It’s LGBTQ History Month, so here’s a revised and expanded version of a piece I wrote last year on the history of LGBTQ parenting in the U.S.
Creating and Maintaining Our Families
We first hear of out LGBTQ parents around the time of World War II, mostly in the context of cases that denied them child custody after divorce from different-sex, cisgender spouses. Starting in the 1970s, however, a few state courts upheld custody rights for transgender, gay, and lesbian parents, though some still required that they not live with a partner or engage in “homosexual activities.” It wasn’t until 1995 that a state’s highest court (Wisconsin) ruled for the first time that a nonbiological mother could try and show that it would be in the best interests of her child for her to remain in the child’s life after parental separation.
In the 1960s and 70s, as the nascent LGBTQ rights movement buoyed the community, out LGBTQ people also began starting families. Bill Jones, a gay man, in 1968 became the first single father to adopt a child in California and one of the first nationally—although, as he told NPR in 2015, he was obliquely advised by a social worker not to mention that he was gay. A decade later, New York became the first state not to reject adoption applicants solely because of “homosexuality.” A gay man in New York in 1979 became the first out LGBTQ person in the country publicly known to have adopted a child, and the same year, a gay couple in California became the first same-sex couple known to have jointly adopted a child.
It wasn’t until 1993, however, that Vermont and Massachusetts began allowing same-sex couples to adopt jointly statewide. New Jersey followed and in 1997 made this explicit in its adoption policy. Not until 2010, however, did the last state, Florida, overturn a ban on adoption by gay men and lesbians. Several other states continued to ban unmarried couples, though, effectively stopping same-sex couples from adopting until marriage equality became federal law in 2015. And it took a lawsuit and another year for Mississippi to drop its law against adoption by same-sex couples.
In the 1970s, too, female couples and single women increasingly began to start their families together through pregnancy. In 1982, the Sperm Bank of California opened as the first fertility clinic in the country to serve this market (although many queer people had been doing home inseminations for years before).
In 1999, Matt Rice became possibly the first transgender man to give birth in the U.S., although it is hard to tell how the few people in the 19th century who gave birth but lived as men would have identified. (They are our queer parental forebears, regardless.) The same year, a British gay couple had children through surrogacy in California, where a court for the first time allowed two gay dads to be on their children’s birth certificate.
In 1985, some same-sex couples first obtained what became known as “second-parent adoptions” to secure a child’s legal connection to a nonbiological parent.
Strength in Community
LGBTQ parents have long come together to support each other, as well as to contribute to the broader LGBTQ rights movement. In 1956, the pioneering San Francisco lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis held the first known discussion groups on lesbian motherhood. The first lesbian mothers’ activist group, the Lesbian Mothers Union, formed in the same area 15 years later.
In 1974, several lesbian mothers and friends in Seattle formed the Lesbian Mothers National Defense Fund to help those in custody disputes. Similar groups for lesbian mothers and gay fathers formed in other cities. In 1977, lawyers Donna Hitchens and Roberta Achtenberg in San Francisco began the Lesbian Rights Project, which helped both lesbian moms and gay dads. It evolved into the National Center for Lesbian Rights, still helping LGBTQ parents and others across the spectrum today.
Also launched in the same era (1979) was the Gay Fathers Coalition, which ultimately became Family Equality Council, the national organization for LGBTQ families. Out of this, too, came a program by and for children of LGBTQ parents, which in 1999 spun off to become COLAGE.
By March 1990, lesbian and gay parents had become visible enough for Newsweek to coin a term, reporting that “a new generation of gay parents has produced the first-ever ‘gayby boom.’”
Seeing Ourselves, Teaching Others
Depictions of LGBTQ parents in media also go back over 40 years. ABC’s That Certain Summer (1972), about a gay dad who comes out to his teen son, was the first television movie to depict a queer parent. In 1994, the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Parents Association produced Both of My Moms Names Are Judy: Children of Lesbians and Gays Speak Out, the first educational film for elementary school teachers about LGBT families. It was followed in 1996 by It’s Elementary from Groundspark, a film for educators and parents on how to talk with children about gay men and lesbians. it was widely distributed to schools, aired on 100 public television stations in 1999, and was screened at the Clinton White House, although it also faced challenges from conservatives.
