Queer Parenting Part III: Who's Afraid of Jeanne Jullion?
Why Moms for Liberty and other right-wingers are so scared of queer parenting.
![New York City Dyke March - Happy Mothers' Day to dyke parents everywhere! Image: Flyer for a Dykes and Tykes Mother's Day Demonstration, 1978. Dykes and Tykes was one of the many New York City Dyke March - Happy Mothers' Day to dyke parents everywhere! Image: Flyer for a Dykes and Tykes Mother's Day Demonstration, 1978. Dykes and Tykes was one of the many](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc24f90f2-ca14-42c5-ac1e-4891cc811729_201x251.jpeg)
Hello again and welcome back to our ongoing series exploring queer parenting. You can catch up on Part I and Part II here. And if you really want to dive deeper into this topic, you can sign up for a paid subscription for access to bonus posts that go deeper on some of the research I have been doing. Just click the button below.
Last time, I used Patrick Dennis’ fictional creation Auntie Mame as an exemplar of queer parenting. Mame’s unconventional approach to parenting put her in constant comedic conflict with various squares including the uptight banker Mr. Babcock and the suburban bigots the Upsons. In the real world, this conflict between queer parents and their more conventional detractors has often taken a darker and more dangerous tone. From newly out parents having to fight for their parental rights in the 1970s to bomb threats against Drag Story Hour today, queer parenting has often engendered hateful and violent suppression. Today we are going to explore why that is.
Keep in mind that “queer parenting,” as I defined it in Part I, has less to do with the LGBTQIA+ identity of either parents or children and is more of a mindset and approach to parenting. It is an approach that works to intentionally disrupt the ways in which parenting and family in our mainstream culture is used to reproduce heterosexuality and cisgender identity. It teaches children from a young age that LGBTQIA+ identities are no less real or valid than straight and cisgender identity and provides queer role models and an appreciation of queer culture. It is an approach to parenting that prizes flexibility, exploration, and respect for childrens’ bodily autonomy over hierarchy, indoctrination, and unquestioning respect for parental authority.
So in order to explore queer parenting and why people are so afraid of it, we need to ask, what does it mean to be a “straight parent”?
The Innocent Child
As Michael Bronski argues in The Pleasure Principle, our current understanding of children in the US and Europe dates to about the 17th century. Before then, children were viewed as miniature adults. Most children lived and worked on farms, where they were both expected to pull their weight and introduced to the basics of sex and reproduction at an early age. They were also, legally speaking, considered property of their fathers, just like wives, slaves, and animals, to do with as they wish. You could no more “abuse” a child than you could abuse a wife.
By the 19th century, with the rise of an industrial middle class and the modern hierarchical nuclear family, children began to be considered, in Bronski’s words, “little angels, to be seen and not heard, and, most of all, to be protected from harm.” Of course, that “harm” did not include the abuse of all kinds, including sexual, routinely inflicted on children by their parents, particularly their fathers. Children were still essentially property to be done with as you please within the privacy of the home. Instead, children needed to be protected from the corrupting influences of the outside world, particularly when it came to sex.
Bronski points out that the Victorian era which gave us this conception of the innocent child also gave us our modern categories of sexuality:
Each of these categories evolved as a means of restricting and classifying sexual pleasure. Heterosexuality was defined by its reproductive capacity. Homosexuality was unrestrained, nonreproductive, immoral pleasure. Childhood was innocent pleasure, devoid of any sexual implication or threat. Children became fantasy projections of “innocence”--humanity uncorrupted by sexual desire.
In this, we can clearly see the seeds of the modern Moms for Liberty ideology. Modern right-wing ideology conflates not just same-sex desire but all deviations from “normal” gender and sexuality as captured under the LGBTQIA2S+ umbrella as “immoral pleasure.” And they use the same Victorian ideas of childhood “innocence.” This is why trans children are portrayed as the victims of a Nazi-esque social experiment cooked up by woke activists and greedy doctors, because their “innocence” means they can’t have any understanding of their own gender which deviates from cisgender norms. Any gender deviance in young children is portrayed as either a childish phase they will grow out of or an effect of the woke mind virus which was introduced by the corrupting influence of the outside world.
And they conceive of a mythic past when people with this deviance either did not exist or stayed in the closet. They are helped in their conception of this myth by the historic lack of representation of queer people in media and culture. The right’s fantasy version of the 1950s is surely helped by the fact that portrayals of “sex perversion” were banned in mainstream Hollywood movies by the Production Code from the 1930s-1960s and that the new medium of television was so scared of any hint of sexuality that married sitcom couples like Lucy and Ricky Ricardo were forced to sleep in twin beds.
