her son came out to her in 1980. she spent the next 46 years building queer south carolina a place to belong.

via WIS News 10 and the Post and Courier, with the Harriet Hancock Center's announcement.

In 1980, a mother in Columbia, South Carolina, listened while her son Greg told her he was gay.

What Harriet Hancock did next is the reason a lot of people in South Carolina had somewhere to go. She died on Wednesday night, September 23, at 89, days before her 90th birthday, the Harriet Hancock Center announced.

what harriet hancock built

She was a Columbia attorney, and she built the way attorneys do, one institution at a time. In 1982 she founded the city's chapter of PFLAG, the national group for the parents and families of gay kids, according to both WIS and the Post and Courier. In 1985, at the height of the AIDS crisis, she co-founded Palmetto AIDS Life Support Services. And in 1990 she organized South Carolina's first Pride march, leading more than 2,000 people down Main Street to the State House, WIS reported. That is where the title came from: the Mother of SC Pride.

The center that carries her name is, per WIS, South Carolina's first LGBTQ+ resource center, and the only LGBTQ+ community center in the state serving people of all ages.

The center explained how it started better than we can. "As she came to know other LGBTQ+ young people whose families had rejected or struggled to understand them, she realized how desperately South Carolina needed places of acceptance, support and belonging," it said, as quoted by the Post and Courier. "So Harriet began building them."

the part she knew

It would be easy to write this as a victory lap. The center did not, and neither will we. "Harriet lived long enough to see a South Carolina that changed in ways that would have been difficult to imagine when she first began this work," it said, per WIS. "She also knew that the work was unfinished."

That is what a PFLAG mom is for: the kid whose own mother is not ready yet. In one state, for more than 40 years, a lot of those kids had the same one.