In cinema, The Kids Are All Right, starring Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, in 2010 became the first major feature film to focus on an LGBTQ couple and their children. It won Golden Globe Awards for Best Motion Picture and Best Actress (Bening), and four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.
For a look at LGBTQ characters in children’s film and television, please see the piece I wrote for Xfinity this past June.
In print media, Jane Severance’s 1979 When Megan Went Away, about a girl trying to understand the separation of her biological and nonbiological mothers, was the first picture book in the U.S. to show a same-sex relationship. It was Lesléa Newman’s 1989 Heather Has Two Mommies
We also have milestones of visibility and recognition in the political realm, too. President Obama in 2009 gave us the first explicit mention of same-sex parents in a presidential proclamation. In announcing September 28 as Family Day, he said, “Whether children are raised by two parents, a single parent, grandparents, a same-sex couple, or a guardian, families encourage us to do our best and enable us to accomplish great things.”
And in 2011, the U.S. State Department updated passport applications to say “Mother or Parent 1” and “Father or Parent 2” instead of just “Mother” and “Father.” That was the same year that Jared Polis (D-Colo.) became the first out LGBTQ parent in Congress. He’s now running for governor of Colorado, and there are more than three dozen other out LGBTQ parents running for office at the federal, state, and local levels.
Marriage Rites and Parental Rights
LGBTQ people were becoming parents and securing parental rights long before marriage equality was a feasible goal. The histories of marriage equality and parental rights have since intertwined at points, although we should be careful not to conflate the two. In recent decades, some have argued against marriage equality by saying that children need both a mother and a father. Marriage equality, they claim, would also require that “homosexuality” be taught in schools. That fear played a large part in the passage of Proposition 8, California’s 2008 marriage equality ban. LGBTQ advocates flipped this around, however, through visibility, legitimate social science research, and court briefs that quoted young people raised by same-sex couples. The U.S. Supreme Court then cited children’s well-being as a key argument in favor of marriage equality in its 2013 Windsor and 2015 Obergefell rulings. It took another Supreme Court case, however (Pavan v. Smith), to affirm in June 2017 that marriage equality means both parents in a married, same-sex couple have the right to be on their children’s birth certificates and be legally recognized as parents.
Marriage equality also allowed same-sex couples to adopt in several states that had not previously allowed unmarried couples to do so—although 10 states have now implemented “religious exemption” laws that allow child care agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ people and others in adoption and foster care.
At the same time, a different ten states plus D.C. now recognize non-gestational parents as legal parents, regardless of marital status, if they consent to the conception of a child born using assisted reproduction; the remaining 40 states lack clear statute or case law on the legal status of unmarried non-gestational parents. That means we still have work to do.
Looking Back to Look Ahead
There is much more to be written about the history of LGBTQ parents, both as a movement and in terms of our contributions as individuals. (See this post for a few resources.) This goes doubly for transgender and genderqueer parents, about whom much less has been written, and for bisexual parents, many of whom have likely been misidentified as gay or lesbian if they were in same-sex relationships, or overlooked if they were not. We also need more studies that look at queer parenting history through the lenses of particular racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds.
Delving further in time and space, we find many parents under the queer umbrella—including the poet Sappho c. 600 BCE, Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, and much later, writers Oscar Wilde and Vita Sackville-West, comedian Jackie “Moms” Mabley, poet Lord Byron, and jazz musician Billy Tipton. Did their queerness inform their relationships with their children? Did being a parent impact how they expressed their queer identities? And how can we write books about them for our children that celebrate both? I hope you’ll ponder these questions as we reflect on our past this month—and as we look to the future.
