In my first Lineages of Queer Parenting post, I looked at Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis as a utopian vision of queer parenting, created by a bisexual man forced to live a double-life in the 1950s as both a heterosexual husband and father and member of the New York gay underground. Auntie Mame was his dream of someone who did not have to divide their identities as a parent and queer bon vivant.
Today, we are looking at a real-life utopian experiment in queer parenting, part of the first generation of queer parents (largely lesbians and other queer women) who attempted to honor both their identities as a parent and queer person and argue that a lesbian household was as healthy and safe of an environment for a child as a traditional heterosexual family.
In my last post, I mentioned Jeanne Jullion, a lesbian mother whose fight for custody of her children became a national news story and cause celebre in the San Francisco gay community in 1977. Jeanne later recounted her story in a 1985 autobiography, Long Way Home: The Odyssey of a Lesbian Mother and Her Children. Today, drawing primarily on Jeanne’s autobiography and the recounting of her story in Daniel Winunwe Rivers’ Radical Relations, I want to look at the lesbian household Jeanne and her partner Shana tried to form as newly-out lesbian mothers in the mid-70s, and how this beautiful vision was crushed by the power of the state before it even had a chance.
The Revolution Begins at Home
Jeanne Jullion and Shana Ascher both came out and left heterosexual marriages in the mid-1970s. Jeanne had full custody of her youngest son, three-year-old Jesse, while her nine-year-old son Paul lived with his father and visited on weekends. Shana had four children from a previous marriage, with the oldest being 10-year-old Hannah, the only girl in the house. Shana, unlike Jeanne, had an amicable relationship and custody agreement with her ex-husband, who had also come out as gay.
In October 1976, Jeanne and Shana (both white) moved their families into an old two-story house in a majority-Black neighborhood in Oakland. They were both receiving welfare benefits while working various low-paying jobs and trying to launch their own business, an odd jobs service called The Wizard of Odds. In her memoir, Jeanne describes the decision to try out a radical new idea of family:
Jeanne met them within weeks and had fallen in love with mother and children alike. They merged their households and rented the five-bedroom house on 55th Street for $350 a month. The result was a new concoction of five children and two rather recent lesbians. It was chaotic. And it was exciting.
Jeanne is honest and unromantic about the challenges of living as a pair of lesbian mothers on welfare raising five children in Oakland in 1976. But there is also a sense of energy and joy and love as Jeanne creates a family of her own making, in contrast to the numbing slog of her decade of heterosexual marriage, in which she tried and failed to do her assigned duty as heterosexual wife and mother.
Jeanne describes the ongoing experiment in raising children in resistance to the reactionary values of the wider world:
The word feminism was never really used. But once learned, the words sexist, racist and ageist cropped up a lot. There was genuine excitement in the household as both mothers expanded and rethought who they were as women plus considered how to build a family headed by two lesbian mothers.
Jeanne and Shana decorate their hallway with family photos going back three generations on each side of their blended family, and Shana frames them with a banner from the local feminist bookstore reading THE REVOLUTION BEGINS AT HOME. They hung a Wonder Woman poster in the living room. Jeanne and Shana’s two-bedroom home in Oakland was as much of a utopian experiment as the dozens of lesbian separatist communes that popped up around the country in the 1970s.
And it was specifically this attempt at a utopian rethinking of a family that led to Jeanne’s hellish five-year custody ordeal with her ex-husband Franco. Almost immediately after she moved in with Shana, Franco started aggressively moving to not only end Paul’s weekend visits at Jeanne and Shana’s house but take full custody of Jesse as well, despite the fact that Jesse had never lived full-time with Franco since he was an infant and barely knew him.
The reasons were clear: “If you are going to live…with THAT woman…in THIS neighborhood.”
Throughout Jeanne’s custody battle, the household she had established with Shana was thought of by others as a feminist experiment that was simultaneously silly and sinister. The idea that two lesbians could raise children with queer feminist values was mocked by Jeanne’s ex-husband, his attorney, and the openly homophobic judge. At the same time, her ex insinuated in official court testimony that being raised around such gender confusion could turn his sons gay.
