Embracing the Uniqueness of Queer Families

Families come in all shapes and sizes, and that’s a wonderful thing. In this week’s episode of In the Den, Jen visits with Dr. Gwen Bass about her unique experiences growing up in the 80’s, the child of two women who broke norms by using artificial insemination to create a family. Gwen also discusses her later experiences as a queer person creating a family through foster care and adoption. Gwen shares her beautifully expansive understanding of family and demonstrates that biology doesn’t make a family. Love makes a family. 

Special Guest: Gwen Bass

Dr. Gwen Bass is the author of Immaculate Misconception: A Story of Biology and Belonging, in which she tells her story of growing up one of the first children of lesbians conceived through artificial insemination.  She is a teacher, advocate, parent mentor, researcher, and collaborative consultant. With a decade of experience each in K-12 classroom teaching and teacher education, plus years of research and program development, Gwen supports kids and adults whose needs and voices aren’t honored by conventional systems.

Her team provides consultation and training to help nonprofits, educators, government agencies, and caregivers foster positive outcomes for young people — especially those with disabilities and learning differences, LGBTQ+ youth and families, and youth in foster care and unique family situations. Gwen is also a foster and adoptive parent in a queer blended family. They travel often, work like a team, and live by three rules: Have fun, be safe, be kind.

Links from the Show:

• Gwen’s website: www.drgwenbass.com 
• Gwen on Queer Family Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3gqsGeQifnrx26W6taN3X1 
• Gwen on This Queer Book Saved My Life: https://thisqueerbook.com/immaculate-misconception/ 
• Gwen on First Person Plural: https://www.keystepmedia.com/podcast/sister-act/  
• Join Mama Dragons here: www.mamadragons.org 

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Transcript

JEN: Hello and welcome to In The Den with Mama Dragons. I’m your host, Jen. This podcast was created to walk and talk with you through this journey of raising happy, healthy, and productive LGBTQ humans. Thanks for listening. We’re glad you’re here.

We have been very interested in helping our listeners understand what a queer family might look like as they imagine the future for their children and their grandchildren. Not all of us were raised in a time or a culture where those ideas were common. Today’s guest hits so many different queer family topics that I don't even know if we’re going to be able to hit them all. And we could do an entire episode just on her work after her family story is addressed! So many perspectives to tackle all at once! I don’t want to give away all the surprises in the story, but I do want to introduce our guest.

Dr. Gwen Bass is the author of Immaculate Misconception: A Story of Biology and Belonging, in which she tells her story of growing up one of the first children of lesbians conceived through artificial insemination. She is now a teacher, advocate, parent mentor, researcher, and collaborative consultant. With a decade of experience each in K-12 classroom teaching and teacher education, plus years of research and program development, Gwen supports kids and adults whose needs and voices aren’t honored by conventional systems. Gwen is also a foster and adoptive parent in a queer blended family. They travel often, work like a team, and live by three rules: Have fun, be safe, and be kind. Welcome Gwen! 

GWEN: Thank you. I’m so excited for this conversation.

JEN: I have been so excited to talk to you. Your story has fascinated me. and I think our listeners will love it. I often start by asking guests to talk about their childhood a little bit. And this usually takes two, three, four minutes. But I want you to go back before your childhood. I’ve never asked this before. I want you to talk to us about before you were a child and how you actually came to exist.

GWEN: Sure. It’s funny. I was just talking about this at teacher graduate class. And I was just talking to my students about this the other day. And I was trying to explain how unusual my story is because there are so many more stories like mine now. But, at the time, I’ll be 42 next month. So I was born in early 1982. And my parents got together in the mid 70’s. They relocated to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and my biological mom, her name is Lois. And my non-biological parent’s name is Judith. And Judith had a son from a marriage to a man, who was about 12 when I was born. And since they wanted to have another child, their options were really limited. Homosexuality was phasing out of the DSM. It was really hard to find a doctor who would be willing to perform an insemination. And, in and of itself, the technology of artificial insemination was very young. The one place that they could find that would do the insemination for a single woman was at Wayne State. And at the time, they were requiring psych evals. And my mom was like, “I probably won’t pass because I identify as queer and that’s going to come up through the eval.” So there was a real question of how honest they could be about who they were, versus do we just play the game to get the baby that we want to have. And, ultimately, they found an obstetrician who just was running this very undercover operation of inseminating single women. And so my mom, I don't know, she must’ve found, she’s passed since I wrote the book, like before I wrote the books. So it’s hard, a little bit, for me. I’m like, “I think that’s what she said.” But I’m not totally 100% sure on how she connected to this doctor. But, my understanding is that it was through a friend. And, basically, Lois and Judith went together to this doctor. And so, as a single woman and her friend, and they asked for an insemination. And he basically said at the time, “This technology is available. We don’t have a lot of restrictions on it yet. But we don’t know if we will. So, I’m willing to do it. I’m not going to deny you access to it. And I’m not going to keep any medical records whatsoever. Like, as far as we are concerned, you came in today for a routine medical visit. You got that. And if you end up pregnant, you end up pregnant. But I will never admit that I had anything to do with that pregnancy.”

JEN: Were they inseminating single women who were straight at the time, or was this…

GWEN: Yep. And they were inseminating single women who were straight. And they were inseminating straight couples who had infertility issues.

JEN: So they didn’t have to pretend to be, she didn’t have to pretend to be single and straight to get this done…

GWEN: She had to pretend to be single and straight, I mean, she couldn’t say she was here with her partner. She definitely had to say, I’m here with my friend. She didn’t at any point disclose her sexuality, kind of strategically. And I think, once he agreed to do it, they were like, “Great. Cool. Let’s do it right now.”

JEN: “How about today?”

GWEN: He had donors from, he told my parents that he had donors from the local community and he was primarily using medical students.

JEN: Okay.

GWEN: So, my parents, my mom, my biological mom is Jewish. She really wanted a Jewish donor, so she said, “Do you have one?” He said, “Yeah. No problem.” He gave her the “Jewish” donor and I think it took three or four times and they slipped him some cash and that was that. I was conceived. And then my parents end up kind of telling some of their queer friends, “Hey, If anyone wants to get pregnant, we found the guy.” And so a handful of their friends ended up using the same doctor to inseminate them.

JEN: But the assumption that they were all making was that it was different donors.

