Lesbian Mom and Daughter of Gay Dad Win Genius Grants

Winners of MacArthur “genius grants” this year include Mary Bonauto, a leading attorney in the fight for marriage equality, who is also raising two 12-year-old girls with her spouse, and cartoonist Alison Bechdel, whose dad was gay and who, through her Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip, gave many of us our first look at lesbian moms.

The MacArthur Fellowship, as the grant is officially known, is a “no-strings-attached,” $625,000 grant “to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”

Bonauto, who directs GLAD’s Civil Rights Project, was the lead attorney on the case that won marriage equality in Massachusetts, the first U.S. state to enact it, and was co-counsel on the case that won it in Connecticut. She was also co-counsel on the earlier case that brought about the nation’s first civil union law, in Vermont. In Maine, she was on the executive committee of the 2009 and 2012 ballot campaigns that fought to enact and keep marriage equality in that state. She also led GLAD’s federal efforts that won in the First District Court and Court of Appeals, and coordinated amici briefs for the Windsor case that won in the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013.  She is now working with the legal team in the case to win marriage equality in Utah.

The MacArthur Foundation notes that while she is now best known for her work on marriage, “much of her early work focused on adoption and parenting, censorship, hate crimes, and discrimination in jobs and public accommodations.”

She lives in Portland, Maine, with her spouse, Jennifer Wriggins, a professor at the University of Maine law school, and their twin daughters.

Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip was a formative part of my own coming-out years. Her most notable DTWOF collection, for the purpose of this blog, is 1993’s Spawn of Dykes to Watch Out For, in which characters Toni and Clarice become parents. DTWOF gave me perhaps the most fully realized representation of lesbian conception and parenting that I’d seen before beginning to think about parenthood myself a number of years later.

In Bechdel’s award-winning graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, she revealed that her dad was a closeted gay man. She continued her exploration of families and parenting in her similarly autobiographical Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama.

Congratulations to both Bonauto and Bechdel for well-deserved recognition of their efforts to champion family diversity in the courts and in the media!