At the time of Jeanne’s custody battle in 1976 and 1977, an openly gay parent like her, in all but a few rare cases, usually ended up either being denied custody or visitation or granted it only on a conditional basis. The condition being the eradication of any evidence they are gay. In order to keep a relationship with their children, they were not allowed to live with a same-sex partner, date publicly, belong to a gay rights organization, attend a Pride parade, or speak publicly about gay issues in any way.
Utopian projects are worth doing because even if they fail -- and they usually do -- they light the way for the future. They plant new possibilities like beans, to borrow from Jenny Odell. When I see the wonderful queer households of my extended queer family, and when we gather at my house for queer movie night, I have Jeanne and Shana to thank for it. They are our ancestors. Our radical queer family grew out of theirs. And with Drag Story Hour, we plant seeds for a new utopian space. We create possibility. It has always been my dream that Drag Story Hour be seen as a prototype, a test case for what we can be done with truly queer-inclusive education.
The Jeanne Jullion Defense Committee
But reading about Jeanne and Shana also reminded me how fragile our queer families are. Without the interference of the state, Jeanne and Shana’s queer parenting experiment might have succeeded or failed on its own merits, and probably would have done a little of both. But we don’t know, because this experiment was crushed in its infancy by a family court apparatus designed to reinforce the norms of heteropatriarchal “family.” And the lifespan of their utopia was heartbreakingly brief.
In early 1977, just a few months after Jeanne and Shana moved in together, court hearings began on the final custody arrangements between Jeanne and Franco. Franco moved to be granted sole custody of both boys, arguing that Jeanne and Shana’s home was not a healthy environment for Jesse. The homophobic judge granted Franco’s request for temporary custody of Jesse while the case was decided and Jesse was removed from Jeanne and Shana’s home by Franco and a local cop while Jeanne and Shana were not home. According to Jeane, Jesse was taken by a father he barely knew and an armed officer of the state with none of his toys, clothes, or even shoes on his feet.
And then Jeanne and Shana’s story takes an unexpected and fateful intersection with history. As Jeanne and Shana learn as they desperately reach out to the local feminist and lesbian communities for help, stories like Jeanne’s were not uncommon by 1977. The early 70s feminist and queer liberation movements led to a wave of women coming out as lesbians and leaving heterosexual marriages. As queer people began coming out as a political act, proudly announcing they would no longer live in the closet, newly out gay parents were forced to make difficult choices. While attitudes were slowly liberalizing, marked by milestones like the removal of “homosexuality” from the DSM in 1973, the idea of queer people making suitable parents was still a radical idea, and the family court judiciary has never been known as a bastion of progressive thinking.
By the mid-70s, there were small grassroots organizations popping up in gay enclaves across the country to support lesbian mothers and -- more rarely -- gay male fathers. Many of these took the form of defense funds raising money for specific cases or more broader organizations like Dykes & Tykes which organized political demonstrations and gathered and distributed resources for lesbian mothers.
In Jeanne’s telling, before this moment in spring of 1977, she and Shana had been supportive but largely disconnected bystanders to the extremely active Bay Area feminist and gay communities of the 70s. They were supporters of the movement, and decorated their house in feminist iconography like the REVOLUTION STARTS AT HOME banner, but with constant money worries and five or sometimes six kids to raise, they had little time for either activism or socializing. Furthermore, living in Oakland, the only place they could afford, further disconnected them from the center of the gay community in San Francisco.
But as word got out about their case, the tight-knit Bay Area lesbian feminist community came together to find Jeanne and Shana a lawyer with expertise in this kind of case, Jill Tippett, and organize a Jeanne Jullion Defense Committee to raise money for Jeanne’s legal bills. Soon, members of the committee were organizing a press conference to put public pressure on the openly homophobic judge. And while activists had organized similar publicity campaigns in past cases to generally little interest from the media, Jeanne’s case would become national news and she would become, at least for a few months in the summer of 1977, perhaps the most famous lesbian in America.
