LGBTQI History: A Sonoma County Timeline 1947-2000.
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In 1970, Sandy Schuster, mother of four, and Madeline Isaacson, mother of two, met at a Pentecostal church in Seattle. They fell in love and subsequently left their husbands to live together with their kids. The church forced them out, and in 1972, their husbands sued for full custody of the children.
They nearly won.
Determined to support Schuster and Isaacson, Seattle activists founded the Lesbian Mothers’ National Defense Fund (LMNDF). It became one of the first U.S. organizations to offer support and legal advice to lesbians grappling with child custody issues. Thanks to LMNDF’s work, Schuster and Isaacson retained custody of their kids.
My own mother wasn’t so lucky.
She came out in 1979 and fled our abusive father’s posh suburban house with my younger siblings and me. We moved into her new girlfriend’s duplex in a scrappy Southern California beach town. Mom had no job, no checking account, and no clue that she might lose custody of her kids. She knew nothing of LMNDF, so when my outraged father sued for full child custody, he won.
We grew up plagued by depression, baffled over why we couldn’t live with our beloved mother—former leader of my sister’s and my Brownie troop and hostess of the best kids’ birthday parties in town. I knew no other adolescents with lesbian mothers. I thought my siblings and I were the only ones until I discovered Abigail Garner’s 2004 book Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell it Like It Is.
Only then did I begin to realize just how many lesbian mothers and their children had been forcibly separated in the Dark Ages of the 1970s and early 1980s. When documentarians Jody Laine, Shan Ottey, and Shad Reinstein found an essay I’d written for The Advocateabout my mother’s experience and contacted me to appear in their film Mom’s Apple Pie: The Heart of the Lesbian Mothers’ Custody Movement, I jumped at the chance.
At last, here were the stories that had eluded me as a teen and young adult—stories similar to my mother’s and mine. It’s impossible to estimate just how many mothers came out and lost custody of their children during this era; stigma and shame kept parents and kids from telling the truth about how legal systems had ripped their families apart. But happily, some of these families remained together.
According to statistics cited in Mom’s Apple Pie, the Seattle-based Lesbian Mothers’ National Defense Fund provided assistance to over 400 lesbian mothers between 1974 and 1980. Other organizations followed suit—two San Francisco lawyers founded The Lesbian Rights Project in 1977, and two years later, urban gay dads who had been previously married to women launched the Gay Fathers Coalition. The former project became today’s National Center for Lesbian Rights, while the latter became the Family Equality Council—both of which serve queer parents across the country.
Most helpful to me was COLAGE, formerly known as Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere, affiliated with the Family Equality Council. Here, I found peers who spoke to our shared experiences of growing up with queer parents. Some, like me, remained in the closet about our moms and dads throughout middle and high school because of the repercussions of fraught custody battles. Others, enviable for their confidence and savvy, grew up out and proud, marching in parades alongside their parents.
Thanks to the efforts of these organizations and others, newly-out parents in 2022 seldom lose full custody of their kids, and many children grow up with a strong sense of in-person and online community among others with queer parents. My own daughter came out last year—a revelation worthy of celebrating both for her own powerful sense of self and for the vast network of support systems around her.
I remember Sandy Schuster and Madeline Isaacson and the queer parent activists of the 1970s with reverence. And I remember my own mother, gone since 2019, with admiration. She honored her identity and fought my father and a homophobic legal system alone, determined to be a kind and compassionate guiding force for my siblings and me her whole life.
She succeeded.
Melissa Hart is the author, most recently, of Daisy Woodworm Changes the World and Better with Books: 500 Diverse Books to Ignite Empathy and Encourage Self-Acceptance in Tweens and Teens. Learn more at www.melissahart.com.
A Russian court on Tuesday fined TikTok for failing to delete LGBTQ material, the country’s latest crackdown on Big Tech companies.
The Tagansky District Court in Moscow issued the 3 million ruble ($50,000) penalty to the short-video sharing platform following a complaint by Russian regulators.
TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance Ltd., didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to the case file, state communications regulator Roskomnadzor complained about a video published on the platform earlier this year that breaches Russian laws against promoting “LGBT, radical feminism and a distorted view on traditional sexual relations.”
The Russian government has been stepping up efforts to enforce greater control over the internet and social media.
Earlier this year, a court fined chat service WhatsApp and disappearing message platform Snapchat for failing to store Russian users’ data on local servers, following complaints by Roskomnadzor.
Music streaming service Spotify and Match Group, which owns dating app Tinder, also have been hit by Russian fines.
The U.S. Supreme Court began its new term Monday, which is shaping to be historical.