GWEN: Mm-hmm. Yep.

JEN: All right. So, without being overly simplistic for a very difficult topic, life for queer people was really different in the 80’s. I wasn’t in that circle realm at all but I remember even hearing about AIDS and the nasty things people were saying about gay people at the time. But in some ways, it was also less volatile. It was more underground or more secret, less constantly in the public eye. So talk to us about the reality of it, what you know from your mom but also as a little kid growing up in this queer family. 

GWEN: It was super weird, to be totally honest. It was super weird. And so you kind of imagine, so the 70’s was – late 70’s early 80’s – we’re talking about Harvey Milk. We’re talking about the beginning of the AIDS Epidemic. You know, my brother who’s 12 years older than I am, would be outside playing “Smear the Queer” with his friends which was like some – that’s just what they called a game of “Keep Away”. That was not weird.

JEN: I remember it being called that.

GWEN: Yeah. And so there was a lot of, it was just accepted that it was a very weird thing. And most people who were gay were not out. So, it’s really kind of striking to me – obviously, my biological mom gave birth to me. And my non-biological mom was a child development expert and was delivering a talk about infant mental health the day after I was born. And she couldn’t tell the audience that she had a baby because she would have no way of explaining to them without coming out and risking her employment. Employment protections weren’t in place for queer people at that time. So there was a lot of – and I describe sort of in the book, this feeling of “We’re just going to be one of the Nick at Night families. And we’re just going to play it really cool, and do all the things straight people do.” Judith was a little more masculine and my mom was a little more feminine and they just sort of did the thing. And my brother did very brotherish, boyish things. And I was sort of expected to be a certain kind of girl that was going to wear dresses and do all these things. And, you know, we’ll talk about this in a minute, but that didn’t turn out to be who I was. So that got complicated in terms of kind of protecting our family as, “We’re just like everyone else.” We weren’t in a lot of ways. But there was a lot of – we did a lot of the same things that typical families were doing at the time.

JEN: Did you just know, instinctively, you knew these things, or were there overt conversations where they were sitting you down going, “These are things we talk about at home. And these are things we talk about not at home.”

GWEN: So here's what’s interesting. And I think this is one of the really unique things about my parents. And it was a benefit and a challenge. It’s hard to say in hindsight. So we moved from the Midwest to Massachusetts when I was two. And I think there were a lot of reasons for that that had to do with a variety of circumstances. But one of the big reasons for that, I think, was because the community was much more progressive. And so my parents were like, “You can talk about you anywhere you go. And we don’t want you to feel like you have to ever hide who you are.” So those messages did not come from my parents. Those messages very definitely from me going, having experiences of being like, “Yeah. And then all these lesbians came over for a potluck last night.” And, “Wait, there were no men?” Or just even saying, “I don't have a dad.” And people going like, “What’s that? You have to have a dad. That doesn’t make sense.” And me kind of reading the room and going, “I think I need to think differently about how I’m sharing information and what I’m disclosing and not.” And I think that we talk a lot now about representation and visibility. There weren’t out families because there weren’t families that looked like ours. There were families of straight couples where one of the parents had become gay after a heterosexual marriage. And I had some friends who had a dad they would visit on the weekends and a mom who had a female partner. But that was kind of it. And they were really, artificial insemination was so young, that there weren’t people who didn’t have a dad. That was a really unusual phenomenon.

JEN: So, as a really young child you’re required to compartmentalize your entire life. Did you feel like the pull of this paradox? Did you feel like you belonged or were you hyper-aware of not belonging? And could you talk about it or was it just normal?

GWEN: And so it was funny. In the book, I also talk about my mom, Lois, so just to kind of give some context. My parents also separated when I was four.

JEN: Oh, you were young. OK.

GWEN: Yeah. And Judith moved to Switzerland. So, and then there was more conversation about, “You need to not talk about our family.” But when I was young, my mom would basically screen anyone who was going to be in contact with me. If I was going to preschool, she would just come right out and say, “Hey. We’re a queer family. Gwen has two parents.” And at the time we didn’t have that language of like, “Two Moms.” And it didn’t become acceptable until, like, the 90’s for people to even think that way. It was more like, “You have a mom and another parent.” So, I ended up calling, I would refer to Judith as my other parent. And I’d end up calling her Ju-Ju because when I was little I couldn’t say Judith. I still call her Ju-Ju.

JEN: Okay. So you had a mom and then a parent.

GWEN: Right. And I went through this major transition when I was four. So, imagine a four-year-old going to circle time on the rug and one of their parents has moved to another country. They’re in the middle of a divorce, it’s really complicated. And I was really sad when she left. And I remember trying to be like, “I’m so sad. My Ju-Ju left.” And people were like, “What is a Ju-Ju? We don’t even understand what that would be.” So that was really odd. But I think part of the benefit of my parents having those conversations with folks ahead of time, or Lois having those conversations, was that I was never in a situation – she was so happy to walk away from someone’s homophobia. She was great, and, you know, it speaks to some level of privilege that she had. “We will not be coming to this day care center if you can’t be cool with our family. And it’s okay. I don’t want you to pretend to be cool. I really only want you to say you can handle this if you can handle it.” And she had a very direct sort of way. And we’re talking about early 80’s and people were like, “Inclusion and diversity and tolerance!” were the big words that I think a lot of folks were using at that time. And so I sort of became the subject of the diversity conversation. We’d be like, “Oh, let’s hear about Gwen’s family.” I was really the only thing happening. And so i think there were moments where I sort of wished I could hide from having that much attention placed on the parts of me that were different even though I can also see how it would’ve felt equally awful if not more awful to be in situations as a young child where I felt like I couldn’t be honest about who I was.

JEN: I love that she just clearly spoke. What a great example for a little kid to have a mom who was able to say, “Hey. This is who we are. Love us or leave us. We don’t even care. We can leave. We don’t need you.” What a wonderful model.

GWEN: And I think, totally, and in any kid-parent dynamic especially and what ultimately turned out to be a single mom/daughter situation, there is an individuation that occurs. And I think that in some ways, I pushed back a little bit as I got older against her “out and proud.” I was like, “Shhh, it doesn’t have to be the only thing people know about us. We don’t have to talk about it all the time. We can just be ourselves.” But there really were benefits to me having some language for what was going on when I was little. And what was very interesting was this back-and-forth, so I went back and forth between Switzerland and Massachusetts for a lot of my childhood.

