It’s Lesbian Visibility Day, so here are a few tidbits of early visible lesbian mom history to honor those who went before us. (Plus a bonus photo of my own family being visible.)
The first known discussion groups on lesbian motherhood began in 1956, organized by the pioneering San Francisco lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis. The first lesbian mothers’ activist group, the Lesbian Mothers Union, formed in the same area 15 years later to try and help lesbian moms fighting ex-husbands for child custody. Its founder, Pat Norman, was the first openly lesbian or gay employee of the San Francisco Health Department and a leader in addressing the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. (She was portrayed by Whoopi Goldberg in the 2017 television film When We Rise.)
One of the earliest major newspaper articles about lesbian moms was the 1973 New York Times piece “Lesbians Who Try to be Good Mothers.” Reporter Judy Klemesrud spoke with members of a lesbian mothers’ group in New York City, noting also that “One third of the members of the New Jersey Daughters of Bilitis (a lesbian organization) are mothers.”
Much of that article feels extraordinarily dated now. Klemesrud noted that one of the women “was mannish in appearance”—an expression no legitimate journalist would use today. She also used the term “nonparent” to refer to nonbiological mothers, another happily outdated terminology.
Although Klemesrud quoted a psychiatrist who gave the then-usual spiel about “homosexuals” being “sick” and their kids more likely to become homosexual themselves, she quoted another who thought lesbians “do as good a job as any parents can.” She noted that in one of the few (at the time) custody cases involving a lesbian mom, the mother won custody. She hinted, too, that lesbian moms in such cases may have benefited in an odd way from the stereotyped gender roles of the time—one of the interviewees opines that “most men aren’t interested in having custody of their children.”
One also senses how parents became a key force behind a growing push for marriage equality and other domestic rights. Klemesrud wrote:
Several of the women said they were distressed because their families weren’t eligible for things that heterosexual couples take for granted, such as a legal marriage, joint income tax returns, family membership at the local “Y,” family rates on airplanes, family hospitalization plans, certain insurance policies, charge accounts, inheritance rights, and the adoption of children.
Go read the rest to marvel at the energy and resilience of this early generation of out lesbian moms.
The next year, in 1974, several lesbian mothers and friends in Seattle formed the Lesbian Mothers National Defense Fund, also with the goal of helping lesbian moms caught up in custody disputes. Similar groups for lesbian mothers and gay fathers soon 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 parents and others across the LGBTQ spectrum today.
Let’s take a moment, then, to think of all the past lesbian moms who became visible for themselves and their children, and helped set the stage for all of the lesbian moms, other queer parents, and our children today.