Jeanne’s case most likely generated more media coverage than previous cases for a few depressingly obvious reasons. Jeanne was a college-educated, conventionally attractive, femme-presented white woman and mother of two tow-headed blonde boys. She did not conform to the stereotypes about lesbians and feminists. She was a subject for at least somewhat sympathetic coverage from a wildly homophobic mainstream press in a way that, for example, a butch-presenting Black lesbian never would be.
But perhaps as important was a coincidence of timing. Jesse was removed and the Jeanne Jullion Defense Committee was formed in May 1977. And at that particular moment, the San Francisco (and later national) press was primed for Jeanne’s story because it dovetailed with another story involving a white femme-presenting mother across the country in Miami.
The vote to repeal Dade County’s gay civil rights ordinance, the political campaign that birthed the “Save Our Children” campaign and made fading beauty queen Anita Bryant the face of anti-gay hate, was schedule for June 7, 1977. All through that spring, Bryant’s campaign had spread vicious and hateful rhetoric about gay people as a threat to children, dusting off the age-old “Molestation Libel” as historian Michael Bronski calls it. And the campaign also focused specifically on San Francisco, portraying it as a modern-day Sodom about to be struck down by God. Footage of scantily-clad men cavorting at San Francisco Pride parades was used in a Save Our Children campaign ad that blanketed southern Florida that spring. The anti-San Francisco rhetoric was so prevalent that the sheriff of San Francisco went on a speaking tour in Florida, defending his city’s reputation.
Jeanne’s case, which hinged on the question of whether a home headed by two lesbians is a suitable environment in which to raise a child, hit on the same fears as the Save Our Children campaign.
After “Orange Tuesday,” in which the Dade County ordinance was repealed by a 2:1 vote, Anita did a victory lap in the national press and became a full-time professional bigot, making plans to take her cause nationwide. The San Francisco gay community exploded in anger. Jeanne describes being in the Castro district on the night of the vote, when angry gays poured into the streets and Harvey Milk led the demonstrators on a five-mile march across the city, fearing that if the crowd stopped moving a full-blown riot would break out.
That Battle Will Be a Long Time in Coming
Throughout late May and June, Jeanne was giving interviews to local press and speaking to various gay and feminist groups across the Bay Area, raising money for the Defense Fund. But a specific narrative of Jeanne’s case was starting to take shape in press coverage and in Jill’s strategy for the upcoming trial.
Instead of the story of a loving family of two lesbian mothers and five children that had one of its children violently stolen by his biological father, it became the story of Jeanne Jullion, lesbian mom, and her two biological sons. Shana and her four children faded to the background. Shana’s role as a co-parent to Jesse, and her children’s attachment to their new step-sibling, were largely erased from the story.
Their lawyer Jill defended the decision by arguing that they had to focus on Jesse and Jeanne’s relationship, not fight the broader battle for the recognition of lesbian households as legitimate. In a letter to Jeanne and Shana about their strategy for the upcoming trial, Jill argued:
You are asking the court to go much further than it needs to -- to approving lesbian households. That battle will be a long time in coming. That battle will be a long time in coming, and we will not win that one until many lesbian mothers have broken the ground first.
This line of thinking is familiar to any activist who has been advised to not ask for too much too fast. But it has a particular tragic irony in this case. Jeanne had rejected the option of breaking up with Shana and going back in the closet to gain conditional custody. In many ways, this custody fight was specifically about not her right to parent Jesse but her right to parent Jesse as an out lesbian in a relationship with another woman. But even then, and with a feminist attorney arguing her case, she was advised to deny the full reality of her relationship and family structure because it did not fit the narrative she needed to tell to retain custody.
