Here’s a fun historical tidbit to brighten your day: Ann Bannon, whose 1950s and 60s novels of lesbian life have earned her the title “the Queen of Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” is not only a mom, but also a grandmother.
Stephanie Theobald recently interviewed the 89-year-old Bannon (a pen name for Ann Weldy) for the Daily Beast. In it, Weldy is delightfully coy about the details of her first relationship with a woman, saying that she has “two children and 6 grandchildren and some of them read The Daily Beast.”
Weldy was in fact married to a man for 27 years, including during the time that she wrote her five famous lesbian novels (Odd Girl Out (Amazon), I Am a Woman (Bookshop; Amazon), Women in the Shadows (Amazon), Journey to a Woman (Amazon), and Beebo Brinker (Bookshop; Amazon)). They had two children. After Weldy finished her fifth book, she stopped writing to focus on her job in academia, “seeking refuge” because “I had a helicopter husband keeping an eye on my every move. I also had two growing daughters.” Raising them as an out lesbian would have been nearly impossible at the time.
She finally divorced her husband in 1981. Unfortunately, her older daughter “converted to Catholicism and “does not approve of any of this at all,” she told Theobald, although Weldy insists they still “get along beautifully.” Her younger daughter, however, is “open and welcoming and loving,” and they have dinner together twice a week.
Even as Weldy sacrificed her freedom in order to raise her children, she offered a generation (or several) of other queer women images of themselves that offered inspiration and hope. And although she did not raise her children in the context of a lesbian relationship, that makes her no less a lesbian mom in my mind and no less a part of queer parenting history. As I’ve said before, the history of LGBTQ parents and our children goes back thousands of years if we take a broad view. Times may have changed (although there are doubtless still closeted LGBTQ parents raising children in non-queer relationships), but we nevertheless rest on the shoulders of many who have gone before.
I hope you’ll go read the rest of the interview to learn more about her. Her books are also available in a single omnibus edition.
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