Morty Manford papers

1962-1986

Morty Manford was an activist and key strategist in the early days of the gay rights movement, a Legal Aid lawyer, and an Assistant Attorney General of New York State. While an undergraduate at Columbia University in 1971, he founded Gay People at Columbia, one of the first gay campus groups in the country. Subsequently he began writing about the goals of the gay movement, and publicizing them on speaking tours of college campuses and gay clubs throughout the United states, as well as organizing protest demonstrations, parades, and rallies in support of gay rights legislation in New York City and across the country. Among the many gay rights organizations he co-founded were three very important ones, the Gay Alliance, which strove to bring gays together as a political force, the National Coalition of Gay Activists, which publicized and coordinated rallies and demonstrations on a national scale, and the clandestine Study Group, a New York-based think-tank which worked with the gay infrastructure in the state and local political establishments to influence political and public opinion and to promote the state-wide activities of the gay rights movement.

Born in New York City in 1950, Manford was a graduate of Bayside High School in Queens. After a hiatus of several years, during which he was intensely involved in the gay rights movement, he graduated from Columbia in 1979.

Manford was a pivotal figure in the growth of the gay and lesbian rights movement in the decade after Stonewall. He was also a Legal Aid attorney, and a New York State Assistant Attorney General. After Manford came out both his parents developed into outspoken movement activists, and were co-founders with him of Parents of Gays, the first support group of its kind in the world and the forerunner of the present-day Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Manford continued his involvement as a movement ideologist, public speaker, and organizer, until 1983, but afterwards he played a less active role. Manford died in 1992 at the age of forty-two from AIDS-related complications.

On the night of June 28, 1969, Manford was at the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village when a police raid touched off spontaneous resistance by defiant gays. The rioting sent a shockwave through New York's gay community and the feeling of solidarity that was forged in its wake gave rise to the modern gay rights movement. Manford followed up his role as a witness to the riots by organizing one of the first campus gay groups in the country, Gay People at Columbia, around the issue of the gay lounge at Columbia University. He also began writing and publicly speaking on the principles and goals of the gay rights movement.

In the early years of his active participation in the movement Manford championed the use of zaps-a vivid term he coined for applying persistent public pressure on liberal politicians-New York's mayor, John Lindsay, was one-to publicly support gay civil rights. Manford also was involved in the creation of a wide spectrum of gay support groups. The proliferation of such groups, and spinoffs such as employment counseling, legal and medical advice, and assistance with housing, culminated in the acquisition by the New York Gay Activists Alliance of a large building on Wooster Street for use as a social/advocacy meeting place for gay men and lesbians. A former City firehouse, the building, called The Gay Firehouse, was a communal hub where the different strands of gay culture-social, political, ideological, literary, musical, sexual-were brought together under one roof.

Manford also arranged and coordinated demonstrations on local and national issues. Manford traveled extensively across the country speaking at colleges, liberal political meetings, and gay social clubs on the historical importance of the gay rights movement and the issues with which it was concerned and encouraged audiences to take an active part in movement demonstrations, especially against anti-gay laws and politicians in their areas. He also traveled to England and Holland where he met with gay leaders.

One of the founders in 1969 of the Gay Activists Alliance, Manford later served in parts of 1973 and 1974 as its president. In May of 1972 he accused Michael Maye, President of the Firefighters' Union, and a former prizefighter, of assaulting him at a gay rights demonstration. When Maye was acquitted of the assault charges, the case, known as the Inner Circle Affair, became a cause-célèbre in the gay community and civil liberties circles, and helped to publicize the need for a gay rights bill. In the summer of that year Manford was elected president of the National Coalition of Gay Activists, which disseminated movement news, ideas, and information, and coordinated civil rights drives throughout the United States.

Also in 1972, Manford was one of the leaders of the gay and lesbian demonstrators gathered at the Presidential National Conventions of both the Democratic and Republican parties held in Miami Beach. Earlier in the year, as a preparation for these demonstrations, he had attended the National Gay Conference held at Chicago. This important colloquium, billed as "A Strategy Session for Election '72", was organized and co-hosted by the Gay Activists Alliance of New York and the Chicago Gay Alliance. One of the purposes of the conference was to come up with strategies and tactics to be employed by delegates inside the convention halls and methods of confrontation to be used by demonstrators outside. Manford commented that it was important that the gay community be fully informed on the views of every candidate, and that the disparity between a candidate's civil rights position and refusal to take a strong position on gay rights should be made public.

Manford was a founder and president of the Lambda Club, a large community center for gays which offered medical and psychological counseling programs, and a director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a separate alliance of attorneys and educators which sought to ensure the civil rights of gay people. In 1973 he became a trustee of the National New Orleans Memorial Fund, which was created after a fire at a gay bar in the French Quarter in which 32 people died. In the same year Manford also served as the campaign manager for James Owles, the first openly gay candidate, for a seat on the New York City Council. Though Owles was not elected, his campaign made an impact on politicians by demonstrating the potential power of gays at the ballot box and emphasizing their determination to win political and statutory equality. In the process of patiently working to raise the consciousness of gay and non-gay voters the Owles campaign helped create a timely groundswell of articulate and resolute support that paved the way for the eventual passage in 1986 of a gay rights bill in the New York City Council.

By the end of the 1970s, after a decade of demonstrations, marches, picketing, sit-ins, and zaps, the gay rights movement had achieved a foothold in the back rooms and corners of the political arena where policy traditionally is made. Manford had taken a decisive step in this direction in 1975 when he became a member of the controversial Study Group (1: Lee Solomon broadcast over New York radio station WBAI in 1977. (See Audio cassette 02825). Lee Solomon, who had just finished an article on the Study Group, says that it was "originally a consciousness-raising group for gay politicians formed during Bella Abzug's campaign for the U. S. Senate in 1970", and charges it with being an anti-democratic elite covertly intervening in gay politics. Manford telephones to vehemently deny that there is anything covert, sinister, or manipulative about the Study Group, and other listeners call to support or oppose Solomon's charges. On this interesting question also see Subjects Files under Study Group and Audio cassettes 02822, 02824, and 02848.), a nucleus of predominantly gay and lesbian New York intellectuals with ties to state and local political parties. The core leadership was composed almost entirely of openly gay men and lesbians, among them Manford, Kenneth Sherrill, Ethan Geto, Michele de Milly, Howard Brown, Douglas Ireland, and Allen Roskoff. The members were either primarily activists, like Manford and de Milly, or were, like Howard Brown and Ethan Geto, veteran members of a politically sophisticated gay infrastructure inside New York's labyrinthine permanent government of career civil servants. Members of the Study Group used their political savvy and scholarly resources to gain crucial ideological access to the powerful state and local policy-making establishments where they conducted a campaign to raise the political consciousness of both parties and to garner support at City Hall and in Albany for state-wide pro-gay demonstrations and other movement activities.

In 1978 Manford worked as a director of the summer Comprehensive Employment & Training Act (CETA) youth programs of the New York City Department of General Services. From late 1978 through September 1979 he was a staff analyst at the Office of Project Management and Analysis, Department of General Services. Two years later he graduated from the Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University and in 1983 he was accepted before the Bar of the State of New York. Subsequently he was a staff attorney and supervising attorney at the Legal Aid Society of New York where he worked with indigent defendants. In 1987 he became an Assistant Attorney General of the State of New York. Manford died in 1992 at the age of forty-two from AIDS-related complications.