So, I found that perspective extremely useful and humane, because it meant we were all in it. And instead of celebrating the position of a few women who could organize openly, independently, it looked for ways to connect with the women who were not yet able to do that and whose mobilization would elevate everybody. So, that’s very roughly what Wages for Housework was about. The strategy of the mainstream women’s movement was, get out of the home, get a paid job, and for most women, that amounted to getting a second job. The first one didn’t go away. Our strategy was to try to find – to try to get that work in the home recognized as work and then, to leverage the parts of that job that were paid to build on that so that women would have more money and therefore more choices, more independent. The lesbians within the Wages for Housework campaign were organized as a group called Wages Due, Wages Due lesbians, and we were part of a big campaign in Canada with the Wages for Housework campaign called the Family Allowance Campaign.

The Family Allowance, the Baby Bonus, Jeanne will remember, was given to every woman with children in her own name, and in many cases, it was the only money that a married woman would have that she could call her own, and it could go for the kids’ vitamins, could go for milk, it could go into her escape fund. And in 1978, the Canadian government proposed ending the Baby Bonus and turning it into a tax credit that would go to the breadwinner, the male. And we – all of us in Wages for Housework just spread out into public housing, shopping centres, everywhere, we got thousands and thousands of petition signatures to try to keep the Baby Bonus from being ended and turned into something else, de-indexed from the cost of living. And through that, we experienced this – the reality of the women’s movement being this massive iceberg underneath the tip of the iceberg. You know, we approached women as comrades and found that was the case.

And as lesbians, we began to think about the costs of wagelessness on gay women, and finding, logically, even though we were all single women, we were young, we were able to organize, we had time to do that, we weren’t afraid of being visible because we weren’t facing threats, we had low-paid jobs, but jobs, and – but we realized that for lesbian women, the cost of poverty was being trapped in marriages they couldn’t afford to leave, by the threat of losing custody, and then, when they did have jobs outside the home, they were low-paid “women’s jobs,” in quotes. You know, they were caretakers’ jobs or because, you know, I mean, they were working in long-term care, they were working in daycare centres, they were working in hospitals. And all of that, because it’s women’s work, underpaid. And we began to think about how to organize around that particular intersection of factors. And I wrote a little pamphlet, “Motherhood Lesbianism and Child Custody.”

That gave us the chance to mail it out to other women’s groups all over the country. We made a big deal of its publication and we went to the media, we talked on the CBC and cable television, all these things. It gave us a lever to get some media coverage and we began talking to outside the gay movement, outside the women’s movement, in media. And we started the Lesbian Mothers Defence Fund at that point in 1978. I want to talk a little bit about the hostility we faced from the gay movement and the organized women’s movement at that point. It wasn’t uniform, you know, there were people who understood what we were saying and why. But there were basically – OK, I’ll talk first about the women’s liberation movement. In the late 1970s, there were basically two women’s movements in North America.

There was the women’s liberation movement, which was made up of mostly young, college educated, white, childless women, and there was the welfare rights movement, which was made up of Black women – Black women leading a movement of welfare mothers to try to get more money for themselves and their kids so they were – so they would be able to improve their lives. And the mainstream women’s movement had a lot of trouble coming to grips with women’s poverty, they did not see their way to throwing everything they had into supporting the welfare rights movement. And the welfare rights movement made huge headway, but it was weakened by that failure. Then there was the gay movement, which was very much male-led at that time.

This is still mid to late 70s. It was represented by men who celebrated their own sexuality. And – it’s really hard to articulate – for me to articulate this. But, you know, that was great, there was male sexuality, but it also … that perspective isolated them from the women’s movement and from the wider movement, and they jeopardized any support they had by also talking about their right to have relationships with young boys. That was the “Men Loving Boys Loving Men” article in The Body Politic at the time. I don’t know, Rachel, were you around for that?

And we would use any excuse to go to the CBC or The Star or The Globe or The Sun, you know, to say, “Do a story, do a story about this, because we want to go through you to reach all these other people.” And there was a kind of clubishness in a lot of groups that I knew about who liked being together with each other, but they didn’t conceive of a wider movement the same way we did, you know. The iceberg was out there. And – what else can I say about that?

But she did decide to take him to court. And on the day when she appeared in court with her lawyer and his lawyer, the father failed to appear, and the judge in that case was Rosalie Abella, who was later on the Supreme Court. And the – Charlie made his arguments, the father’s lawyer made his, saying that God looked – frowned on lesbian relationships and would, you know, definitely not approve of Mary-Anne being –given custody. And Rosalie Abella said, well, I don’t see God in the courtroom, so I’m giving custody to Mary-Anne. And that was, you know, it was a different time of day when that happened, so. Wonderful to see all you guys.