The Umbrella of Authority
A modern version of this conservative approach to parenting, which views the nuclear family as an absolute monarchy ruled by a patriarch and a fortified castle to be protected from the corrupting influence of the outside world, can be seen in fundamentalist education grifter Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles. Though not a church itself, Gothard’s organization had a huge influence in the conservative white evangelical movement that coalesced in the 1970s through its seminars, books, and homeschool curriculum. Gothard’s purportedly educational materials were propaganda for an almost comically on the nose example of right-wing ideology around parenting, with its notorious “umbrella” diagram of patriarchal authority:
While Gothard’s view of parenting -- which gained notoriety through the reality TV grifters the Duggar family -- represents an extreme view of the family order, his basic ideas of a patriarchal, hierarchical nuclear family in which the father has the duty of protecting his family from the outside world -- and has unquestioned authority within the family -- is extremely common among conservatives, though sometimes in slightly watered-down forms.
As Bronski argues, one of the primary desired outputs of this arrangement is the reproduction of heterosexuality and cisgender norms. Therefore, having a child who is queer or trans represents a failure of the system. The parents have failed to protect their children from the corrupting influences of the outside world.
Rather than take the blame for these failures (or better yet, realize this whole ideology is fucking bullshit), conservative parents turn to a few common scapegoats: public education and popular culture. And the thing is, they are right to do so. If you are a child, particularly a queer child, living under the oppression of Bill Gothard’s multiple umbrellas, school and pop culture often present your only chance to glimpse life out from under the umbrellas. There is a reason so many queer people become educators, artists, and/or pop culture obsessives.
Gothard’s umbrellas also show us why the current panic over youth transition is not really about the emergence of trans kids, which have always been around, but about the emergence of supportive parents of trans kids.
The Rise of Affirming Parents
In Histories of the Transgender Child, Julian Gill-Peterson challenges the narrative that trans kids are a new phenomenon, tracing a history of identifiably trans kids back to the early 20th century. And Gill-Peterson even cites examples of early 20th century trans children with supportive families, such as a trans woman known as “Val.” Interviewed as an adult in the 1940s, she recalled her child in the 1920s and 1930s, where she identified as a girl from a young age. Her parents, school, and local doctor in her small town all agreed that she should be raised and treated as a girl, which she was. She attended school as a girl and participated in the girls’ chapter of the 4-H Club. Most of the people in town always knew her as a girl, though passing became more difficult after puberty and she eventually dropped out of high school.
Val’s parents and supportive community provide an early example of what we now call gender-affirming care. There have probably been other historical examples of such affirming parents, though most are lost to history. We only know of Val’s story because she was interviewed as an adult as part of an evaluation while attempting to be one of the first Americans to access gender-affirming surgery, which was ultimately unsuccessful.
As the moral panic stokers love to point out, there has been a marked increase in the number of minors receiving gender-affirming care over the past 15 years. There has also been a concurrent (but lagging) increase in the number of places to receive such care across the United States over the same period. Part of this change has been driven by the growing acceptance and endorsement of gender-affirming care by mainstream medical organizations, responding to the consistent and compelling evidence that this care is relatively safe and extremely beneficial for children and teens with diagnosed gender dysphoria. But since minors cannot access medical care on their own, it is also driven by the increasing number of parents willing to listen to their children and take what they have to say about their own gender seriously. And my contention is that this is what really angers the defenders of traditional, Gothard-style parenting.
And right-wingers are correct to be scared about this. Because it is an assault on a fundamental foundation of their ideology. The idea of parents taking what their children say about their own gender seriously collapses Gothard’s umbrellas in two ways. First, by respecting the autonomy of children, it undermines the top-down hierarchy and the idea of kids being born queer or trans rejects the idea that queerness only comes from corrupting outside influence.
“Parental Rights”
Like all other aspects of the current anti-queer backlash and moral panic, the hypocritical framing of “parental rights” is also a rehash of the 1970s and other earlier anti-queer moral panics. By now it is clear to everyone who has either not suffered a traumatic brain injury or doesn’t write for the New York Times that the parental rights argument of Moms for Liberty is about asserting the rights of a certain kind of parent and infringing on the rights of other parents, specifically the types of parents that take their kids to Drag Story Hour and affirm their identities.
In the 1970s, this enforcement of a narrow view of which parents deserved rights to raise their kids as they see fit took the form of opposition to gay parents. Throughout the 70s, newly out gay parents who had left straight marriages (particularly lesbians and other queer women) fought for custody of their kids, facing the hostility and bigotry of not only their ex-husbands but the court system and sometimes their own families too.
The most well-known of the hundreds of gay parents who fought for custody in the 70s was Jeanne Jullion, whose case garnered national media attention. In 1985, Jullion wrote a memoir entitled Long Way Home: The Odyssey of a Lesbian Mother and Her Children, published by a small feminist press.
Jullion’s was a story typical of many 1970s lesbian mothers. Jeanne was a young woman with an interest in art history who fell into a marriage with an Italian grad student named Franco and had two sons. Franco seemed content to live quietly in his native Italy, where his family was well-to-do and they would never have to worry financially. But Jeanne was restless and unhappy in her marriage and after an affair with a woman and an introduction to the burgeoning gay scene in the early 70s Bay Area -- and some international crisscrossing -- she ended up living in a house in a black neighborhood in Oakland with her youngest son and her partner Shana and Shana’s four kids. Franco lived nearby with their older son, who visited on weekends, until Franco moved to take sole custody of both kids, claiming Jeanne and Shana’s house was an unfit environment to raise children.
