Jeanne Manford, PFLAG founder, dies

Jeanne Manford, PFLAG founder, dies


Mrs. Manford, who started Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays in 1972, had seen her health slowly fading for months, said her daughter, Suzanne Swan.

Mrs. Manford was a mother of three and a New York City elementary school teacher when her defiance in the face of violence thrust her onto the national stage and led her to found an organization known as PFLAG, which now has more than 200,000 members and more than 350 affiliates across the nation.

In April 1972, one of her sons, the late Morty Manford, was beaten at a gay rights demonstration in New York by a former amateur boxing champion, and police failed to respond, Swan said.

Not long after, she marched with her son in New York's Christopher Street Liberation Day March, a precursor to present day Pride parades, carrying a sign saying: Parents of gays:

[...] homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness, sodomy laws were on the books in many states, and there were no legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Karen Sundheim, program manager of the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library, recalled a childhood friend whose parents refused to speak to him after he came out, even as he was dying of AIDS in the mid-1980s.

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