Notably, associate justice Ketanji Brown Jackson will have heard her first arguments as the court’s first Black woman. But this term comes as the court has its lowest approval rating ever, with Gallup reporting a historically low approval rate of 40 percent in the wake of last term’s Dobbs decision which overturned Roe vs. Wade and took with it decades of precedent with the stripping of reproductive rights from Americans.
This term will bring major controversies over affirmative action, voting, religion, free speech, and gay rights. The court will decide whether LGBTQ+ people are protected from discrimination in business or whether a business owner can refuse to serve a group of people based on religious beliefs. If this sounds familiar, it is.
And the court’s conservative supermajority of six judges is positioned to tower over the court.
In 303 Creative L.L.C. v. Elenis, a battleground of the culture wars returns: Do businesses have the right to refuse customer services based on their religious beliefs?
As the justices consider the line between someone’s religious beliefs and state laws protecting LGBTQ+ people from discrimination, they will examine whether a Colorado designer can refuse to design a website for same-sex couples’ weddings.
The Colorado anti-discrimination law at issue, in this case, is the same one that was brought Masterpiece Cakeshop before the court in 2018 when the justices ruled in favor of baker Jack Phillips, who refused to bake the wedding cake of a gay couple. However, they did not resolve the larger question of when businesses may use religious objections to refuse service. Instead, the justices only decided that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission displayed bias against his religious views in ruling against Phillips.
The new case is that of Lorie Smith, who owns a website design firm that claims to serve queer customers but intends to limit its wedding-related services to celebrations of straight couples’ unions. According to her, providing those services to LGBTQ+ couples violates her right to free speech.
A disagreement arose among the justices in the majority over whether the logic of Dobbs should lead to reconsideration of other landmark decisions, including the one establishing a constitutional right to marriage equality. As a reliably anti-LGBTQ+ justice on the high court, Clarence Thomas stood out by pursuing, among other things, marriage equality in his concurring opinion in Dobbs.
In the past, Thomas has made clear that he would like to see Obergefell overturned, and Alito has said so too.
The new case does not directly address that question, but it might provide hints about the court’s commitment to LGBTQ+ rights and how quickly it aims to move to the hard right with rulings potentially meant to strip Americans of further rights.
Yesterday Erika Hilton (she/her) in São Paulo and Duda Salabert (she/her) in Minas Gerais won their elections to the Brazilian Congress, making them the first trans people ever elected to Congress in the country’s history. Despite ongoing anti-LGBTQ hate perpetuated by the Bolsonaro administration, a record number of out LGBTQ people ran for Congress this year in Brazil – over 300 – including a record number of trans people. With yesterday’s results, LGBTQ representation in Brazil will double from 9 to 18 elected officials, 16 of whom are women.
Alhelí Partida, Director of Global Programs at LGBTQ Victory Institute, released the following statement about the election:
“Brazil’s LGBTQ community – and trans community in particular – has never had equitable representation in government. But with a record number of LGBTQ candidates running this year, it is clear that LGBTQ leaders are stepping up to make change from within the halls of power. Erika and Duda showed true courage in their campaigns for Congress, running during a time of increased homophobia and transphobia at the hands of President Bolsonaro and his followers. Their success is not just a sharp rebuke to these bigots, but a beacon of hope to Brazil’s vibrant LGBTQ community.
“While we hope their success is a sign of better days, Brazil remains an incredibly tough place to engage as an out leader – where homophobia, transphobia, death threats and worse are common. In 2018, we lost one of our own, Rio de Janeiro Councilwoman Marielle Franco, assassinated by anti-LGBTQ and anti-women attackers. While her loss continues to be devastating, she has become an icon and the fuel needed to inspire more courageous LGBTQ Brazilians to raise their voices.”
In preparation for the 2022 election cycle in Brazil, LGBTQ Victory Institute and #VoteLGBT held two trainings to support LGBTQ candidates. In total, there were 63 participants, 28 of whom ran for office this year – including three trans women who ran for Congress. #VoteLGBT, Victory Institute, Equal Rights in Action Fund and Google also released “The State of Brazilian LGBT+ Politics: Between Power and Obliteration” this year, the first analysis of LGBTQ politics and political power in Brazil.
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LGBTQ Victory Institute
LGBTQ Victory Institute’s Global Programs work to increase the political participation of LGBTQ people to advance equality across the globe. This work includes training LGBTQ leaders and aspiring candidates, implementing voter education and civic engagement initiatives, and conducting research on the climate of LGBTQ political participation.
In 1994, a Missouri high school teacher named Rodney Wilson – the first out public school teacher in the state – wanted to give students better access to LGBTQ history as well as more role models with whom they could identify.