Shana’s bitterness at her sidelining continued to grow as the Defense Committee maneuvered to get Jeanne a speaking slot at the upcoming San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade on June 25. The parade organizers (dominated by cis gay men) at first did not invite Jeanne but an outcry from her supporters got her a last-second invitation. Shana insisted she join Jeanne onstage, presenting themselves as a family. The Friday night before the parade, Jeanne and Shana had a blowout fight about Shana’s anger over being marginalized, ending with Jeanne smashing an ashtray and cutting her hand while the children looked on in horror. On Saturday, the two appeared onstage together at the parade and presented the image of a loving lesbian family. On Monday, Jeanne decided to move out.
Fading Memories
In Jeanne’s memoir, Shana fades gradually from the picture after this. Though they ended their romantic relationship, Shana and Jeanne remained friends for a while. Shana was subpoenaed to give a deposition in the custody case and testified to Jeanne’s fitness as a mother while angrily deflecting invasive questions about their sex life. Shana’s oldest child Hannah appeared with Jeanne onstage at the Castro Theatre for a Defense Fund fundraiser that fall and Jeanne referred to her as “the closest thing to a daughter I have.”
But eventually Shana fades away as Jeanne’s life take another series of improbable turns. In January 1978, after months of intentional feet-dragging from the judge who was seemingly punishing Jeanne for the media coverage the case had received, final custody was decided. He made the rare move of splitting siblings, awarding custody of Paul to Franco and Jesse to Jeane, with the parents to split summer vacation.
But this agreement came with a major trapdoor that Jeanne and her lawyer Jill saw right away but were powerless to stop. In addition to ruling that Jesse would spend six weeks of the upcoming summer vacation with Franco, he allowed Franco -- an Italian citizen whose parents lived in Italy and had been financing his custody fight -- to take both boys on a trip to Italy that summer. Since Italy did not have to recognize an American court’s custody decision, if Franco simply decided to not return from Italy, there was basically nothing Jeanne could do. Franco and the judge both assured Jeanne that would not happen. And then that is exactly what happened. The judge, on hearing the news, simply replied, “So the rascal flew the coop.”
By fall 1978, two years after Jeanne and Shana moved into together and put up the REVOLUTION BEGINS AT HOME banner above the wall of their blended family photos, Shana and her children are largely out of Jeanne’s life while her biological children are across the globe in Italy. Though Jeanne would eventually regain custody of Jesse, in a daring international rescue mission, the utopian family that she tried to build with Shana was long gone by that point. When she finally snuck a now eight-year-old Jesse out of Italy in 1981 with the help of a pair of Swiss lesbians, he not only had forgotten how to speak English but had forgotten ever living with Shana and her children. He did not remember the names of the former step-siblings he used to live and play with in the old two-story house in Oakland.
Jeanne and Shana’s utopian project of a blended lesbian household where their children would be raised on feminist and antiracist principles lasted less than nine months, as their relationship was ground down by the stress of the custody battle and of being the face of lesbian motherhood. It is impossible to know what would have happened to Jeanne and Shana’s parenting experiment absent the custody battle and media attention. There are many reasons it may not have worked out in the end. But they barely had a chance to try before it was snuffed out.
Today, the memory of Jeanne and Shana’s household has faded from LGBTQ+ history in much the same way it faded from young Jesse’s memory. Despite being one of the most well-known gay people in America during the pivotal summer of 1977, today Jeanne’s story is so forgotten that she does not even have a Wikipedia page. Her memoir is long out of print, available only in battered used copies. Daniel Winunwe Rivers conducted an oral history interview with Jeanne in the early 2000s, which was later used in his book Radical Relations, but beyond that I have been able to find out little about her life after the publication of her book in 1985. As of this writing, I have not been able to even verify if she is still alive or not. There is even less information about what happened to Shana and her four children.
But for queer parents today, Jeanne and Shana should be honored as ancestors. They paid a horrible price for attempting a radically new approach to parenting and family formation, one that envisioned and paved the way for a world in which today’s queer families can exist.