
Department, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Ralph Nader
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But, for all his outward accomplishments, Morty was inwardly wretched.
By the time he was in high school, he was fighting what he later
called “a personal civil war” over his sexual orientation, and
eventually he asked his parents if he could see a psychiatrist. They
were surprised—he had always seemed like a happy, well-adjusted
kid—but they readily agreed, and when the first one didn’t work
out they found him another. Meanwhile, the Manfords’ older son, by
then in college, was struggling as well. Charles had always been
bright but volatile, and in the fall semester of 1965 he slashed his
arms in his dorm room and was rushed to the infirmary. Four months
later, at the age of twenty-one, he took his own life.

The Manfords, undone, channelled their grief into love. When their
daughter, Suzanne, got pregnant, she moved back home so that her
parents could help raise the child—a girl, Avril, born two years
after Charles died. “This might sound strange,” Avril told me.
“But I think that’s why I had such a blessed childhood. Some
families would have fallen apart, but they took that awful experience
and decided that life was precious. They were, like, ‘We are going
to take care of who we have.’ ” This admirable commitment was put
to the test soon enough. The same year Avril was born, Morty’s
psychiatrist summoned Jeanne and Jules to his office and informed them
that their beloved golden boy and sole surviving son was gay.

To the best of her knowledge, Jeanne Manford had never known anyone
who was gay. Born and raised in one of the more conservative quarters
of New York City (not by accident was Flushing the fictional home of
Archie Bunker), she had lived almost all her adult life there as well,
and spent most of the nineteen-fifties at home raising her children.
She knew how to cook; she knew how to knit; she knew how to make a
house guest feel at home. She was soft-spoken, with an accent that
aspired upward, toward the patrician—half Queen’s English, half
Queens. Her clothes were fashionable without being flashy; her hair
was always done just so. “I considered myself such a traditional
person,” she once said of her life before Morty was outed, “that I
didn’t even cross the street against the light.”

There was no mystery about what that kind of traditional, law-abiding
woman was supposed to think about gay people in 1968. At the time,
homosexual acts were criminal in forty-nine states, with punishments
ranging from fines to prison time, including life sentences. Same-sex
attraction was classified as a mental illness by the American
Psychiatric Association and routinely mocked and condemned by everyone
from elementary-school kids to elected officials. Those who lost their
jobs, homes, or children owing to their sexual orientation had no
legal recourse. Political organizing was virtually impossible—one
early gay-rights group that attempted to officially incorporate in New
York was told that its mere existence would violate state sodomy
laws—and positive cultural representation was all but nonexistent;
there were no openly gay or lesbian politicians, pundits, religious
leaders, actors, athletes, or musicians in the mainstream. Newspapers
used the words “homosexual” and “pervert” interchangeably, and
the handful of gay people who appeared on television to discuss their
“life style” almost always had their faces hidden in shadows or
otherwise obscured. In 1974, when “The Pat Collins Show” aired a
segment on parents of gay children, the host introduced it by saying,
“Even if he committed murder, I guess you’d say, ‘Well, he’s
still my child, no matter what.’ But suppose your child came to you
and said, ‘Mother, Dad, I am homosexual.’ What would you do
then?”

You could fit most of the solar system into the chasm between how the
average American of the era would have reacted in that hypothetical
situation and how Jeanne Manford responded upon learning that Morty
was gay. She was dismayed to discover that his sexual orientation had
troubled him for so long, but she herself was not concerned about it.
Not for a moment did she entertain the possibility that something was
wrong with him. Not for a moment did she wonder, as the otherwise
supportive Jules initially did, if his gayness reflected some failing
of theirs as parents. And not for a moment did she worry about how
other people would react; she told her sisters and friends right away,
making plain that she was fine with the information and they had
better be, too. “You don’t love him in spite of something,” she
later declared on national television, her face free of shadow or
blur. “You love him.”