JEN: I was going to ask if you were still connected with your brother and, or did you call him your brother?

GWEN: Yep. I do.

JEN: OK. your brother and Judith, you still maintained a relationship there?

GWEN: Yep. Absolutely. So I would spend summers with Judith or vacations and things like that. And, again, read the book. But there’s a lot in the book about what it was like to be on an airplane. And people being like, “Oh, are you going to visit your mom?” And he’d be like, “I’m visiting my mom. But that’s not really her mom because that’s not how we talk about it.” But there was all these nuances that were kind of inside jokes or insider information for him and I. And then, going back and forth, what became true is that Judith couldn’t be out at work when she was working abroad. And so we started to refer to me as her God-daughter as opposed to her daughter. I think there were lots of reasons for that. I think part of it was, like, in the mid 80’s it would have been very weird for a mother to move away from her child. So I think, there was probably some concern about “Where is your kid the rest of the time? You never mentioned this kid? This is strange. Why is your kid living with another woman?”

JEN: Wait, didn’t you say she was, did you say she was Jewish?

GWEN: So, my non-biological mom is not Jewish. My biological mom is Jewish.

JEN: Okay.

GWEN: So, suddenly, I was her God-daughter and it got confusing for me as a little person understanding, “But we’re family but we have to play this game so that work is protected. But we already know we have this special connection that nobody really understands anyway. So who cares what label we throw on it.” And, at the time, it really was about trying to keep life moving in the face of what had the potential of being quite a lot of discrimination and prejudice for sure.

JEN: So you’re, like, 5, getting professional lessons in code-switching.

GWEN: Totally, and explaining to people, “No. Here’s how artificial insemination works.” And most preschool teachers don’t want to have conversations about sperm at the rug. That was not good.

JEN: No. they’re not interested. So, if I understand correctly, you had this rare opportunity or maybe obligation, I don't even know how to word that, to be, like, the example of the queer family was. That was the beginning of a movement, like civil rights was kind of ending and, like you just said, Harvey Milk. And so this idea of “We’ve got to be out, there queer representation. Also, there’s a lot of risk to our family.” So you’re like this little spokesperson, right?

GWEN: Very much.

JEN: What did that look like in the 80’s for a little kid?

GWEN: So it looked like explaining artificial insemination to my four-year-old peers. And then, as I got older, and you know what, the juxtaposition of the ways that my parents approached their own sexuality was an interesting piece for me too. Like, Judith was much more, “I’m just going to be who I am and I don’t need to talk about it.” And Lois was much more like, “I’m going to be who I am and I’m going to blaze the way for anyone else who feels like they’re on the out.” Like, “I’m so comfortable in myself that I’m going to go be out and proud.” And so I sort of got to see both examples and how they worked. But, in the early 90’s, I remember being like 10, and there were these parenting panels for these lesbians who thought they could never possibly have families and had a lot of internalized homophobia. There were just beginning to be more options around.

JEN: Adoption wasn’t a thing for lesbian couples back then, right?

GWEN: Right, in most states. Yeah. It started to be more so in the 90’s. But, yeah, and so I remember sitting on panels. And people would be like, “Oh my God.” I had a couple of friends, Lois had a couple of really close friends who had kids my age. And they had had them in relationships with men and then later had become lesbians. So they were all kind of single moms. And there were the three of us and the three of them. And the three of us, these kids, we would sit on these panels and talk to prospective parents about “It’s going to be okay. We play game boy and we . . .”

JEN: “We’re so healthy and well adjusted.”

GWEN: “We drink Tang just like the rest of them and we have this really funny family situation that sometimes is complicated to explain. But we feel like we’re pretty normal. I don't know. I have friends. I play with Cabbage Patch dolls and rubix cubes. It’s cool.”

JEN: Did you do that, did it ever stop or were you just like an advocate from age 5 until today?

GWEN: Well, there’s like soft advocacy in my mind and then there’s this really intentional, overt political advocacy. And when I was much younger and sort of under my mom’s wing, I think her approach was much more political and so I did stuff like that. And I don’t, it never was, “She made me!” She was very, “Are you sure? You don’t have to.” But it felt important to do at that time. And I think that changed for me over time. And I think part of that had to do with the individuation that I had to do a”s a young adult from her way of being. Just as any kid does from any parent. I was like, “I’m not going to do this your way. I’m going to do it my way.” And my way was a little more, I’m just going to be me.” And there were lots of moments of softer advocacy. But, I remember speaking in college classrooms, sociology classes, graduate, any time people were talking about queer family, they’d be like, “Can you come in?” And I was pretty articulate as a little kid so I think it was like I would talk to these groups of older people who would ask me questions like, “Do you think you’ll ever find a partner?” or “Are you gay too because your parents are?” That was really the prevailing concern.

JEN: Did everyone think you were just going to automatically be gay?

GWEN: 100%. Yeah. And the expectation, as the spokesperson whether it’s in the classroom or just on an internal level, was very much, I was like, “Gwen, don’t be gay. You can like basketball and you can like a lot of those other things that you like that most boys like. But just don’t be gay.” And I remember coming out to my mom, actually, when I was like 5. And she was like, “Just give it a little more time.”

JEN: Not yet.

GWEN: “Like maybe you don’t know yet.” And I was kind of like, most kids of my age hadn’t been exposed to the possibility of an accepting community of queer people, right? Most of us are like, “I don’t even know how I would find that community.” But that was my upbringing. So there was certainly a question that even lived in me from a young age of like, I realized that what I’m seeing is really different from what other kids are seeing at home. We would have parties and there would be all lesbians, right? And I had lots of really good mentor people in my life who took good care of me and were part of my community who are lesbians. So I saw these really positive role models. And I was like, maybe I am just aware of that as an option because I’m seeing it in a way that other people aren’t. And maybe if other people had the same option, were aware that that could be, they too would be like, “Maybe I am gay.” But there was some negotiating for me both between the tension of, “I’m supposed to be straight and I feel kind of gay. And do I just feel gay because I’ve seen gay or am I actually gay?”