He established a planning committee with LGBTQ leaders from around the country, and from there, Gay and Lesbian History Month was born.
The group selected October for what would ultimately become LGBTQ History Month because school would be in session. October is also when we celebrate National Coming Out Day (on the 11). The two LGBTQ marches on Washington in 1979 and 1987 also took place in October.
After its founding, organizations like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, GLAAD, and the Human Rights Campaign endorsed Gay and Lesbian History Month, and in 1995, the National Education Association passed a resolution officially recognizing it as a commemorative month.
In 2006, the civil rights organization Equality Forum became the official organizer and promoter of the month. Each year, Equality Forum selects 31 icons to honor, one for each day.
Today, as conservatives continue their widespread attacks on the rights of LGBTQ students, LGBTQ History Month feels more important than ever, serving to remind LGBTQ young people that they are part of a long, storied history of strength, resilience, and bravery.
LGBTQ History Month is celebrated both nationally and internationally and has become a crucial tool in ensuring that queer history is shared, taught, and celebrated, as it is rarely included in school curricula.
Thus, LGBTQ students are often unaware of the fact that many figures they study in school were in fact LGBTQ. They also miss out on learning about the LGBTQ rights movement and the many figures who have fought heroically for LGBTQ equality.
LGBTQ History Month is a way to encourage schools, media, and other institutions devoted to sharing knowledge to amplify the important stories of the LGBTQ community.
In the United States, LGBTQ History Month is celebrated every October. Canada and Australia also celebrate it this month. It is also recognized in the United Kingdom (in February), Hungary (in February), Finland (in November), and Berlin (in June).
And this past year in May, Cuba became the first country in Latin America to celebrate it. Italy also celebrated its first one this year in April.
LGBTQ History Month focuses on the achievements of the LGBTQ community. Pride Month in June, on the other hand, originated with the 1969 Stonewall Uprising and is about uplifting the LGBTQ rights movement.
Pride is more focused on rebellion and the continued fight for LGBTQ rights, whereas LGBTQ History Month focuses on honoring the past.
Pride is a protest, a battle cry, whereas History Month is a celebration.
Celebrating LGBTQ History Month can take many forms, including:
There are endless LGBTQ figures to honor this month, but here a few icons to start with:
LGBTQ people continue to make history, which is why LGBTQ Nation honors modern day heroes every year.
Bisexual Swedish geneticist Svante Paabo won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday.
The 67-year-old helped found the study of paleogenetics, a field that investigates ancient humans and other species using very old genetic materials. Using this science, Paabo successfully reconstructed the genome of Neanderthals, the closest ancient relative to homo sapiens, the modern human species. Scientists think that Neanderthals genetically diverged from homo sapiens nearly 500,000 to 650,000 years ago.
Paabo’s reconstruction of the Neanderthal genome was particularly impressive considering that his team only had DNA evidence that had severely degraded over nearly half a million years.
He and his team also helped discover a new human species called the Denisovans by successfully extracting DNA from a small finger bone fragment found in a Siberian cave. The discovery helped scientists understand how humans migrated across Asia.
Paabo’s work isn’t just about the past. Paleogenetics can help modern scientists understand how both the human mind and body evolved, particularly in response to illnesses.
For instance, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Paabo found that people with greater amounts of Neanderthal DNA were more likely to become severely ill. Scientists used this information to understand more about how best to respond to newly infected individuals.
“Trying to understand the implications of [ancient DNA] for health is something that will be with us for the rest of…our time as a species,” David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston told The National News when speaking of Paabo’s work.
Paabo’s Nobel prize came with a $900,000 reward. Upon hearing about his win, his teammates celebrated by throwing him into a pool of water near the institute where he works.
“Paabo took it with humor, splashing his feet and laughing,” the Associated Press reported.
Paabo publicly came out as bisexual in his autobiographical 2014 nonfiction book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes.
He reportedly wrote that he thought he was gay until he met his wife, U.S. primatologist and geneticist Linda Vigilant, and fell for her “boyish charms.”
They are now raising a son and a daughter in Leipzig, Germany. There, Paabo founded the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, where he now works.
Paabo’s father, Sune Bergstrom, also won the Nobel prize in medicine in 1982.
“The biggest influence in my life was for sure my mother, with whom I grew up,” Paabo said in his Nobel interview. “And in some sense, it makes me a bit sad that she can’t experience this day. She sort of was very much into science, and very much stimulated and encouraged me through the years.”
Paabo is also an adjunct professor at Japan’s Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.
Pinot on the River! Festival at Old Courthouse Square in downtown Santa Rosa featuring a day of tastings from some of the west coast’s best Pinot producers! Small-production artisanal wineries join with guest artisan food vendors from 11-3p. on Saturday, Oct. 8, 2022, to celebrate all things Pinot Noir. Meet the winemakers and other Pinot-loving consumers.
