May 14: Morty Manford and His Mom

Morty Manford, a gay activist and attorney whose harsh beating in 1972 by Michael Maye, the head of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, eventually led to passage of New York’s gay rights ordinance, died of AIDS-related complications on this date in 1992. In 1969, at age 18, Manford was a patron at the Stonewall Bar and witnessed the police raid that led to the Stonewall Uprising, after which he became active in the fledgling Gay Activists Alliance. When he was attacked, with police idly standing by, Manford had been distributing GAA leaflets at the Inner Circle annual dinner, an event hosted by the New York media for civic and business leaders. His assailant was acquitted, despite numerous eyewitnesses to the attack. Shortly after, Morty Manford’s parents, Jeanne and Jules (a teacher and a dentist), founded Parents of Gays, which eventually grew into Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, a national organization with some 500 chapters and more than 200,000 members. Since 1993, the Queens, New York chapter of PFLAG has annually bestowed the Morty Manford Award for “pioneering” gay activism.

“I’m very shy. I was not the type of person who belonged to organizations. I never tried to do anything. But I wasn’t going to let anybody walk over Morty.” —Jeanne Manford