She started her journey as a mom just trying to protect her son.
Along the way, Jeanne Manford went from quiet schoolteacher at PS 32 in Flushing to an icon of the gay community. Her daughter, Suzanne Swan, said her mom’s transformation was not a surprise, “She knew how to stand up for herself. She was gentle but she was just strong. That was just her,” she tells 1010 WINS.
Jeanne’s life changed course in April of 1972 when her son Morty was attacked while he was participating in a Gay Activist Alliance “zap” (a quick and public political protest meant to galvanize the public and attract media attention to LGBTQ causes) outside the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan. The man accused of the assault was Michael J. “Mickey” Maye, the leader of the city’s firefighter’s union at the time.
“When that sign walked past, it was the kids that roared and screamed and cried, and hugged her and kissed her, and begged her to talk to their parents. That’s when, as they marched together, Morty and my mother said, “we need to do something, we need to help people.”
Jeanne recognized the need to educate parents of gay children and teach them to love their kids, and she took up the mantel with a flourish, rallying parents and starting Parents of Gays (later renamed PFLAG, or Parents For Lesbians And Gays), the first support group of its kind in the nation. “The phones were ringing off the hook,” she remembers.
You can hear Morty and Jeanne tell their story at Making Gay History.
Jeanne spent the rest of her life as an activist and role model for other parents of LGBTQ children. PFLAG has blossomed into an international organization, the largest alliance of its kind. Suzanne says her mother’s impact is immeasurable. She credits historian Eric Marcus with being the one to correctly articulate how crucial her mother was to LGBTQ youth and to the advancement of the gay rights movement, calling her a bridge between the straight and the gay communities.
“She got the parental community to appreciate, to love, their children. They didn’t have to reject their children. They could continue to love them.”
Morty was an activist in his own right, serving as president of the Gay Activist Alliance and working as an assistant Attorney General for the State of New York. Morty died in 1992, of complications from AIDS. His sister says the love and support both their mother and father, Jules, gave to Morty helped him greatly as he came to terms with being a gay man in 1970’s America.
“I think it gave him great confidence and great happiness to know he was still loved by people he loved so much.”
Jeanne Manford died in January of 2013. A month later, President Barack Obama awarded Jeanne the Presidential Citizens Medal. Suzanne traveled to Washington to accept it on her behalf.
It wasn’t the first time President Obama recognized Jeanne Manford’s strength as an activist and her importance as a role model for American parents. In 2009 he championed her accomplishments during a speech at the annual Human Rights Campaign National Dinner, calling Jeanne’s story “the story of America, of ordinary citizens organizing, agitating, educating for change, of hope stronger than hate, of love more powerful than any insult or injury.”