For International Lesbian Day and LGBTQ History Month, here are some fun moments of lesbian mom history to know and share! (This is an enhanced version of a piece I posted for Lesbian Visibility Day in April; clearly lesbians are so awesome that we need two holidays to celebrate!)
This is hardly a full history—just a few notable moments and fun facts—but I hope you enjoy this look back! It’s always a good time to learn more about our past as we look to the future!.
Early Days
I like to think of Sappho (7th-6th 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.
The Modern Era
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 2006 documentary Mom’s Apple Pie: The Heart of the Lesbian Mothers’ Custody Movement.
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. Prose authors like Minnie Bruce Pratt, too, who had lost custody of her children when she came out as a lesbian, reflected, “I had learned that I could be either a lesbian or a mother of my children, either in the wilderness or on holy ground, but not both”—but then asserted, “I became determined to break the powers of the world: they would change, the powers that tried to keep me from touching my children because I touched another woman in love.”
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.
In 1985, health educator Cheri A. Pies published Considering Parenthood: A Workbook for Lesbians, which helped innumerable queer women become parents. The book offered information not only on how to start a family, but on critical related topics like making the decision to parent in the first place; building a support network; interacting with one’s family of origin; work and money issues; maintaining a healthy relationship with one’s partner; being a nonbiological mother; single parenting; disabled lesbians considering parenthood; considering another child, and choosing not to parent. With practical tips, numerous questions to ask oneself and/or one’s partner, and plenty of quotes drawn from the hundreds of lesbians Pies had worked with, much of the book feels startlingly relevant today, even though some of the terminology is dated and many of the legal details have changed. Today’s crop of books on queer parenthood stand on Pies’ shoulders.
This era was also ably documented in the film Choosing Children, by Debra Chasnoff and Kim Klausner (first released in 1984 but copyright in 1985); here’s my 2010 interview with Chasnoff on the occasion of the film’s 25th anniversary. “People would come to the screenings and you could see these little light bulbs going on over their heads, saying, ‘Oh my god, I could have a child if I wanted to?’” she reflected. I highly recommend this film, too, which is also available for streaming.
Heather Has Two Mommies, a picture book 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 phrase 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 U.S. 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 to have the role. And just this past week, Laphonza Butler became the first out LGBTQ parent to be a senator and the first Black lesbian member of Congress. We’ve made our marks in other areas as well, from music, film, and television to sports, business, and more, all while raising our children and continuing to be there for them even when they are grown.
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 have helped to set the stage so that lesbian moms, other queer parents, and our children may flourish today.