It’s Lesbian Visibility Day, so here are a few pieces of lesbian mom history to honor those who went before us, even as we continue to move forward.
This is hardly a full history—just a few notable moments and fun facts—but I hope you enjoy this look back!
Early Days
I like to think of Sappho (6th-7th century BCE), who may have had a daughter, as the first lesbian mom. Even though we should be careful about applying modern labels to historical figures, this denizen of the Isle as Lesbos has an important symbolic place as—very literally—our Lesbian foremother.
Skipping ahead a few millennia, the first known discussion groups on lesbian motherhood were in 1956, organized by the pioneering San Francisco lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis. The organization’s newsletter, The Ladder, noted that some members were talking in discussion sections about raising children and that “it is surprising how many women are raising children in a deviant relationship (we have also learned of instances where men are undertaking this responsibility too).” The newsletter said the organization needed more data and research to be able to assist such women, and asked members to step forward if they could help.
Fighting for Custody
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 in terminology and approach. Klemesrud quoted a psychiatrist who gave the then-usual spiel about “homosexuals” being “sick” and their kids more likely to become homosexual themselves, as well as another who thought lesbians “do as good a job as any parents can.” (Current evidence is overwhelmingly for the latter.) One senses in the piece, though, 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.
Despite the mixed tone, the article conveys 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 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. For more about these pioneering organizations, I highly recommend the documentary Mom’s Apple Pie: The Heart of the Lesbian Mothers’ Custody Movement (about which more here), which is available to stream or purchase.
During this era, too, poets like Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich began to explore in their work what it meant to be a lesbian and a mother, among other identities.
The first children’s book in the U.S. to feature any queer parent was also published in this decade. Jane Severance’s 1979 When Megan Went Away was dedicated to “all children of lesbian mothers, for the special hardships they may face, and for the understanding we hope they will reach.” It tells of a girl and her mother helping each other grapple with their emotions after the mother’s break-up with her partner. It’s full of lots of 1970s lesbian references (women’s centers! softball! overalls! vests!), but much of the story holds up surprisingly well.
Being Out, Starting Families
Moving ahead just a few years brings us to the first real wave of out two-mom couples starting families together. The Sperm Bank of California began operations in 1982, the first in the country to openly serve lesbian couples and single women. This era was ably documented in the film Choosing Children, by Debra Chasnoff and Kim Klausner; here’s my 2010 interview with Chasnoff on the occasion of the film’s 25th anniversary. I recommend seeing this film, too, which is also available for streaming.
Heather Has Two Mommies, by Lesléa Newman, came out in 1989 and perhaps captured the more positive spirit of the era by being about an intact two-mom family. Heather doesn’t use the word “lesbian,” however—either or both of her moms could be bi, which I actually appreciate as being more inclusive—but since we’re talking about lesbians today, I also have to mention the 1996 book Amy Asks a Question: Grandma, What’s a Lesbian? Written by two lesbian grandmothers, it now feels rather dated, but is full of references to a certain White lesbian feminist culture of the era. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for children today (try more recent titles in my database under the “Lesbian/queer woman/mom(s)” tag or the “Grandparents (LGBTQ)” tag), but it’s a fun read for us parents, especially if we were part of that earlier generation and culture. Read more about it here; you can also borrow it free online at Open Library for an hour at a time.
By 1990, Newsweek was writing about the “gayby boom” among “homosexual men and women,” though its use of quotation marks around the term implies that Newsweek didn’t coin the term, but was quoting something already in use.
Moving Ahead
Lesbian moms were among the many LGBTQ parents and LGBTQ people of all types who helped push for marriage equality across the country, as plaintiffs, attorneys, and activists.
In 2018, Angie Craig was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Minnesota, making her the first out lesbian mom in Congress. In 2022, Karine Jean-Pierre became the first Black woman and the first out LGBTQ person to become White House Press Secretary—and also the first Black or lesbian mom.
Today, we lesbian moms (and lesbian parents of other parental titles) are part of an ever-expanding spectrum of queer parents raising (and having raised) children, continuing to fight for LGBTQ equality and other civil rights, and otherwise making a difference in our communities and our world.
Let’s take a moment, then, to be grateful for all the past lesbian moms (cis and trans) who became visible for themselves and their children, helping to set the stage for all of the lesbian moms, other queer parents, and our children to flourish today.