At first, Morty could not accept his parents’ acceptance. In the
early days, when he was still struggling with self-loathing, it seemed
impossible to believe that everyone else wasn’t similarly disgusted
by him. Later, after he went to college at Columbia and came to terms
with being gay, the steady, unfussy love of his family seemed tepid
compared with his own increasing radicalism. The first time he
attended a gay-rights protest, he wore sunglasses and turned away from
the news cameras, but he soon became, his sister Suzanne (now Suzanne
Manford Swan) told me, “unafraid and unstoppable.” An
eighteen-year-old regular at the Stonewall Inn, Morty was there when a
fight broke out between patrons and the police in the summer of
1969, an event that catalyzed the gay-rights movement
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The following year, after joining the brand-new Gay Activists
Alliance, he began organizing political demonstrations, then dropped
out of college to do so full time. Not long after, he was arrested for
refusing to move when police tried to shoo him off a stoop on
Christopher Street, the heart of the Greenwich Village gay scene. (It
was two in the morning before he was allowed to make a phone call.
Reluctant to ring up his parents, he instead called a congressional
candidate sympathetic to the G.A.A.: Bella Abzug, the firebrand
feminist who would help introduce the first federal gay-rights bill.)
Later, he and a friend “went out like Johnny Appleseeds” and, with
the G.A.A. covering the gas money, travelled to cities and towns
throughout the South to raise awareness about gay liberation.

Meanwhile, Jeanne was clipping and saving Morty’s every newspaper
appearance, including many that few other parents would have cared to
put in a scrapbook. (One of them, from the _Times_, featured him
being ejected from a benefit for John Lindsay, the mayor of New York
City, after shouting, “Justice for homosexuals!”) This pride in
her son proved strategic, because it meant that she could never be
baited or shamed. The next time Morty wound up in jail,
Jeanne _was_ woken up by an early-morning phone call—not from him
but from the arresting officer, who, apparently expecting to ruin
Morty’s life, made a show of asking Jeanne if she knew that her son
was “a homosexual.” Morty was there to witness the officer’s
confusion and deflation when she said, “Yes, I know. Why are you
bothering him? Why don’t you go after criminals and stop harassing
the gays?”

Still, for all her bravura, Jeanne worried constantly about her son.
The possibility that he would be attacked for being gay “was always
in the back of my mind,” she said—until the day when it was
suddenly at the forefront. In the spring of 1972, the New York _Daily
News_ ran an editorial, headlined “Any Old Jobs for Homos?,” that
referred to “fairies, nances, swishes, fags, lezzes” and commended
the Supreme Court for deciding that a public university could rescind
a job offer to a man who applied for a marriage license with his male
partner. (The same couple were the plaintiffs in Baker v. Nelson, a
1971 court case that found no constitutional obligation to recognize
same-sex marriages, which remained legal precedent until the Supreme
Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges
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That editorial coincided with the annual Inner Circle dinner, a parody
show hosted by New York City journalists, which that year was slated
to include a mocking skit about a gay-rights bill. Fed up with the
press’s treatment of L.G.B.T.Q. issues, the G.A.A. decided to
protest the event.

Among those attending the protest and handing out leaflets was Morty
Manford. Among those enraged by it was Michael Maye, the head of the
New York City firefighters’ union and a former professional
heavyweight boxer. With multiple police officers looking on, Maye
allegedly attacked several of the demonstrators, including Morty,
punching them, kicking them, stomping them in the groin, and throwing
at least one of them down an escalator. This time, the phone call
Jeanne Manford got about her son was from the hospital.

There were ultimately no real consequences for Maye, despite multiple
witnesses, including high-ranking city officials, and a prolonged
effort to bring him to justice in court. But there were enormous
consequences for the country as a whole. “You would meet Jeanne
Manford and you would never in a million years guess what she had in
her,” Eric Marcus, the author of the 1992 book “Making Gay History
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and now the host of a podcast by the same name, told me. “But as I
came to know her I always felt that what was in her mind was
‘Don’t fuck with my Morty.’ ” Incensed by the attack, she sat
down and wrote a letter to the editor condemning both the perpetrators
and the police officers who stood by and let it happen. Then she went
on to express a sentiment never before aired in a mainstream
publication: “I am proud of my son, Morty Manford, and the hard work
he has been doing in urging homosexuals to accept their feelings.”
She sent the letter to multiple newspapers, including the _Times_.
Only the New York _Post_—in its last waning days as a liberal
paper, before its purchase, a few years later, by Rupert
Murdoch—agreed to publish it.