JEN: It’s interesting because even in this super-affirming world, there’s like I’m hearing some elements of internalized homophobia. “I don’t know. I have this image. I’ve got to protect things.” Like, wanting to be straight because the world is crazy even if our feelings are affirming. The world is a little bit crazy. So at what point were you like, “This is kind of a done deal. I’m not straight?”

GWEN: I really swung hard. All through high school I played sports. I was very stereotypically, I checked a lot of the boxes for, “That kid’s probably gay.”

JEN: But we didn’t think about that back then very often.

GWEN: Right. And any sort of experimentation that my friends were doing. I was like, “That’s for you. Not for me. I’m going to be straight, actually.” So, no.

JEN: “I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve decided.”

GWEN: Yeah. and then I went away to my first year of college and I sort of decided to try on what it would be like to not be an athlete. And what would it be like to try to be a little more girly and really experiment with my heterosexuality. And then I realized that that was probably not for me. And so I had gone away for my first year of college to California. And then I came back to a smaller college locally. And came out at that point. And everyone was sort of like, “Yeah. We know. But it was cool that time you tried to not do that.”

JEN: “It was a good college try you offered up there.” 

I want to pivot a little bit because we’ve kind of been talking about you as a queer kid in a queer family. You guys didn’t use the word queer back then?

GWEN: No.

JEN: So when you talked about your family being a queer family, that wasn’t what you said. What did you say?

GWEN: No. I appreciate you saying that because it really wasn’t. Queer was not an okay word. Queer was bad for sure. I’m trying to think, I think it was like, ‘My mom is a lesbian.” Was kind of how I talked about it. And I had this interesting cover. So, in terms of disclosing that to people I would meet, I often didn’t disclose it. So what I had been told about my donor was that he was a Jewish doctor. And I obviously knew who Judith was. And I had my mom. And my mom was the one who would pick me up from practices or take me to friends’ houses. And so sometimes I would just be like, “Yeah. I just have a mom.” Because it was easier for me to say that then have to disclose what the complexity of my family.

JEN: And we knew what divorce was back then.

GWEN: Right.

JEN: So people could just assume that and be fine.

GWEN: Or people would say, “Oh, really, where’s your dad?” And sometimes I would say, “My other parent lives in Switzerland.” So sometimes I would go back and forth. And people would be like, “Okay. I don’t know why you’re calling your dad your other parent, but whatever.” It didn’t even cross their mind that that was an odd label.

JEN: “You’re kind of a weird kid.”

GWEN: Strange. Or I would say, “One of my parents lives in Massachusetts and the other one lives in Switzerland.” Or I would say “My dad’s a doctor, he lives in Michigan. I don’t see him.”

JEN: And you were like, “He’s very smart.”

GWEN: “He’s busy. A very busy man.” But it wasn’t weird in the 80’s to not see your dad. That was the other thing, there was a higher – divorce rates were coming up, things were shifting. There was a huge single mom culture. It was interesting.

JEN: Mom’s got bank accounts and legal rights and divorce for sure. This was all kind of happening at the same time. So, did you know from the start, you’re like two and you know there was a sperm donor?

GWEN: Yes.

JEN: That wasn’t like a conversation when you were 10.

GWEN: Nope.

JEN: “We’re going to put you on a panel, you ought to know this.”

GWEN: Yeah. Right. Exactly. “It’s your moment. We’re going to give you your script.” Can you imagine looking up, like, “What?” No. I definitely, I knew all along. And I think that was important to them. And any time I talk to parents now about that, I feel like giving kids all the information, in an age appropriate way, is important just because surprises are never fun for anyone.

JEN: I love how you talk about your – I’m going to say your mom’s – your parents’, I guess, is what I should say. The way you articulate their intentions in the most generous way. Everything you speak is just generous. But some of this had to be kind of hard. And I’m wondering if part of that generosity comes when you switched and you became the parent or if you were feeling that generous about it the whole time, like even when you were a kid.

GWEN: You know, I think that’s a really, really good question. I think my parents are much older. My biological mom passed away. My other parent, Judith, is much older. I feel like I’m a parent myself. Absolutely, that gives me some level of generosity about the whole thing. But I’m also like, “They had no idea what they were doing.” There was no script. There was no way to even begin to know “How are we going to navigate this?” Right? Judith re-partnered. And is she like my step mom? We don’t even have language for any of this. Is my brother my brother? Is he my half-brother? I just feel like everybody did the best they can. And the number of situations that I’ve encountered now as an adult where I’m like, “I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m going to have to pick a way and try that.”

JEN: And see if that works.

GWEN: I feel like people very, very specifically chose different directions or different ways to handle the complexity of the situation and they did the best that they could. And it was not always easy and it was sometimes fraught. And it would certainly feel hard at times to be like, “Oh, am I just your god-daughter now? I thought I was your real daughter. I thought we said that we were a real family like those other families with two parents.” So there’s definitely ways that my mom was really out that I was kind of uncomfortable with. I was just like, “Could you just not be out? I just want to go to the dance without everybody seeing all the bumper stickers on your car. You could just leave me on the corner. I’m just trying to meet new people. I don’t want people to make assumptions about me.”

JEN: “Let’s go for subtle, Mom. Let's go for subtle.”

GWEN: Totally. So, yeah. I mean, I think that’s where that all comes from for me.

JEN: So as a mom who currently in the 2020s has two queer kids, I, without knowing your parents and your book’s still on its way to me via Amazon. But I am super grateful for these two people who raised you and who were willing to be pioneers. Because how much better is the life of my kids than it would’ve been if those people wouldn’t… You were kind of caught in the crossfire a little bit. So it’s probably different for you. But for someone like me, I just look with this intense gratitude at people who were willing to pave the way and stick the stickers on their car or be more subtle or anything to make it so my kids could actually get married legally if they wanted to. Because that wouldn’t have happened without people like your parents.

GWEN: Yeah. And it wasn’t easy for them.

JEN: No.

GWEN: So I’ve been going through – my mom kept everything – and I found these letters that she and her dad and her siblings wrote back and forth to each other at the time that I was conceived. And just reading how much, how complicated that choice was. She thought she was going to lose her whole family.

JEN: Oh, I’m sure she was.