Jeanne’s harrowing account of her first custody hearing makes clear what was meant by “unfit environment,” which was steeped not only in homophobia but in sexism, classism, and racism. Her husband’s lawyer, grilling Jeanne on the stand, made a point of noting that Jeanne and Shana lived in a Black neighborhood and were receiving welfare assistance. He asked if the children ever saw her and Shana in bed together and if they had sex in front of the kids.
But the lawyer didn’t stop there. Shana and Jeanne were both newly out lesbians and feminists, fully embracing the spirit of queer liberation that was especially prevalent in the Bay Area in the 70s. And just like newly out queer people today clearing out the Target Pride collection every June, they decked their house in queer feminist iconography, including a Wonder Woman poster and a banner reading THE REVOLUTION BEGINS AT HOME at the top of a wall of pictures of their blended family.
During a visit to their home before the first court hearing, Shana and Jeanne’s lawyer had advised them to take down such decorations: “She then said that while she understood, no judge would like children being exposed to such strong, feminist ideology.” Shana and Jeanne ignored the advice, only to have Franco’s lawyer produce pictures taken by a private investigator of the Wonder Woman poster, visible through their front window. After the hearing, Jeanne and Shana reluctantly took down the poster and the banner. And they further scrubbed their house of anything feminist or queer for an inspection by a court officer.
Jeanne and Shana tried to make their house look as “normal” as possible in order to show that lesbians could be good parents. They had to do everything to refute Franco’s description of their household which was included in the officer’s report, which claimed Jeanne:
Had permanently dedicated herself to a lifestyle which rejects almost all normal and conventional standards present in American life…that she has an openly lesbian relationship with Ms. Shana Ascher in an exaggerated feminist environment which takes great pains to promote the disposal of the male role…and that this is extremely damaging to the boy’s normal personality identification.
The subtext here is not all that subtle. By claiming that raising her son in a lesbian feminist environment was “damaging to the boy’s normal personality identification,” Franco was raising the possibility that his son would end up queer.
Later, Franco’s attorney asks Jeanne that if she were forced to choose between custody of her children and her relationship with Shana, which would she choose? This was no mere hypothetical. In this period, it was common for judges to give custody or visitation to gay parents only on the grounds that they demonstrate no evidence of their “lifestyle” in front of the children or to the court. This would mean moving out of her house with Shana (which she neither wanted nor could afford to do) and essentially going back into the closet or living a life of abstinence until her three-year-old turned 18.
Jeanne knew that if she went along with this “conditional custody,” as the practice was called, it would be a humiliating ruse. It wouldn’t turn her straight or make her a better parent. But what it would do was quash the openly queer and feminist style of parenting she and Shana were experimenting with in their home. And this of course is the real goal. At the same time queer liberationists were chipping away at the idea that someone could be “turned” straight, through either religion or conversion therapy, family court judges were using the power of the state to make sure families could still be turned straight, with gay parents forced to either give up custody of their kids or conform to the norms of straight parenting.
The current attacks on the rights of parents who stray from the norms follows the same logic, using the power of the state and the legal system to enforce a narrow, reactionary idea of parenting and family and punish those who deviate. This ideology motivates the attacks on gender-affirming care, banning of queer books and school curriculum, attacks on Drag Story Hour, and of course the attacks on reproductive freedom which allow people to form families on their own terms to begin with. And of course it also motivates the underfunding of public schools, lack of access to quality healthcare, and destruction of the social safety net and demonization of parents who use public assistance to provide for their children.
In Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States since World War II, Daniel Winunwe Rivers calls 70s lesbian households like Jeanne and Shana’s “resistance families”:
Like earlier “red-diaper babies” of the old Left, children from white, heterosexual countercultural families, or radical families of color during the 1960s and 1970s, lesbian feminist families were resistance families. They made contingency plans for going underground to escape the law; they developed their own schools based on radical social principles; and they developed separatist principles based on a mistrust of the American government….They founded schools and raised children in communal families committed to an egalitarian concept of motherhood, always under the fear of state removal of their children.
Today, queer parents in Republican-controlled states, especially those with trans or gender nonconforming kids, are also making contingency plans for the possibility that the state will try to take away their children, as states like Texas and Florida have already tried to do, claiming that affirming a child’s gender is child abuse. They are also looking for alternative modes of education that model antisexist, antiracist, queer-inclusive principles and ideas. They are teaching their children the radical idea that everyone, including children, has a right to bodily autonomy and to have their identity respected.
And why something like Drag Story Hour is so threatening is that it gives these new resistance families a chance to connect and realize they are not alone. It allows individual resistance families to build networks and become resistance parenting communities. Even with the growth of queer parenting over the past few decades, an organization like Drag Story Hour has an infinitesimal fraction of the money, resources, political power, and influence a program like Bill Gothard’s has to spread its idea of parenting and family. But even that is scary to these people because they realize how rickety the whole house of cards is.