That letter made Morty realize, finally, that his mother was not just
tolerating her gay son. And when throngs of friends and acquaintances
called him up to say that Jeanne’s words had stunned them and given
them hope for the future, it made him realize something else, too. As
crucial as his own activism was, what his mother had done—what
she _could_ do, as a mother, that he could not—was just as
important. The organizer in him took note. It was April of 1972, two
months before the Christopher Street Liberation Day March. Morty asked
her if she would join him there. Yes, she said, but the emerging
organizer in _her_ had one condition. There was no point in going if
no one knew why she was there; she wanted to carry a sign.

The first meeting of Parents of Gays was held nearly a year later, on
March 11, 1973. To reach parents directly, the Manfords placed an ad
in the _Village Voice;_ to reach them indirectly, through their
children, Morty and the lesbian activist Barbara Love descended on New
York City’s gay hangouts with fifteen hundred signs and leaflets,
handmade and possessing something of the intimate, supplicant look of
lost-pet posters. At the invitation of the Reverend Edward Egan, who
was later forced into retirement because he was gay, the meeting was
held at the Metropolitan-Duane United Methodist Church, in the West
Village. In addition to Jeanne and Jules, Morty and Love were present
to answer questions that the parents in attendance might not be
comfortable asking their own daughters and sons.

At the time, most parents of gay or lesbian children were in a
supremely difficult position. Those who were conflicted enough to come
to a meeting—rather than, say, refusing to talk about their kid or
refusing to talk _to_ their kid or organizing an exorcism—loved
their children but also experienced them as sources of grief, shame,
and confusion. They were full of questions, many of them ignorant but
all of them sincere: about whether their gay son would get more
effeminate every year; about how their “beautiful blonde daughter,
just nineteen” could possibly be a lesbian. And they were often
punished for seeking answers. “I had no one to talk to but the
psychiatrists,” one mother of three gay children recalled. “And
every one of them said I had sick children.”

For mothers and fathers like these, Parents of Gays was both a gift
and a shock. Most people who came to a meeting expected, as Morty
later said, to sit there weeping while someone patted their hand and
said, “Now, now, dearie.” They did not expect to be told that the
kids were all right and society was all wrong. “As parents of gay
persons,” some of the organization’s earliest informational
material read, “we have learned to recognize our children’s
expression of love as honest and moral.” Even that was only the half
of it, because Jeanne had always understood that acceptance wasn’t
enough. “We will fight for the rights of our children,” she once
said. “We will become political. We will have a national
organization. I remember thinking that at the very beginning.” In
essence, she founded a support group that was really a civil-rights
organization—one that took the idea of traditional family values, so
often wielded against queer people, and mobilized it on their behalf.

There was a cost to doing so, of course. The Manfords’ home number
was listed in the phone book, and Jeanne’s full name had been
printed in the New York _Post_. Someone threw a rock through the
window of their house; someone made rude comments to Avril, then just
twelve or thirteen, about her uncle and grandparents. People sent
letters addressed to “the misguided Parents of Gays” and quoted
Scripture to prove that these “degrading, repulsive feelings are
wrong and against nature.” If any of this bothered Jeanne, she never
showed it. When the principal of the elementary school where she
worked told her that people were starting to talk and asked her to be
more discreet, Jeanne informed the woman that her professional life
was one thing and her private life was another and that she would do
as she pleased.

Mostly, though, the people who reached out to the Manfords and to
Parents of Gays were looking for help or community or a balm for
heartbreaking pain. A Lutheran pastor wrote to say that he had lost
his parish after coming out—although at least by doing so he had
enabled a congregant to finally reveal the reason for her son’s
suicide. A young man wrote to say he was afraid that if he came out
his parents would either be fired from the Baptist college where they
worked or resign in shame. A grandmother in Norman, Oklahoma, wrote
seeking advice on how to reconcile her intolerant daughter with her
lesbian granddaughter, both of whom were full of “hate and hostility
and can’t communicate and yet I think they love each other.” A man
wrote to say, “May God bless you for all the good things you are
doing. You make us gays very proud.” A mother of a gay son wrote
anonymously to say, “A woman in the office where I work said she
thought all homosexuals should be put in prison. Hardly a day goes by
that I can’t hear someone make a nasty remark about queers.” She
didn’t know how to stand up for her son, even though she already
felt awful for all the ways she had failed him: “I only wish we had
been more sympathetic when he was young. He was effeminate in many
ways and we scolded him for it many times.” She concluded by
thanking the Manfords “for saying the things that weak, timid people
like me can’t say and can’t even sign their names.”

