Gwen Bass’s parents, Lois and Judith, were among the first two-woman couples to start a family via donor insemination with an unknown donor. In this introspective and moving memoir, Bass shares her thoughts on how that has shaped her life, from her birth in 1982 through her own coming out as gay, becoming a parent, and connecting after decades with her own donor siblings.
In the early 1980s, there were almost no options for two-woman couples who wanted to use unknown donor insemination. (The Sperm Bank of California, the first sperm bank in the country to serve lesbian couples and single people, did not open its doors until late 1982, months after Bass was born.) When her parents found a doctor willing to help them inseminate, he would only do so if there was no record of the procedure and he provided no information about the donor’s identity. They agreed.
In her early years, Bass knew no other families like hers. She “straddled two worlds,” that of her nontraditional family and that of “everyone else’s heteronormative reality.” By the time she was in preschool, she was ‘an unwitting spokesperson for the gay movement,” sitting on panels at conferences and classes to show both prospective parents and skeptics that children of gay and lesbian parents turned out okay.
Bass explores her complicated relationship with her mom, Lois, as well as with her “other parent” Judith (who chose not to identify as a mom), and with her older brother, Judith’s son from an earlier marriage. Lois and Judith separated when Bass was five, but Bass and her brother continued to spend time with Judith, flying overseas to see her when she worked in Switzerland. “We’d become a queer collection of people held together by a bond that didn’t have a straight translation,” she writes.
The few other children with lesbian parents whom Bass knew had been born in prior heterosexual relationships. Bass learned early to code-switch, to answer the many questions classmates had about her family, but also to hide behind white lies in order to protect herself and her family.
Despite the challenges, we also see Bass developing an early resilience. Being invited to speak about having lesbian parents, she observes, “was further proof that I was part of something cool and groundbreaking.” If others thought her life must be hard, “I must have been pretty badass for meeting the challenge,” she writes.
Bass also sensed from an early age that she herself was gay, but feared that coming out would be “a form of failure, proving that gay parents do make gay children.” For many years, she tried to suppress her feelings. Eventually, however, she realized that her parents, and the lesbian community she grew up in, hadn’t “made” her gay, and she was in fact lucky to have parents “who really ‘get it.'”
After a wife, kids, and a divorce, and years of seeing her donor as simply a means to an end for her parents, Bass was motivated to try and learn something about him, initially for medical reasons and later, to connect with the donor siblings she had never known. She bonded with them over their shared experience of growing up knowing little of their donor, and pondered questions of nature and nurture.
This is a rare, full-length book by someone who grew up in the first generation of queer families formed via donor insemination; there have been some other people who have shared their stories as well, but often in anthologies or as part of a broad look at LGBTQ families (e.g., in Abigail Garner’s excellent 2004 book Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is). Throughout the narrative, Bass explores not only the chapter-heading questions people have asked her throughout her life, like, “Do you have two moms?” “What’s your dad like?” and “Are you a boy or a girl?,” but also broader ones about fitting in, the ways we disclose—or not—parts of ourselves in different environments, and the connections between biology and belonging. Her insights, though related to a childhood in an era that may seem remote now, should still have resonance for many queer families (and others formed in “nontraditional” ways) today. Immaculate Conception offers much to ponder both as a piece of queer history and as commentary on still-current themes, such as what makes a family, how we choose to share our stories, and how we find the strength to form and express our true sense of self.