GWEN: I’m willing to lose my whole family because I know that I want to be able to have my own family. And her dad wrote to her in one of the letters saying, “I love you. I’ll love any child you bring into the world. And I really think that what you’re doing to your kid is unfair and so I don’t support your choice.” And, ultimately, he and I had a great relationship. And they stayed – my mom and him, they had a complicated relationship – but they stayed connected and they were close and we were a family and he was my grandpa. And the same was true with Judith’s parents who had a different approach, which was to just not talk about it. And I think that, people still talk about, and live with those fears of, “Can I have a family, and will I lose my family, if I’m honest about who I really am?” And I think it is a testament to the fact that my parents were really willing to be like, “This is who we are.” As paving the way.

JEN: I think it’s so brilliant. And your grandpa, like, it would be easy to look at him now and be like, “That’s so rude.” But that was seriously progressive from the time.

GWEN: Yeah.

JEN: I’m older than you, but that was not very common back in the day. So kudos to grandpa, too.

GWEN: Thanks, Max.

JEN: So let me do this whole 180 turn now instead of talking about you as a kid, talking about you as a parent. So, from my perspective, you’re barely an adult. You're like a kid who’s legal, almost, and you start fostering. What would motivate you to do that at such a young age, and were you already a teacher when you started doing that?

GWEN: Yeah. So I became a teacher as I was finishing college.

JEN: So that’s 21ish, 22.

GWEN: Who trusted me with children in a whole classroom? I’m like your age. I don’t even know what I’m doing. So there were like a couple of things that sort of come together in my early 20s. I had always – and I knew one or two families in the community that fostered, that were foster families – and I’ve always had like a natural, innate joy, enjoyment of and skill with kids. And I was like, I was a coach of a basketball team when I was 15. I was just a kid who took on a lot of responsibility with younger people. I ran a babysitting business starting when I was 12. I was just really into it. And I always wanted to be a foster parent. And I remember having a conversation with my mom about that. “You have to sign the papers. You be the parent, but I’ll do all the work.” And I was like 16 or 17. She’s like, “You’re out of your mind. Absolutely not. Very generous of you, but no.” And so it was just something I always wanted to do. And I felt like there are very few tangible things you can do in the world to be helpful. Like you can donate money, or you can volunteer at a soup kitchen or whatever. But, for me, I was like, being supportive to a kid who’s having a hard time, is something I really understand from my own experience of feeling sort of like “I know how to code switch and I know how to balance being on the inside and the outside.” And there were many microtraumatic things about my experience growing up for sure.

JEN: Oh, yeah.

GWEN: And so I felt like, I don’t get what it’s like to be a foster kid, a kid who’s in that system. I did have a really volatile relationship at times with my mom. So I really understood attachment trauma and some of that stuff. But I was like, “I can do this, so why would I not?” And I think it’s fun. So I’ll hang out with kids. They can live with me. It’ll be great.

JEN: Did you have your own apartment then?

GWEN: I did, because, I mean, I was so young. I can’t even, now I think about it, what was I doing?

JEN: Yeah, you were a baby still. But I have huge mad respect. I work as a – or volunteer as a CASA in the foster system and I have mad respect for foster parents. And you were a baby. Fostering is not easy.

GWEN: No. It wasn’t really what I thought I was signing up for when I actually got into it.

JEN: I have this idea that if I just loved them really hard, then that would be enough, with this wild misunderstanding of trauma and the significance of it. But I could do a whole episode on fostering because I think we know, there’s more queer kids in the system. and they’re harder to place to begin with.

GWEN: And given what we know now about queerness and neurodivergence, it’s like that much more complicated. But yes.

JEN: Yeah. So, you’re single. You’re fostering which is probably because you lived in Massachusetts. That wouldn't have happened in my little red state at the time, especially if you were out. But you’re kind of single and are you dating?

GWEN: Yeah. I had a girlfriend at the time. We’d been together for maybe a year, I think. And I was like, “So, I’m going to be doing this thing. And you can do it or not do it. I don’t want to force you into it.” And she was like, “It seems sort of weird that if we’re going to be living with a kid, I wouldn’t do it with you. I’ll do it.”

JEN: She was like, “Weird, but Okay. I’ll try.”

GWEN: I’m not trying to force it on you. But she was like, amenable. So we went through the process together and it was positive. And we took a handful of placements. And the thinking really was at the time, that we would foster for a while and then at some point we’d have biological children, like after a few years, we’ll have biological children together. And so I actually reached back out to the doctor who inseminated my mom around that time to just say, “Hey. Just curious. Do you really not know who my dad is? Is there any, remember me?”

JEN: “I’m wondering if I have medical problems.”

GWEN: Right. I should just know. I don't have half a medical history. And so he seemed like a really nice guy. He was like, “Nope. I didn’t keep any records.”

JEN: He seemed friendly enough.

GWEN: He seemed friendly enough. But he was really honest. “I didn’t keep records because I didn’t want to have information I had to lie to you about.” So the men didn’t want to be known. The women didn’t want them to have any way of finding you all because there was so much legal action around donors taking kids from lesbian women. So it was a win/win for everyone. So “I have nothing. So, nope, I don’t know and I’ve heard from other offspring over the years.” And I was like, “Give them my number.” He was like, “Okay. Sounds good. Happy to.” I don’t even know how he would know if we were related. But, anyway, so the thinking very much had been we would have biological children. Then we ended up not doing that. We ended up fostering to adopt.

JEN: I hope I’m not speaking out of turn, but I heard you refer to your family as a funky blended family, I think was the term that you said. Talk about that. You’re 22. You’re fostering by yourself. Then you’re adding a girlfriend into the mix. And, now, we’re what, 20 years later. You said you’re 42. So we’re 20 years later and you are part of this funky blended family. Let’s hear the narrative. How did you get there?

GWEN: Oh, man. I’ll try to be as efficient as possible.

JEN: You’re fine. This is fascinating.

GWEN: In my 20s, my girlfriend and I are fostering. We foster a couple of children. It goes well. We learn a lot about what it is to foster. I start getting really interested in how early childhood trauma affects family relationships and children dynamic, or whatever. We take one placement of a kid that is like such a – it was a foster placement. It was such a sweet bond that the three of us had. But we’re in our early 20s and we’re like, “We’re going to have boundaries so that we can still be kids. And we’re taking this trip to Central America. So we can foster this kid for four months and that’s the plan. And then we’re going to have this beautiful transition to his forever home and everything's going to go great.” And what ended up happening is we’re getting ready to go on this trip. We’re talking to the social services folks. And they can’t find a home and they can’t find a home and it’s like the day before he’s supposed to leave . . .