Jeanne herself had always identified as timid; all her life, she
insisted that she was “very shy.” And yet, as word spread about
Parents of Gays and the Manfords started to get invitations to appear
on television and radio, she almost always said yes. That was not
because she craved the attention—“There was nothing pretentious
about her, nothing fortune-seeking, no love of the spotlight,” her
granddaughter Avril told me—but because she was one of the few
people willing to speak out in public on behalf of their gay kids.

By this time, Jules was one of those people, too. In a kind of proof
positive for the group’s model, which gave parents a chance to talk
not only to one another but also to queer people other than their own
children, it was Morty’s friends who had helped bring Jules fully
into the fold. All around the country, kids were getting thrown out of
their houses when they came out; meanwhile, Jeanne and Jules were
welcoming Morty _and_ his friends, and the Manford household had
become something of a home for wayward gays. (“You know, ‘Who’s
that sleeping under the coffee table?’ ” Daniel Dromm, a friend
of Jeanne’s and a future New York City Council member, joked.) Jules
loved talking with these young men, and they convinced him that
nothing he had done as a parent had made Morty gay. His activism from
that point on was limited only by his deteriorating health—he’d
suffered additional heart attacks, as well as a series of
strokes—and whenever he could he joined Jeanne in television and
radio interviews across the U.S.

One day, a man named Bob Benov happened to catch one of those
interviews on the radio. His sixteen-year-old son had just come out,
and his wife, Elaine, could hardly imagine anything worse, so Bob told
her about Parents of Gays and suggested that they attend a meeting.
Soon enough, they became regulars and, along with Richard and Amy
Ashworth, started a chapter in Westchester. (“I wasn’t sure
Westchester was ready for it,” Amy Ashworth said. “But then I
thought, Nobody’s ever ready for it.”) Another early member, Sarah
Montgomery, was a generation older than Jeanne—she had been born in
the nineteenth century—but had likewise never faltered in her love
for her gay son. She was devastated when he and his partner,
confronting the possibility of losing their jobs because of their
sexual orientation, took their own lives together. At meetings,
Montgomery told parents, “Your child faces a very hostile world. He
needs you more than any of your other children need you.”

In California, a couple named Adele and Larry Starr came home one day
to a note from their son Philip that said, “I’ve left home because
I am a homosexual.” After a frantic search that included placing a
personal ad in the Los Angeles _Times_—“Philip, we love you. Call
or come home”—they were reunited. They suggested that he see a
therapist, but when he told them he wasn’t going to change they
realized they would have to do so instead. They reached out to Jeanne
and Jules, who came to visit and encouraged them to found a Parents of
Gays group in L.A. Before long, people began to inquire about starting
groups in other places as well: in Binghamton, New York, and
Greensboro, North Carolina; in Youngstown, Ohio, and Omaha, Nebraska,
and Pensacola, Florida. “I am 70 and hooked onto an oxygen tank most
of the time,” a mother who was hoping to start a group in Calgary
wrote, “but I still have much energy and can use a telephone.”

All political activism is a numbers game. Do you have enough
supporters to pack a room, convince a legislator, sway a corporation,
win an election? By definition, minority groups do not; to secure
political victories, they must get others to join their cause.
That’s the practical reason—though there are compelling
philosophical and interpersonal ones as well—why too profound a
suspicion of political allies is counterproductive. L.G.B.T.Q. people
make up just a fraction of the over-all population, but they have
parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. From the
beginning, one of the goals of Parents of Gays was to persuade more
and more of those people not just to make peace with their queer
family members but to make common cause with them.

It worked. Many early members became evangelists for the organization,
inspiring similar groups around the country, and in 1979, during the
first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights,
representatives from twenty-five of those groups met to talk about
forming a national body. They were planning to call it Parents of
Lesbians and Gays until one participant raised an objection: if she
attended a group by that name, she would effectively out her closeted
daughter. As a solution, she suggested adding the word “Friends.”

Thus was _pflag_ National born. When its First International
Convention was held, in August of 1982, participants showed up from
England and Holland and Canada and from throughout the United States:
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Augusta, Maine; Memphis, Tennessee,
and Little Rock, Arkansas; Rapid City, South Dakota, and Birmingham,
Alabama, and Corpus Christi, Texas. It was a triumphant occasion for
the nascent organization, but a bittersweet one for Jeanne. The
conference was dedicated to her husband, Jules, who had died a month
before it began, at the age of sixty-three.

