I'm Eric Marcus and this is Making Gay History. For this episode we've dug into our stack of cassette tapes for a story that dates

back to the early 1970s. It's about Jean Manford and her son,

Mordin. They founded a group for parents of gay people in 1973. Today it's an international

organization called P- Flag. originally that stood for parents and friends of lesbians and gays.

It's got 400 chapters across the country.

By the time I came out to my mom in 1977, I knew about P- Flag.

So when my mom told me that she wanted me to see a psychiatrist,

I told her I'd go if she went to a P- Flag meeting.

She said no, I said no, big mistake. We both would have been better off.

But 13 years later my mother went to her first P- Flag meeting. My mom became such an activist that I had to remind her that I was the gay one,

that this was my issue.

I put a photo of my mom on Making Gay History.com

from the 1993 Gay march on Washington,

and you'll see she paid no attention to me.

Gene and Marty's story starts with a letter.

I wish you could hear this story from the beginning,

but I screwed up the audio. I thought I'd be

interviewing Jean Man for by herself but when I got to her house it turned out that

Mordy was there too so I interviewed them together. But I hadn't done a double

interview before.

They were already part way through telling me about how Jean came to write a letter to a New York City newspaper about her gay son,

when I realized there was a problem with the sound.

...