How the Early 90s Shaped Queer Families
My spouse Helen and I recently celebrated our 33rd anniversary, which got me thinking about the early 1990s when we first met. Take a walk back with me through a few significant early 90s moments and milestones for queer families.
At the start of the decade, the World Health Organization in 1990 removed "homosexuality" from its list of mental disorders, a sign of changing attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people as a whole. And while out queer individuals and couples had been intentionally starting families since the 1970s, this surged in the 1980s. By 1990, queer family building was enough of a trend for Newsweek to write of a "gayby boom," the first documented instance of the term.
New avenues were also opening up. The first documented use of what would become known as reciprocal IVF (RIVF)—one partner carrying eggs from the other—dates to 1995, as far as I have found, but the technique (which Helen and I used in the early aughts) likely started even earlier. The first definitive instance comes from records of a California Supreme Court case in which a couple who had done RIVF in 1995 later separated, and the non-gestational mother sued successfully to be recognized as a parent. Nancy Polikoff, professor of law emerita at American University Washington College of Law, who told me of this case, shared, "It was certainly my impression that the practice [RIVF] was well established (if rare) by then." Indeed, a 1993 article in the journal Ethics & Behavior discussed the ethical issues raised by a hypothetical lesbian couple seeking to do RIVF. The contributor who originated the article, Timothy Murphy, now a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, told me in an e-mail that it was based on a real couple whom a colleague had mentioned, although he doesn't know if they actually went forward with the procedure.
In 1993, too, Vermont and Massachusetts became the first U.S. states to allow same-sex couples to adopt jointly statewide. By the mid-90s, more than a dozen states had also granted co-parent (second-parent) adoptions to non-gestational parents, thanks to the efforts of many individuals and advocacy organizations.
On the flip side, many courts were still biased, such as the Virginia circuit court that in 1993 took away Sharon Bottoms's son because she was in a relationship with another woman. It placed him with his grandmother, although Bottoms claimed that the grandmother's live-in boyfriend had previously molested Sharon. The Virginia Supreme Court upheld the ruling in 1995. Tragic as it was, the case helped raise public awareness and rally activists to push further for LGBTQ+ family rights.
The era also saw the first LGBTQ+-inclusive picture books to reach broad public awareness. In 1990, LGBTQ+ publisher Alyson Publications launched its children's imprint, Alyson Wonderland, with "Daddy's Roommate," by Michael Willhoite, and "Heather Has Two Mommies," which author Lesléa Newman and a friend had self-published in 1989.
In 1991, both of the above titles, plus Newman's "Gloria Goes to Gay Pride," were included as suggested readings in a proposed "Children of the Rainbow Curriculum," a set of multicultural resources created by the New York City Board of Education to teach first-graders respect for all.
After vocal opposition from some parents, religious groups, and one school district president who said the books would "promote sodomy," however, the Board in 1992 rejected the curriculum. School Chancellor Joseph Fernandez's contract was not renewed in 1993; Education Week reported that the controversy was a large part of that, and was "the central issue in about one-fifth of the local board races and a major issue in more than half of them" (3/24/1993). One can see echoes of this battle in the attempts to ban LGBTQ+-inclusive materials in schools today.
A long shadow over LGBTQ+ families in the early 1990s, too, was the ongoing AIDS crisis. During the 1980s, 70 to 90% of the members of gay fathers' groups in San Francisco and Los Angeles had died from AIDS-related illnesses, and the crisis "shook the lives" of many children with gay fathers, wrote Daniel Winunwe Rivers in his 2013 history of lesbian and gay families, "Radical Relations."
As local groups were hit hard, however, "they were sustained by a nationwide umbrella organization, the Gay Fathers Coalition International," Rivers explained. By the early 90s, this group, renamed Gay and Lesbian Parents Coalition International (GLPCI; later Family Equality), "was increasingly central to gay and lesbian parent advocacy," he asserted.
In 1990, too, a group of young people who had met at a GLPCI conference formed "Just for Us," an organization for people with LGBTQ+ parents. In 1993, it changed its name to Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere (COLAGE) and still exists today under the acronym, building community, offering resources, and engaging in advocacy. (See colage.org.)
In the summer of 1994, the executive director of GLPCI, Tim Fisher, and his partner Scott Davenport, invited other LGBTQ+ families to a barbecue in Provincetown, Massachusetts. This led to nearly 45 families gathering the next summer for the first official "Family Week." The event is now the largest annual gathering of LGBTQ+ families in the world; in 2025, 600 families attended. (See familyequality.org.)
These are just a few highlights of LGBTQ+ families in the early 90s, not a complete history. (In particular, the history of transgender parents and their children during this time remains to be brought to light.) I hope they are enough, however, to show the time as a pivotal one of both challenges and progress, whose ramifications are still with us today.
Dana Rudolph is the founder and publisher of Mombian (mombian.com), a two-time GLAAD Media Award-winning blog for LGBTQ+ parents, plus a searchable database of 1,900+ LGBTQ+ family books. She is an unpaid volunteer member of Family Equality's Communications Committee.