The year 1973 was monumental in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights. The American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder, and the events that followed made the year a key time for the community that validated queer identity.
In the same year, a number of LGBTQ+ advocacy groups were established, three of them – PFLAG, Lambda Legal and the National LGBTQ Task Force – recently celebrated their semicentennial, commemorating 50 years of advocacy and looking forward to the future.
The History of Lambda Legal, the National LGBTQ Task Force and PFLAG
Lambda Legal is an American Civil Rights organization. Their focus has and remains to center impact litigation, education and policy work for LGBTQ+ communities, as well as people living with HIV.
The organization held their first official meeting on Nov. 10, 1973. Among those present for that historic moment were founding attorney William J. Thom and other founding members E. Carrington Bogan and Michael J. Lavery. Lambda Legal also elected their first board of directors at that meeting, among them Rodney L. Eubanks, Shepherd Raimi and Nicholas Russo.
Over the next two decades, the organization’s growth expanded quickly, right along with the pace of the developing LGBTQ+ movement. In 1974 Lambda Legal had their first go at fighting for the rights of LGBTQ+ students when an organization at the University of New Hampshire began sponsoring events on campus. When the state’s Governor threatened to cut all funds to the university, Lambda Legal sued and won, allowing the gay and lesbian student’s group to hold meetings and organize the same way other groups did.
By 1991 Lambda Legal took on what was likely the most prominent LGBTQ case in its history at that time: Guardianship of Sharon Kowalski. Kowalski and her partner Karen Thompson had been together for four years when a car accident left Kowalski paralyzed. Her parents refused to acknowledge her partner, moved Kowalski to a nursing home 200 miles away and barred Thompson from having any contact. Following an eight-year battle and a Lambda Legal Amicus brief, Thompson eventually won the right to bring her partner home.
With the arrival of the 21st century, Lambda Legal, more solidly established than ever before, made groundbreaking history with the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case, which overturned all sodomy laws across the country. But there was more to come! In 2015 Lambda Legal’s involvement with Obergefell v. Hodges, led to a decision that secured marriage equality for all same-sex couples in the United States.
“Since 1973, Lambda Legal has fiercely advocated for the LGBTQ+ community and, since the 1980s, for everyone living with HIV. No matter what effort has been launched to force us back into the closet or to undercut our fully lived equality – we have beaten back those efforts in the court of law.” said Kevin Jennings, CEO of Lambda Legal. “Now more than ever, the LGBTQ+ community must and will stand up and fight for our rights. We vow to keep fighting for the next 50 years to protect and advance our rights and freedoms.”
The National LGBTQ Task Force was founded in New York City in October 1973 by a group of activists who were crucial in post-Stonewall advocacy. The founding members included Dr. Bruce Voeller, Barbara Gittings, Frank Kameny, Dr. Howard Brown, Arthur Bell, Ron Gold, Nathalie Rockhill and Martin Duberman. The task force played a critical role in the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973. From there, they continued to make strides toward ending the stigma associated with queer identity.
In March 1977, the task force met with then President Jimmy Carter’s Assistant Margaret Costanza, marking the first time queer activists met at the White House with a leading official to discuss gay rights in American History. Six years later, co-founder Voeller led an effort which successfully reclassified what was then called Gay-related Immune Deficiency Disorder (GRID) to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The AIDS Pandemic devastated queer communities during this time, and most of the world’s medical experts and governments were doing minimal work to intervene. The task force established the AIDS Action Council, the United States’ first advocacy group focusing on public policy and funding for AIDS research.
Among other accomplishments, the Task Force was one of the main organizers of the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which over 200,000 people attended. The march served as a protest against the federal government’s inaction up to that point regarding the AIDS crisis and the Supreme Court’s decision in the Bowers v. Hardwick case, which upheld Georgia’s sodomy laws.
The organization is also responsible for the first National AIDS Memorial Quilt, which has continued to be a symbol of those we’ve lost to AIDS.
“Now more than ever we have the power to define the future we want; a world where every LGBTQ person can be themselves without any barriers,” former Executive Director Rea Carey said. “We have worked hard for decades to create this momentum. Let’s seize this opportunity, let’s be ourselves fully, and let’s make a future together that’s worthy of our struggle.”
PFLAG was founded at a time when the majority of psychiatrists considered homosexuality to be a mental disorder — gay and lesbian bars were still being raided, queer people were institutionalized and laws were passed criminalizing same-sex relations.
Jeanne Manford, one of PFLAG’s founders, went to the Christopher Street Liberation Day march with her son Morty in 1972. She carried a sign with the words “Parents of Gays: Unite in Support for Our Children,” and she soon became known as the the first parent to walk in a Pride march.
