Here's Monday's Hero: Jeanne Manford, Founder of PFLAG

I first learned about PFLAG when I was binging the show Queer As Folk in 2003. This was back when Netflix sent you the DVD disks in the mail. The main character, Michael, has a mother, Debbie, who supports him tirelessly in his queer indentity. She is always wearing pride colors and is an active PFLAG member.

When JJ came out, the first thing I knew to do was reach out to PFLAG. And they have been an incredible resource for me. The monthly support group not only held me up: they clarified a lot of matters for me that I didn’t yet understand.

I never thought much about how PFLAG came to be until I read the article “Family Values: How a Mother’s Love for Her Gay Son Started a Revolution” in the New Yorker about Jeanne Manford.

To get an even better sense of who this woman was (alongside her husband), watch this clip of her on The Pat Collins show in 1972. It’s AMAZING.

From Kathryn Schulz’s article:

“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.”