Jeanne attended the convention anyway; she knew that he would have
wanted her to do so. The program was packed with events, some of them
celebratory—banquets, musical performances, awards—but most of
them practical. There were workshops on managing a hotline, on working
with the media, on legislation relevant to the L.G.B.T.Q. community,
on what to do if someone in your family got arrested, on estate
planning for gay and lesbian couples. The gestalt impression, borne
out by the decade to come, was of a community simultaneously coming
into its own and bracing for the worst.

By then, ten years had passed since Jeanne and Morty Manford had
marched together up Sixth Avenue. The family home in Flushing was far
emptier than it had been back then: Jules was dead; Charles was dead;
Suzanne and Avril had moved to California; Morty and his friends were
now grownups with homes of their own. And, in a sense, the streets
outside were newly empty, too. The end of the Vietnam War had brought
with it the end of antiwar activism, and the revolutionary energy of
the left had begun to dissipate. The seventies had given way to the
eighties, hippies to yuppies, radical action and the collective good
to conservatism and greed. Within the queer community, respectability
politics were ascendant, protests and disruption on the wane.

Morty, observing these changes and ready for change himself, finally
returned to his studies. In 1979, he completed the B.A. that he had
begun in 1968, then went on to law school. But his interest in social
justice never flagged; he spent four years as a public defender for
Legal Aid, then became an assistant attorney general in New York. He
seemed to be back on the trajectory that people had envisioned in his
youth—on the inside now, a rising star, plausibly bound for elected
office. And then, once again, tragedy found the Manford family.

In the spring and summer of 1981, gay men started showing up in
intensive-care units in New York and San Francisco with a strange form
of pneumonia and a rare type of cancer known as Kaposi’s sarcoma. By
the end of the year, many of those men were already dead, the earliest
American victims of a disease that would eventually be named
acquired-immunodeficiency syndrome. By 1985, more than twelve thousand
people in the U.S. had died of _aids_, and the country was careering
toward full-blown panic. A decade later, that figure had climbed above
three hundred thousand, and _aids_ was the leading cause of death
for Americans between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four. More
than half the dead were gay men; in that age bracket, one in ten of
them died of _aids_, a literal decimation.

The timing of the epidemic was devastating. On the strength of a
handful of hard-won legal and cultural victories, the gay community
had just barely begun to believe that the future would be better;
instead, it got suddenly, existentially worse. Before the development
of effective antiretrovirals, _aids_ was almost always fatal, and in
urban areas with high concentrations of gay men the scale of death was
overwhelming. “We watched all of our friends die,” the Reverend
Troy Perry, the founder of the Metropolitan Community Church and a
good friend of Morty’s, told me. Men in their thirties
[[link removed]] were
going to funerals every two weeks.

To make matters worse—although they could hardly get worse—the
epidemic unleashed another wave of anti-gay vitriol. It was the era of
Phyllis Schlafly, the era of Jerry Falwell
[[link removed]];
there was no shortage of people willing to characterize _aids_ as
God’s retribution for the sin of being gay. Those who were not
calling it a purifying agent for a sick society were too often simply
ignoring it; Ronald Reagan famously refused to even say “_aids_”
for his entire first term. Far too many people who had lived with
unnecessary shame now died with it as well, and far too many families
buried children they had not yet learned how to love. “I’ve been
to _aids_ funerals where they got up and condemned the body that was
in the coffin,” Perry said.

For many parents, though, _aids_ taught them a crucial lesson in the
hardest possible way: the time to love your gay children, like all
your children, is immediately and always. That had been the message
of _pflag_ from the beginning, but the organization could not
protect its members from the catastrophe of _aids_. All it could do
was try to keep them from losing more time than necessary with their
children.

Morty Manford learned that he was H.I.V.-positive in the winter of
1989. For a brief period, the family home in Flushing filled back up
again. Morty was once more living with his mother; his niece Avril,
now twenty-two, moved home as well, to help take care of him. Three
generations of Manfords did what they could for Morty, but that was
barely more than what they had always done: love him. He died on May
14, 1992, at the age of forty-one.

