Today marks Lesbian Visibility Day, and because the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case this week involving LGBTQ-inclusive children’s books, my mind is turning to the 1979 picture book that was the first to depict an LGBTQ character—a lesbian mom. Let’s look at its history and context.
The Story
The book is Jane Severance’s When Megan Went Away, illustrated by Tea Schook. It tells of a girl named Shannon and her mother, who help each other navigate their emotions after the mother’s break-up with her partner. Severance dedicated the book to “all children of lesbian mothers, for the special hardships they may face, and for the understanding we hope they will reach.”
The story itself does not mention the mother’s identity as a lesbian, but we can assume from the dedication that she was intended to be one. The text and homespun illustrations also give us lots of 1970s lesbian cultural references: women’s centers! softball! overalls! Vests! Vest-wearing guitar players at coffeeshops! Still, much of the story holds up surprisingly well in its exploration of the characters’ feelings, and it remains one of few picture books about LGBTQ parents and divorce/separation.
The Origins
Severance explained in a 2010 interview in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly why she chose the topic she did:
I was teaching in a preschool when I wrote Megan. I had seen that there was nothing for kids with lesbian parents. People ask why I wrote about lesbians breaking up. Partly, I was writing about what I saw. I was a very young lesbian. I didn’t know any older lesbians. I didn’t know anyone who had been together for more than a couple of years.
She added:
I was a very young lesbian working in a woman’s bookstore collective. My life was all about being a lesbian. I did lesbian theatre and lesbian marches and lesbian events. I was about twenty-one. Young lesbians today can’t understand how we were creating a community. It was a very different era…. Lesbians were different, too. We were all fierce little androgynous lesbian-feminists.
Severance also spoke in her interview about the difficulties she saw lesbian mothers facing back then. Most of them had had children in marriages to men before coming out, and could lose their children if their lesbian identity became known. As single mothers, they struggled financially, and were often estranged from their families of origin. These circumstances led to some “wretched parenting,” Severance opined, but added, “Do I think there were great lesbian mothers during that time? You betcha. Were you a lesbian mom who did a great job? Thank you—it must have been hard and you must have made a lot of sacrifice.” By the time of the interview in 2010, she said, “now I see many more lesbian moms who, single or in couples, decided to have kids on purpose. Because of that choice and because (depending on where you live) it’s just not as hard to be a lesbian anymore, I now see more mothers with the support they need to be good parents.”
In the late 70s, however, Severance saw more challenges, and an opportunity to explore one of them in a book. She had always wanted to be published, and when she saw books by the feminist book-publishing collective Lollipop Power Press at the women’s bookstore where she worked, she wrote to the address on the back, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Lollipop Power was dedicated to producing non-sexist, non-racist children’s books, including Jesse’s Dream Skirt, by Bruce Mack, about a boy who wants to wear a skirt, and Margrit Eichler’s Martin’s Father, about a single Black dad raising his son. According to 1970s North Carolina Feminisms, a 2011 undergraduate women’s studies project at Duke University:
During the time that the collective operated, women met weekly in each others’ homes. . . . For the first several years, the collective was made up strictly of volunteers. During this time, they selected three to five stories a year to publish, out of the hundreds that were submitted (they received 20-30 each week). After their fifth or sixth year, the women all chipped in to buy a printing press…. Lollipop Power Press published between 30 and 50 books in total.
A true feminist collective, Lollipop Power reached women all over the country. Women from all over the country sent in scripts to Lollipop Power….
Lollipop Power agreed to publish Megan. In 1983, it also published Severance’s Lots of Mommies, about a girl who lives with her mother and three other women, whom she also considers her mothers. The press was bought by Carolina Wren Press in 1986.
Interestingly, Severance wrote in 2010 that “Megan was kind of a cause book. Its point was that there are no books about lesbian moms and not many about breakup and divorce and so I’ll write a book that fills that niche.” Now, she said, “books that I am interested in writing have gay and lesbian characters, but there is more of a story and its point is not that mommy is a lesbian. That’s incidental to the story.”
I’ve been writing in support of that type of book for a long time, too—it’s one of the reasons my Database of LGBTQ Family Books includes a tag for “Incidental queerness.” Today’s books, I’m happy to say, are much more of a mix, with books in which the characters’ queerness is incidental to the plot as well as ones that deliberately and thoughtfully explore those identities. The best of the former, however, still show the characters acting in ways that feel authentically aligned with their queer (and other) identities; the best of the latter explore the identities without problematizing them.
Impact and Identities
The better-known Heather Has Two Mommies, by lesbian author and poet Lesléa Newman, was published 10 years after Megan (first by Newman herself and then by Alyson Publications, an LGBTQ press). Heather was the first picture book to show an intact two-mom family, and is by far the cheerier tale; there’s a reason it has had greater longevity (and a 2015 edition with updated text and new illustrations that make it feel timely even today).
It’s notable, though, that neither Megan nor Heather uses the word “lesbian” in the stories. Severance said in her interview that she deliberately didn’t use the word in her children’s books, because “I was afraid they wouldn’t be published.” (Lollipop Power seems to have overlooked the word in her dedication, however.)
Severance’s dedication, and her and Newman’s own lesbian identities, may lead us to conclude that they intended the moms to be lesbians, but the stories themselves are actually ambiguous. (Statistically, the moms are more likely to be bi than lesbian, as bi women comprise 61% of all LGBTQ parents, versus lesbians, who comprise 14%, per UCLA’s Williams Institute.) That’s fine with me; I’d rather that children of any two-mom family feel included in stories that could reflect their lives as well.
At the same time, it can be useful for children to know the words that describe how their parents—or grandparents—identify. Since we’re talking about lesbians today, I’ll mention one slightly later LGBTQ-inclusive children’s book that leaned into an exploration of lesbian identity and wasn’t afraid to use the word—the 1996 title Amy Asks a Question: Grandma, What’s a Lesbian?, created by lesbian grandmothers Jeanne Arnold and Barbara Lindquist (Mother Courage Press). It was the first picture book to feature same-sex grandparents, though it is of more historical than current interest now. It’s wordy and pedantic, and in hindsight feels almost like a parody of late-20th-century White lesbian feminist culture—the grandmothers open a women’s bookstore and have a “moon circle” ceremony to celebrate their relationship. (Lesbians who lived through that era may get a smile from reading it.)
Still, parts of the book feel warm and genuine, as when Grandma Jo says to Amy, “Each woman needs to think of herself as a lesbian before anyone else can pin that label on her. You are a lesbian only if you consider yourself one.” (For more on this title, see my full review.)
These books and others in the 80s and 90s laid the groundwork for the hundreds of LGBTQ-inclusive picture books that followed. I appreciate Severance’s groundbreaking depiction of a child with a queer parent, and the subsequent books that continued—and continue—to depict LGBTQ families and LGBTQ children with care and authenticity. Each one offers children a reflection of themselves and/or their world.
Both When Megan Went Away and Amy Asks a Question are now out of print and hard to find, but can be read free online at the Internet Archive:
For a look at the above books and even more, see my post from a couple of years ago about highlights of lesbian mom history (and if you want an even broader history, check out my “Short History of LGBTQ Parenting”). You may also enjoy these inspiring quotes from lesbian parenting books published in the 1980s through early 2000s, which convey something of the spirit and long history of lesbian parenthood, and are reminders of those on whose shoulders we stand.