Jeanne Manford, the founder of PFLAG, loved her children as many parents strive to but few achieve: unconditionally.
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.
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.
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. This pride in her son proved strategic, because it meant that she could never be baited or shamed.
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 “” and now the host of a podcast by the same name, told me.
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