Five months later, Jeanne stood in the pouring rain in the nation’s
capital with a quarter of a million other people while the names of
those who had died of _aids_ were read aloud on the steps of the
Washington Monument. Earlier that day, the _aids_ Quilt—that
beautiful homespun expression of grief and anger, each panel roughly
the size of a grave—had been unfurled on the National Mall. One of
its panels read “Golden Boy. Freedom Fighter. His star lights our
way.” When Jeanne dedicated it, she said that her son had “stood
against the seemingly invincible forces of hate, greed, and bigotry
and helped to turn them back.”

For the second time, Jeanne had buried one of her children. And, also
for the second time, she responded by tending as best as she could to
her remaining family. Moved by the experience of caring for Morty,
Avril had applied to medical school and been accepted at the Mayo
Clinic. She was married by then and newly pregnant, so Jeanne, well
into her seventies, uprooted herself after a lifetime in Flushing and
relocated to Minnesota to help take care of the baby. Two years later,
she moved again, this time to live with Suzanne in Daly City,
California. Jeanne Manford died there on January 8, 2013, at the age
of ninety-two. The next month, Barack Obama posthumously awarded her
the Presidential Citizens Medal for her work on behalf of L.G.B.T.Q.
people and their families. In his remarks, he summarized, in the
plainest possible terms, the reason she stood up against bigotry on
behalf of her son: “She loved him and wouldn’t put up with this
kind of nonsense.”

What made this worthy of a President’s praise was that, when Jeanne
first began speaking out, almost everyone around her took that
nonsense as gospel. It is difficult to say why some people perceive
injustice right away while others require a social movement or a civil
war to see it, if they ever do. Some of those who knew Jeanne Manford
speculated that her support for Morty stemmed from Charles’s
suicide—that, having lost one child, she could not bear the thought
of losing another. Others suggested that it was because she grew up
Jewish at a time of rampant antisemitism, deadly abroad and insidious
at home. But Suzanne, who disputes both accounts, told me that her
mother simply loved her children as many parents strive to but few
achieve: unconditionally.

The organization that Jeanne Manford helped found on the strength of
that love lives on, in many respects unchanged. At its regular
grassroots gatherings, there are family members in various stages of
embracing their kids, L.G.B.T.Q. people on hand to listen and help,
boxes of tissues that still get used at almost every meeting. All that
differs, in some places, are the demographics. In New York City,
where _pflag_ started, the organization now hosts A.P.I. Rainbow
Parents, which specifically supports Asian and Pacific Islander
L.G.B.T.Q. people and their families; elsewhere, groups are full of
Spanish speakers or members of the military. And all over the country
more and more parents of trans kids are showing up at meetings.

A decade ago, one of those parents was Susan Thronson, who is now the
president of the board of directors of _pflag_ National. A support
group “changed my life, and by extension my family’s life,” she
told me, before describing a familiar trajectory: the meetings helped
her become a more supportive parent, then an outspoken
activist. _pflag_ was one of the first national organizations in
America to add transgender rights
[[link removed]] to
its mission, back in 1998; under Thronson’s leadership, the group
recently sued Governor Greg Abbott, of Texas, over his directive
requiring child-abuse investigations into reported cases of minors
receiving gender-affirming care.

On the phone with me, Thronson mused about what the Manfords would
make of _pflag_’s work today. “No one twenty-five years ago would
have anticipated gender expression and gender identity would have been
the issue,” she said, and she herself can’t imagine what the issue
will be twenty-five years hence. She does believe, though, that the
organization will remain necessary, and that its core commitment will
continue to be its best guide: “We love all of our children, and
we’re not going to leave any of them behind.”

In case she ever needs a reminder of the courage that commitment
takes, she keeps a photograph of Jeanne Manford on her desk. It is the
iconic one, of Manford marching up Sixth Avenue with her son and her
sign. Just behind her is an elderly man, tall and stooped, in a white
shirt and dark tie. With the clarity of retrospect, it is possible to
see not only the physical proximity of the two figures but their
metaphorical common ground. Like Dr. Spock, the Manfords, as Thronson
put it, “are responsible for changing the way Americans raise their
children.” ♦

_Kathryn Schulz
[[link removed]], a staff
writer at The New Yorker, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for feature
writing. Her latest book is “Lost & Found
[[link removed]].”_

* LGBTQ
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* Gay Rights
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* parenting
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* Jeanne Manford
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* Grassroots Organizing
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