JEN: How old is he? Did you already say?

GWEN: He’s four. He came to us the night before his fourth birthday. I, like, loved this kid. And the transition is awful. And then we leave the country. We were like, “That can’t happen again. So if we decide that we want to continue fostering, we have to be ready to say yes to a placement that feels like it’s a yes placement forever.” You just never know when you foster if it’s going to be a long term thing. And, if that were to emerge as a possibility, we have to be ready to say yes. so we have our hey-day, Central America. We explore the world. We come back, we get a placement of a baby who needs to be in foster care for 45 days. And 45 days passes and she’s still with us and she’s really sweet. She’s two months old when she comes to us. She’s really sweet. And 45 more days passes and then they’re like, “This is actually going to move to an adoption track. Tell us now if you’re not interested.” And we looked at each other and we were like, “We’re totally interested. She’s our kid.” And while we were gone we’d gotten engaged. So we came back, got our daughter, we got married. And I think, in thinking about being, like legal marriage had just been passed a couple years prior in Massachusetts.

JEN: You guys were one of the first states, right?

GWEN: Yeah. And we were very much in a moment of “We’re going to be just like everyone else.” That was the trend in the early 2000s. “We’re going to be like straight couples.” So we did the thing. We went to grad school. We got jobs. We were a very stable family. We participated on the board of directors at our kids’ preschool. We’re like, “We’re doing the thing!”

JEN: “We’re both the PTA president.”

GWEN: Exactly. And then we thought, when our daughter was two, we were like, “Let’s foster again. Maybe we should adopt another kid before we have biological children so that those two kids have sort of a shared experience.” Long story short, we adopt another – we put our names on the list and get a call like a day later. But it’s a long story but we’d basically been fostering an infant at the time that we got the call to take my son. So we had these two newborn babies. One that was going to stay forever and the other wasn’t. But it was wild. Anyway, so there was a lot of . . .

JEN: There’s not a lot of sleeping, is what there was not a lot of.

GWEN: There was not a lot of sleeping. We had a two year old, too. So the foster baby left. My son, obviously, stayed. And then three months later we were like, she’s pregnant again, the baby’s going to come into care.

JEN: Wait, she who? Your son’s mom?

GWEN: My son’s biological mom was pregnant again.

JEN: OK.

GWEN: Now, in the mix, my daughter’s biological mom had become pregnant again. And they’d asked us if we wanted her child. And because of a variety of legal things, that didn’t end up happening, mostly because he ended up staying with her. So, do you want to take this baby? Yes, sure we do. And, like I kid you not, days after our child who’s now nonbinary came home, we got a call saying, “Do you want your daughter’s two biological siblings because they’re going to come into foster care?” So we have now, these five kids floating in the mix. One who’s adopted, my daughter. My son who’s from a different biological family who we were adopting. My other child who’s related to my son who we’re adopting. And then these two other kids who are sort of floating around as like, “Are they going to live with you?” And for a period of time, we fostered them. So we had five kids under five. It was bananas.

JEN: I kind of love that the biological kids were kind of together, though.

GWEN: It was really sweet. It was really, really sweet.

JEN: Yeah.

GWEN: And it was really, really hard.

JEN: My kids are way more spread out than that, and it was still hard, all those babies.

GWEN: And what was tricky about it is that they all had a combination of trauma.

JEN: You don’t enter foster care without it.

GWEN: Right. Right. Right. And it was like running a group home for toddlers, basically, is how I thought about it at the time. So, shortly after, so again, long story short, my daughter’s two biological siblings end up being adopted. And we still see them and have a sweet relationship. But five kids was too many kids to try to, for the long run. But the time we had together was sweet. And a few years later, my wife and I got divorced. So now I have kids who are – so at the time my daughter was seven, my son was five and my other child was four. And shortly after that, I got together with my partner now, who had a 3-year-old. So we have, 7, 5, 4 and 3. And her daughter was born through a relationship she had with a man who was living in Angola and then they separated and she moved back home to live with her mom. So she and her mom are raising her daughter. And then my ex-wife and I have our kids going back and forth. And now, my partner and I live together, the kids are all together. And the four of them are incredibly close. But we have all of these like, weird, it’s weird. Weird is probably the wrong word. But these unusual dynamics.

JEN: I liked funky.

GWEN: We have some funky dynamics, right? So have the one kid who goes back and forth to Grandma’s. We have my kids who go back and forth to their other mom. We have three different sets of biological relatives that don’t live, so my step daughter’s dad has two other kids too. So there are these siblings that she doesn’t live with. My daughter has siblings she doesn’t live with. My younger two kids are numbers five and six in a big family. They have siblings they don’t live with. And, yet, the four of them are totally a sibling group doing their thing. And so that’s what makes it super funky. It was funny, I was sitting on the beach. It was just me and the kids a couple of summers ago. And we were laying there, and I was like, “You know what's really weird? None of us have grown up with our dad and all of us have siblings that we don’t live with, didn’t grow up with.” It’s just, I don’t find myself in situations like that very often.

JEN: At some point along the line, right, because we’re talking across 40 years, this narrative. Right? Society has these pretty strict definitions of family. But they’re created socially. We’ve socially constructed this idea of family. We can look around the whole world and throughout all of history and it looks a little different all the time. So, did you think of it, does it still feel the same, I guess is what I’m saying. The definition of family with different language in the 80’s, that was definitely outside the norm. And now you’re in the 2020’s with a family that is definitely sitting outside the norm. Does it all just feel like family? Can you tell the difference between then and now?

GWEN: I think it does all feel like family. So, the piece – a couple of things stand out to me. One is, we were just on vacation in Mexico this last week. And my son made a friend on the beach. And he brought his friend. I was like, “Hey we gotta have a snack.” Whatever. He comes over. And the kids like, “Where’s your dad?” I don’t know who these people are. I can’t totally tell the gender of this person sitting right here because I present sort of gender confusing. And they’re like, “Where's your dad?” And Mike looked at me and was like, “What do I say?” And I had this flash moment to being a kid and having people be like, “Who are all these women that come to your basketball games? I don’t understand.” And I said, “You can tell them the truth. He might not know other families like ours. But you can tell him the truth. Just explain.” And he was like, “Well, I don’t live with my dad. I was adopted. I live with my mom and this is her partner. And these are my parents. And these are my siblings.” But even, we’re a multi-racial family. And so that’s another component. And I think your question about family stands out to me because I think even now, sometimes people get into our -- we have a minivan, right, because you have to – and so they’ll get into our car, other kids, and have them come over for a playdate and they’re like, “Who are all these people? I’ve never seen these people before.” And the kids are like, “They’re my siblings.” And they’re like, “All of them? They don’t all look like you.” Not every kid, even now.

