Over 11 years and 570 episodes, John Rabe and Team Off-Ramp scoured SoCal for the people, places, and ideas whose stories needed to be told, and the show became a love-letter to Los Angeles. Now, John is sharing selections from the Off-Ramp vault to help you explore this imperfect paradise.
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Jeanne Manford died Tuesday in Daly City CA. She was 92. Manford was one of the heroes of the gay rights movement because she founded PFLAG: Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. P-Flag is now an international group, with 200,000 and 350 chapters, and has dedicated the front page of its website to Manford:
It is truly humbling to imagine in 1972 - just 40 years ago - a simple schoolteacher started this movement of family and ally support, without benefit of any of the technology that today makes a grassroots movement so easy to organize. No Internet. No cellphones. Just a deep love for her son and a sign reading “Parents of Gays: Unite in Support for Our Children.”
I spoke with Manford in 1997 when she was living in Rochester, Minnesota. She told me it all started for her when her gay son Morty got beat up -- as police stood by -- when he was protesting for gay rights, and she wrote an angry letter to the New York Post.
There's much more of her story, including video, over at Frontiers LA.