Author Kirsty Loehr takes us on a whirlwind tour of queer parenting and methods of family creation from Sappho onward, interspersed with humorous commentary and insights from her own experiences as a queer mom (but with one unfortunate error about a key LGBTQ family-building method, as I explain below).
The book, Loehr says, is for queer people who have ruled out having children because they never thought it possible or that it did not exist in history, as well as for those who know having children is an option “but don’t know where to start.” She covers some of the same ground that I covered in my own, unrelated “A Short History of LGBTQ Parenting” post back in 2018 (based on a 2017 original) and other posts collected on my Remembering LGBTQ Families page, but the book format allows for some additions (particularly related to non-Western examples) and extra detail, plus more tangents and personal reflections.
Loehr reminds us of some of the famous queer parents throughout history (including Oscar Wilde and Vita Sackville-West), and gives us glimpses of queer parenting in several pre-colonial, non-Western cultures. She looks, too, at the first efforts within the queer community to support queer parents (who mostly had kids in heterosexual marriages before coming out), early attempts at intentional queer parenthood, backlash and advocacy, and more. In the modern era, she focuses on the U.K. and the U.S., and the political, legal, and social challenges faced by queer parents—as well as the solutions they found.
Most of the legal challenges she describes are based on U.K. law and focus on whether both partners in a couple can be on their children’s birth certificates; U.S. parentage laws are covered in much less detail. Loehr does discuss the efforts of early U.S. lesbian rights groups to secure legal protections for lesbian mothers, for example, but doesn’t mention the long-standing need in the U.S. for co-parent (second-parent) adoptions, court orders of parentage, or the equivalent, even for married couples who are both on the birth certificate, which has been a major issue for many queer families in the U.S.
Overall, though, it’s an entertaining and informative read, but I have to point out one significant error. Loehr writes: “In 2007, the CEFER Institute in Barcelona, Spain, made headlines when they discovered a new way to make babies, because, you know, IVF just isn’t complicated enough. This was reciprocal IVF, and, as mentioned, it was pretty much a game changer in terms of how queer people could have children.” Actually, RIVF dates back to at least 1995, possibly earlier, and attributing its invention to CEFER in 2007 is an unfortunate error that has been propagating online, as I have explained here. My spouse and I started our own journey with RIVF in 2002.
The book also doesn’t quite get things right when it asserts, “DOMA was then replaced by the Respect for Marriage Act—a much less aggressive term that required the US federal government, along with all fifty states and five territories, to recognise the validity of same-sex marriage and their families.” That’s true, but misses a key fact. The RMA ensures that if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns its marriage equality rulings, the federal government will continue to recognize same-sex couples’ marriages, and it requires all U.S. states and territories to extend full faith and credit to legally performed out-of-state marriages of same-sex couples (among others)—but it does not guarantee that all states will continue to let same-sex couples marry, should that be overturned at the federal level.
This is not an academic history, though, and what it may lack in detail in some places, it makes up for in relatability. Loehr weaves in plenty of her own often humorous insights on much of the history she covers, along with her own story of starting a family. She also offers family-building information like a multi-page description of the reciprocal IVF (RIVF) process she and her ex-wife used, using one person’s egg and the other’s womb—the same way my spouse and I started our family.
The book is not intended to be a complete history of LGBTQ parenting, and readers shouldn’t expect it to be. It is, however, an enthusiastic, personal look at some of the queer foreparents on whose shoulders we stand and how they formed and protected their families despite the odds.
Loehr writes, “I hope that [the book] will give queer people the tools to start their journey, but also the quiet confidence that queer parenting is not a newfangled innovation but something that has been a part of society forever.” That’s the same goal that has driven my own coverage of LGBTQ parenting history, and I welcome this book and its contributions to the cause.
