22 Morty Manford Transcript Eric: I’m Eric Marcus from Making Gay History. Over the course of two decades beginning in 1988 I conducted a hundred interviews with trailblazers from the LGBTQ civil rights move- ment. Now, with the Give Voice to History Project, I’m bringing some of those trailblazers into your classrooms to help tell the story of this part of the American Civil Rights Movement. Meet Morty Manford. In the early 1970s he was a young activist who very publicly challenged New York City’s mayor over police brutality against the city’s gay citizens. The mayor also happened to be running for president. When I interviewed Morty in 1989, his activist days were long since behind him. By then, he was a 39-year-old lawyer working for the New York State attorney general’s office. But I asked him to take me back in time, to his early days as a fearless young man. Eric: I want to ask you about an NYU [New York University] protest, uh, where you broke into the hall where the mayor was speaking. Morty: That was my 21st birthday. There had been some raids. The police were out going wild raiding the bars. They did this each year as the elections started to roll around. They’d want to build up their statistics to show the police were making arrests and they were arresting all these perverts. Those were the sorts of things they’d say in the New York Times. Anyway, we had already reached the point where we weren’t going to just stand by and let this stuff happen. And there was a big uproar at One Sheridan Square, which was a bar. And the police had physically beat some gay people who were there. The police brutality against the gays was the inspi- ration for the demonstration at NYU against John Lindsay. It was a pretty quickly organized protest. Everybody was having trouble getting inside. Somehow or another I got inside. Eric: All by yourself. You were the only one to get in. Morty: Yeah. What, maybe a thousand people sitting in the audience. And the mayor was up at the podium talking. It was just me. What was I going to do? I did what anyone else would do. I walked onto the stage and I took the podium away from John Lindsay. [Both laugh.] I walked up right next to him and I said, so the audience could hear, “The police are brutalizing gay people three blocks away from where we’re sitting…” The police harassment and attacks were even going on that night. That was one of the points that I made. I wasn’t there very long but what I said made an impression. The police dragged me off the back of the stage and they ejected me through, you know, some or another exit. After I left, the audience called the mayor to account for what was going on with the police bothering the gay community. And apparently John 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75