JEN: “This isn’t computing.”

GWEN: “I don’t get it.” Yeah. So it’s layered. And I think my view of family has certainly expanded. And what’s been interesting for me is I found my siblings. So when I was in my mid to late 30s, it was like right around the time that my mom started to decline. It was like really interesting divine intervention or something that, getting ready to say goodbye to my mom. And we had these family friends from back in the day who lived in Ann Arbor. And one of their kids, who we had hung out sort of once a year for ten years or so over the course of my childhood. We would get together. And she reached out to me and was like, “Hey. There are other siblings. I don’t know if you want to be a part of this group. But you might want to check it out.” And another friend had given Judith a DNA test and was like, “You should have Gwen do this DNA test because our kid actually also is part of this group.”

JEN: “Our kids are siblings, maybe.”

GWEN: Yeah, turns out. And then I started googling them. And I’m like, “There’s no way we’re not related. We look exactly alike.” And so through finding them and connecting with them and just that experience of seeing someone who looks like you. As an only child, the only one of your biological makeup in your family, you’re used to not looking like the people around you. I looked a little like my mom but I also didn’t in other ways or had attributes that were different. And just so to see these other folks and feel, like as we’ve connected, feeling an immediate sense of family in biology, that really surprised me because I had been taught my whole life that love made a family. It didn’t matter if you were biologically connected. And I was like, “Yeah. It doesn’t matter. And I’ve adopted these kids and it doesn’t matter and biology doesn’t matter,” and just kind of thinking about some of their – it just made me think differently about some of their relationships with their biological siblings and parents. And so I think, if anything, my view in a very weird way around family has moved to become not more conservative, but more expansive in a different way. Like I thought that family was just who you decided was in our family. And there’s certainly members of our extended family and our family who feel so much like family and who we have no blood relation to. I’m sitting right now doing this interview in the apartment of one of my mom’s best friends from when I was growing up. One of those three women I was telling you about. And she always jokes that she was actually my sperm donor because we are so similar. So and she’s like a grandma to my kids in this very lovely way and totally a parent to me. I don’t know if that really answers your question.

JEN: It does and I was going to actually mention that because that’s the third angle of family, right. You’re all, you’ve got this childhood as a queer family, you’ve got this parenthood in a queer family. And then I don’t want to call your siblings, half-siblings a queer family, but it sort of is like this really unusual circumstance of finding family. And, if I remember correctly, you were in your 30s.

GWEN: Yeah. It wasn’t that long ago. It might be five years ago, now. If that. It was right before the pandemic. And it was really, I mean, it was fascinating for so many reasons. In part, because we just shared a lot of innate connections. One of my sisters was doing a podcast at the time that we found each other. And I listened to an episode of it just because I was curious about who she was. And I was like, “Oh, my God. I would’ve used the exact, I would have delivered that line with the same cadence. We have the same intonation.” There are these weird things like mannerisms and ways of speaking and ways of delivering a joke that all of us do that I would never have thought that that would be nature not nurture. And many of them had also had lesbian parents. Some of them didn’t. And it turned out my dad was not a Jewish doctor. That was not true. But that piece was really fascinating to be able to kind of be like, ‘I know that I was kind of only one at the time or in the community that I grew up in. But these other folks have really similar experiences and get what it was like to be on the inside of that first wave of insemination.”

JEN: I love that your dad could be whatever they needed him to be.

GWEN: He was Egyptian. He really, he was a tall white guy with blonde hair.

JEN: Dad’s probably the wrong word, but the donor, right, he was whatever anyone needed. I love that.

GWEN: Sure. I got a guy. Turns out he’s [inaudible] too which is this whole other interesting racial area.

JEN: I got a guy. I’ve got a perfect match for you. So, you started off in a queer family in the 80’s, with AIDS and, like we talked about, some subtlety was required. Now you’re in this new family, twice, in the middle of the “war on woke.” The vilification of nonconforming people. I loved your term gender confusing. That’s a new term to me. I love it.

GWEN: I just made it up. Yeah.

JEN: Does seeing this evolution of politics – obviously gay marriage is legal, or marriage equality is legal. And gay couples can adopt and those things are better. But it’s kind of gotten vitriolic and maybe discouraging. And I’m wondering after this long arc of 40 years if you feel more hopeful politically or culturally or if you’re feeling more discouraged.

GWEN: That’s an interesting question. I think that what has sort of been the throughline for me, when you grow up in a situation where there are no laws to protect you or your family – and people are still doing this now – but my experience 40 years ago, growing up in a climate where nobody looked like me. I knew on some level everything about who my family was was absolutely unacceptable to most people. And yet, I was just a person who did the things. I played the sports and I got the grades and I had the friends. I did the things that you’re supposed to do as a person. I traveled and I lived in the world. I just kind of – and I think in some ways, and it’s the opposite of what my mom would be doing and it’s certainly in many ways the opposite of what you’re talking about being so great for many people to have folks that are out and proud. For me, my way through, has often been to just be myself and show up in the ways that I’m a person and lead with that as opposed to leading with all of the things about me that I worry might not be included. It’s sort of been like, “Just, okay, you can accept me as a person for who I am and what I bring or you cannot.” But I’m not going to lead with my sack of differences. I’m going to lead with myself. And in myself, you can just physically look at who I am and see a lot of things that are nonconforming. Like I have short hair, and I present, again, I don’t present in a feminine way, but I use she/her pronouns. There’s just certain things where I feel like I have figured out how to just be me in the world and move forward and not lead with some of the things about me that are different. I think there’s probably ways that -- that’s one form of visibility. It’s not as loud as other forms of visibility for sure. And I watch my kids navigate that in some different ways. Like, my son said to me, I recently had some gender affirming health care. And he said to me, “I really thought everyone was going to start to think that you were a man. But they don’t seem to notice. They still ma'am you all the time.” It’s really funny. And sometimes when I think about this, I think about how there are ways to be a part of the mainstream and other ways to subvert the mainstream or seek to change the mainstream. And I think for me, it has always been clear that there will be nasty political rhetoric. There will be unfair laws. And it’s our job to both work to change those. And for me, my path has not been “That’s my only job.” My path has also been, I also want to live a life that’s not just about that. And so other people get to do that. and I want to get to do that too. So that’s probably like a non-answer to your question, but that’s kind of how I think about things. So, yes, I feel a little bit like we’ve come full circle. Like we’ve come back to, in many ways, to where we were when I was conceived. And what I hold in my mind is like, “Alright. I made it through.” Something about the way that we did things worked. So some alchemy of that will hopefully carry forward and we’ll get through this next wave. But what’s happening is really devastating.