Prior to marching in 1972, Jeanne received a call from the police when Morty was arrested after being beaten and thrown down an escalator by a firefighter when he was protesting a meeting of a homophobic parody group. Morty was hospitalized for days after this, and while there, he asked his mom if she would march with him in two months at the Christopher Street Liberation Day march, which she agreed to.
“They screamed! They yelled! They ran over and kissed me. ‘Would you talk to my mother?’ ‘Wow, if my mother saw me here.’ … They just couldn’t believe that a parent would do that,” Manford said in an interview years later.
Those interactions at the march inspired Manford to collaborate with her son to create a support group called Parents of Gays, or POG, in a church in New York’s Greenwich Village. Around 20 people attended the first meeting in 1973. The organization then rebranded itself as Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and then eventually, it was shortened to PFLAG.
Now, there are over 400 chapters of PFLAG across the country.
“For 50 years, people have walked into PFLAG meetings worried about their loved ones. There, they learn that the people they love are still the same people they always knew and loved,” Jeanne’s daughter Suzanne Manford Swan said at PFLAG’s 50th anniversary GALA. She called the organization “a beacon of hope, love and acceptance for millions of people around the world.” She also called on members to “recommit ourselves to the work that still lies ahead.”
Where They Are Today
After numerous victories for the LGBTQ community, Lambda Legal continues to fight against cruel, sustained, despicable and ignorant attacks on the LGBTQ+ community and especially transgender, nonbinary and intersex people, as well as those in other marginalized communities.
Following many legal successes, other notable pending cases include Dekker v. Weida, Florida’s anti-transgender health care rule; Doe v. Abbott and PFLAG v. Abbott, which challenges the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services’ attempt to investigate and charge parents who work with medical professionals to provide their children with medically necessary gender-affirming care (and other similar cases in multiple states around the country); BPJ v. West Virginia State Board of Education, which bans girls and women who are transgender from participating in school sports; and Roe v. Critchfield, where Lambda Legal is representing an Idaho transgender student challenging the school’s discriminatory ban on trans students using school facilities consistent with their gender identity.
“Make no mistake, Lambda Legal is ready and prepared, and has no illusions about the fights ahead,” stated Jenny Pizer, Chief Legal Officer of Lambda Legal. “For 50 years, we have confronted bigotry and opportunistic ignorance in many forms, defending our community and steadily establishing … breakthrough precedents in courts nationwide. Our litigation strategy in the coming decades will continue to be proactive and determined [and] we will continue to call on the American public and our elected leaders to reject the extremists working to impose their narrow, self-serving orthodoxy on all of us…”
The National LGBTQ Task Force continues its advocacy work in a political environment where queer people have been demonized by legislators, public policy and more. Their website currently has four different areas the task force focuses on: democracy, equity, faith and power. There are three separate initiatives the task force established to advocate for public policy addressing LGBTQ+ issues, including voter mobilization (Queer the Vote), reminding people to participate in the Census (Queer the Census) and networking hundreds of organizations to lobby for policy change (FedWatch).
These initiatives all are working toward the organization’s mission statement, which states:
“The National LGBTQ Task Force is dedicated to achieving freedom and justice for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer people, and their families through proactive, targeted, change-inducing initiatives. As a progressive racial, economic, and social justice organization, the Task Force is working to help build and sustain a society that values and respects the diversity of human expression and identity and achieves equity for all.”
More than 400 local chapters of PFLAG across the country continue the organization’s mission of educating parents and families of queer folks about allyship. Charlotte has its own chapter, with Karen Graci as its executive director.
“Our mission is to create a caring and affirming world for LGBTQ+ people and those who love them,” Graci explains. “We do that through peer support, education, and advocacy.”
The local chapter hosts workshops and peer support groups to educate loved ones of LGBTQ+ identifying people to help them learn about the community and what allyship looks like. PFLAG Charlotte uses four locations in its surrounding communities to reach out to families, queer folks and anyone interested in learning how to be a supportive ally to LGBTQ+ people.
“What that peer support looks like is we meet people right where they are in their journey, so for the most part, people who are showing up in our peer support spaces are parents or caregivers or grandparents, and they come from a variety of perspectives,” Graci shares. “What we find is after that educational program, a lot of parents, caregivers, grandparents, whoever was there might end up actually showing up again in a peer support space just to learn more, or because they appreciated the sense of community that they started feeling in there.”
PFLAG Charlotte’s work has been crucial, especially after the North Carolina General Assembly passed anti-LGBTQ+ legislation including the “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” which prohibits the instruction of LGBTQ+ history and issues in grades kindergarten through four and forces teachers to “out” students who divulge their sexuality or gender identity.
“What the data shows is for LGBTQ+ youth, support has a direct impact on life outcomes,” she explains. “That can look like support from the family, from school and support from other community organizations. We have worked with a number of area schools on programs for faculty and staff … with the whole goal being to take a deeper dive into why this matters and how you respond in school to your LGBTQ+ youth does directly impact their outcomes.” ::