Manford, Morty

Morty Manford (1950-1992) 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, speaking on college campuses and at gay clubs, and organizing protest demonstrations, parades, and rallies in support of gay rights legislation in New York City and throughout the United States. Among the many gay rights organizations he co-founded were the Gay Activists 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 promote the state-wide activities of the gay rights movement.