Use promo code WeAreFamily and save 10% on your tickets
The Spahr Center announces the forthcoming departure of its executive director, Adrian Shanker, who has been appointed by the Biden-Harris Administration to serve in the role of Senior Advisor on LGBTQI+ Health Equity in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Shanker joined The Spahr Center in April 2022 and in this short time has led an organizational rebranding with a new logo and website, an expansion of programs for LGBTQI+ families, and the launch of the organization’s Training Institute. He has also been a critical advocate for MPOX vaccine access in Marin County.
Shanker has been serving in a voluntary capacity in the Biden-Harris administration as a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS since 2021. He joined The Spahr Center after founding and leading Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania for more than seven years.
Executive Director of The Spahr Center, Adrian Shanker comments:
“It has been a tremendous joy to work with the team at The Spahr Center to enhance and expand programs and services for LGBTQI+ and HIV+ community members in Marin. When I started at The Spahr Center, I did not anticipate a short tenure, however I am confident that the organization is in a strong position to continue its positive momentum in service to Marin’s LGBTQI+ and HIV+ communities. I am deeply humbled by the invitation to join the Biden-Harris Administration in this role and I look forward to supporting the administration’s efforts to advance health equity for the LGBTQI+ community.”
Chair of The Spahr Center’s Board of Directors, Denny David, comments:
“When we hired Adrian we knew we were bringing someone in with tremendous expertise in LGBTQI+ health. It turns out that The Biden Administration agrees. For decades, the LGBTQI+ community has fought for a seat at the table and we have seen the devastating consequences of being ignored. While we are sad to lose Adrian, that sadness is tempered by a tremendous amount of community pride. We are glad to have a champion for the health of our community heading to Washington to advise the administration, and at The Spahr Center, we will continue to seamlessly offer the services and programs our community needs.”
The Board of Directors is committed to leadership for the agency through the transition. Today, the Board announces the appointment of Cindy L. Myers, Ph.D., as interim executive director. Dr. Myers brings 30 years of executive leadership experience in the behavioral health and human services fields to The Spahr Center. She has served as an interim Chief Executive, Chief Operating and Chief Clinical Officer for a diverse range of businesses and organizations, including the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR).
Iceland has published its action plan on LGBTQ+ issues for the years 2022 to 2025, which includes an end to discrimination for queer blood donors, training in LGBTQ+ issues for police, “appropriate and unbiased” healthcare for trans people, and more.
The country’s parliament is also pledging 40 million Icelandic Króna (around £250,000) to support ministries’ LGBTQ+ projects within that time period.
The UK used to have an LGBTQ+ action plan, established in 2018 under Theresa May’s Conservative government, which included meaningful reform of the Gender Recognition Act and the banning of conversion therapy in all its forms.
Neither of those things has come to pass and in 2021, then-equalities minister and now-prime minister Liz Truss suggested the government’s commitment to the plan had been abandoned entirely.
Iceland, which already has strong LGBTQ+ protections in place, and in 2017 was found to be the least homophobic country in the list of members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), pushed forward the 21 progressive measures in June.
A statement about the programme says it is the “first one that focuses solely on LGBTI matters”.
Among the key changes laid out in the action plan is abolishing the blanket ban on men who have sex with men donating blood, a move which Iceland’s Ministry of Health has been considering since 2018.
“The purpose of the action should be to abolish the discrimination which blood donors have been subject to on account of their sexual orientation,” the plan reads.
Particular focus was made on wellbeing in the action plan, with steps to help ensure the health and wellbeing of LGBTQ+ youth, elderly people, and disabled people, as well as tackling LGBTQ+ domestic violence.
The plan states: “The well-being and situation of this group [LGBTI disabled people and LGBTI elders] in society should be considered in terms of isolation and expression.”
It added that it would also study the “well-being of LGBTI people in regions outside the capital area… should be given special consideration, where people are in proximity to a great extent and economic life tends to be undiversified.”
Ahead of a visit from the UN’s independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity on 26 September, Ambassador Bergdís Ellertsdóttir said: “Human rights are a key priority in Iceland’s foreign policy, and LGBTQ+ rights are a particular focus at home where, as a society, we ensure that all of our people are accepted and enjoy full rights.”
Iceland remains high up on Europe’s “Rainbow Map” of LGBTQ+ friendly countries in 2022, however it was beaten to the top spot by Malta and Denmark, with ILGA Europe noting that Denmark is “taking the lead in filling in anti-discrimination gaps in current legislation”.