JEN: Obviously I can’t let you go before we talk about your book for a minute. It’s a memoir about your story and I’m curious about your motivations for putting it all – the story itself is compelling, and I love hearing about it. So was that it? You’re like, “This story is awesome and people are going to want to read it.” Or did you have other motivations for writing?

GWEN: It was kind of two things, so I – well probably three – so I started a book writing process, I joined a cohort where they were like, “We’re going to take you “soup to nuts,”  this is how you write a book.” So I thought what I was going to write about was some of the parent education work that I do and some of the work with kids in foster care. And one of the first questions we were asked was “What’s your inspiration story?” And I was like, you know, I have spent like the first 25 to 30, more than that, 30 years of my life in school getting degrees. And I’ve been asked questions like that a whole lot. And something just kind of like hit me differently like, “Why do I care so much about this population of kids in care, kids in foster care and kids who’ve experienced trauma?” And I was like, “Oh, because I actually had this oddly normal and traumatic life myself and I feel like there’s something about my constitution where I, even as a young kid, was sort of able to see the whole picture of what was happening.” So that was one piece. I was like, my inspiration is like my own lived experience as somebody with marginalized and invisible identities.

The other piece was I had recently connected to my siblings. And it was the first time that I felt like, “Oh, I have allies who really get what this was like.” And I felt like my story was a story that I tried to pretend hadn’t happened, I think, in certain ways. I’m just an adult and now I’m queer and I don’t want to be talking about how my parents were queer because that’s like, remember that whole thing about how we think that’s not supposed to happen ‘cause queer parents make queer kids and here I am. I’ll just be myself. And I don’t want to be out there with this whole story. It’s actually a story I didn’t tell a lot. I didn’t talk to people about having queer parents for most of my adult life. And something about finding them for me made it feel like our story’s cool and y’all are cool. I have great siblings. I feel so lucky that I get to share this part of the processing of this whole experience with them and that I just get to have an adulthood that includes them. And that kind of made me feel comfortable telling the story.

And my mom passed away. And I felt like this story gets to be mine now. She was the one that was like, “We’re going to do this out and proud. We’re going to put you on the panels. You’re going to go to preschool and everyone’s going to already know about who you are.” And I was like, this is my moment to reclaim my story with the support of my family. And I think especially as a queer person being aware that – I don’t want to get too far into this, but there are certain types of groups that tend, so I work a lot, like I said, with kids in the foster care system. There are certain kinds of religious groups that tend to support that population. And I’m aware, that as a queer person, I might not be the first person that they would call to hire to do a presentation for their families on how to support kids who’ve experienced trauma. And so I don’t lead with my queerness in a lot of ways. And also I just hit a point where I don’t want to feel like I have to hide anymore. This is a cool story. It’s important for people to understand how far we’ve come. And, in the time since I wrote the book, I used to have the number of anti-gay sort of bills that had passed, it was something like 35 in the six months that it took me to write the book. I was like, “Look how far we’ve come. People really need to understand where we’ve been!” And by the time I finished the book I was like, “We’re kind of back there right now. This doesn’t feel quite as poignant.” But anyway, those are sort of my motivations for writing the book.

JEN: I’m so excited for it to come. And I feel like I kind of got a glimpse of the story. But when it’s in a book, I’m excited to meet your half siblings in new ways and stuff. I’m really excited about it. If people who are listening want to buy your book, we’ll include a link in the show notes of course. But, if people want to buy the books, how’s the best way for them to do that? I did Amazon, I already confessed.

GWEN: For those of you that are comfortable buying things on Amazon, it is definitely available there. I don’t say that to shame you. I’m comfortable buying things on Amazon. If you buy things on Amazon, it’s available there. It’s also available in a lot of independent bookstores. You can request it through your library. It’s very widely available. And it’s structured and every chapter is a question I was asked as a kid. So “Do you have two moms?” “Where’s your dad?”

JEN: You’re like, I don’t even know if I have two moms. That’s a hard question.

GWEN: Right. I was like, “That’s not what we say, but yeah.” Where were you born? Just things that I couldn’t just say this is where I come from. All of those things were harder for me to answer.

JEN: I love that. I’m so excited. I hate how fast the time goes in these conversations. I know it goes faster for me than anyone else. But I want to express my gratitude to you for coming and for sharing. And also I want to tell the audience that you have agreed – this is me committing you – you’ve agreed to come back because you’re a parenting coach, to do some parent coach with our listeners. And I’m super excited. I already have like 10 questions about that, that we didn’t have time for so I’m just going to add to it and bring you back. So I’m really excited about that. But thanks so much for coming.

GWEN: Thank you so much for having me and, in the same way that you sort of described my parents as being pivotal in a certain way of making space for all kinds of families and all kinds of kids, the work that you’re doing is right there too. So I appreciate all that you do to support families in being good and better to their kids.

JEN: That’s so sweet of you. Thank you so much. I’m excited to talk to you again in a few weeks.

GWEN: Sounds good.

JEN: Thanks for joining us here In the Den. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell your friends, and take a minute to leave a positive rating or review wherever you listen. Good reviews make us more visible and help us reach more folks who could benefit from listening. And if you’d like to help Mama Dragons in our mission to support, educate, and empower the parents of LGBTQ children, please donate at mamadragons.org or click the donate link in the show notes. For more information on Mama Dragons and the podcast, you can follow us on Instagram or Facebook or visit our website at mamadragons.org.