But we had them – you know, we had a lot of lesbian mothers who heard about our potlucks, and as Francie said, you know, we would go on radio, we would go on TV, I did a lot of TV interviews where I was blacked out, a lot of radio interviews with Francie. And I know that a lot of women who came to the LMDF, one, they were coming from quite far out of town, because there was just nobody in their community that was a lesbian mother. Or I remember a couple driving from Bracebridge to Toronto as a couple, you know. And I know that some women, like, there was a couple who were quite well-off and they lived in the Riverdale area and they had this swanky house, which was great. But one woman had a child. But in order to not risk any kind of conflict, the couple had separate bedrooms. So, this child had no idea they were – you know, they were not out to the child. So, I think the meetings were really an amazing sort of contact with some women.

Some women didn’t come all the time, and some women became, you know, quite regulars, and we would take on parts of, you know, what we call the steering committee, kind of, like, to divvy up the workload. Yeah, you know, to do interviews, to write the Grapevine, to organize dances, you know, to do public speaking, to, you know, all kinds of things. So, we would kind of sit there – we also had steer committee meetings outside of the potluck. So, those were sort of, you know, this was, like, OK, we would get together and – at somebody’s house, we’d have an agenda, we would go through it, it was a pretty formal meeting. At the potluck, it was more – very loose meeting to tell you what was up, what was going on, and then, it was more social. Like, it was more of a, you know, women getting to know other women, and just, you know, maybe you have to say, like, you know, this is, like, 1980, that’s, like, a really long time, you know.

People didn’t just say – they just didn’t say, you know, “I’m a lesbian mom,” there were so many risks. But it’s like Velvet said, you know, pride day, IWD, all those kinds of things, you know, when we marched under the banner, and the kids were present, you know, they were having a blast, right? You know, they were – I don’t know, they were making as much noise and chanting doing all kinds of things. So, in that sense, it was kind of fun for them and for us. And, yeah. So, you know, there – you know, in the meetings, I think my first meeting, I didn’t take the kids, but that was just – I think I had a sitter that day. Otherwise, I would have taken them. But yeah, so …

So, the meetings were fun. There was a lot of food. I don’t remember, you know, formal activities being organized or conversations about our families, although they might have happened informally. But it was really just time to kind of be ourselves. And when I reflect on different experiences I had as a kid, there were times where I was very aware that it didn’t feel safe to come out as being a kid with a lesbian mom. And so, the LMDF potlucks and pride day were really important because we could relax. And we weren’t looking over our shoulder necessarily, and there was this sense of pride in being able to be out and loud and celebrate our family, because the contrast was, everywhere else we went, there was a lot of silence.

Which created shame and confusion. And there was also, you know, I think this awareness that the parents were meeting upstairs because there was this fear that women could lose custody of their kids. So, even though I’m not sure how I was processing that on a conscious level, I mean, that was the reason why we were together. So, there was an awareness that some families might lose their kids because of who they loved. And we also knew that that was incredibly unfair. And here were women who were coming together to fight back. So, there was also this sense of hope and what Francie said, a sense of possibilities, because when we were together, we felt strong. And we felt like we could protect each other, we could support each other, and we could do amazing things together.

And then, I think there’s just sort of media, the stories that we share, what are the dominant narratives, which I’ve now come to know as heteronormative, right? Stories about families that have one father, one mother. And so, I think kids are picking up on stories that exclude them and that include them. And when I was a kid, there were very few stories that included families that looked like ours. And in fact, there was a lot of negativity that made our family life feel a little bit confusing, because it didn’t feel unsafe, it didn’t feel dangerous, it didn’t feel like anything we had should be ashamed of. It was really our family and it was full of love and pride.

You know, there were other women who actually did not even try to gain custody. There were some women who, you know, would leave and, yeah, they would actually go for a fight or, you know, or the father really was not interested in custody so much as getting back at the ex-wife or ex-partner. So, yeah, so, there were a lot of women and a lot of high stakes. And, you know, things were just, yeah, it was really dangerous. Like, it was very dangerous. You know, not only could you lose your children, you could lose your job, you could lose your housing, you could lose all kinds of things. And, you know, I think when I forwarded Mary-Anne’s speech to you, you know, not only was there this, you know, backlash against, you know, gay parents in the 70s and 80s, but, you know, there’s, like, Anita Bryant’s crusade to save the children, like, and painting all kinds of gay people as pedophiles, which is not that.

You know, it’s just not that. And that’s why I felt very strongly that, you know, people should not be judged. Like, parenting and sexuality is not – it’s not the same. It’s like, you know, you can love your child, raise your child very fairly with love and all that, and you can have, like, a lesbian relationship. They should not be, you know, cause and effect, kind of thing.

I mean, in this, you know, we have examples from the 70s and 80s, but I was at pride day two years ago and you always find a group of people who are sort of protesting and talking about how the choices that we’re making in our lives are somehow immoral. So, I think that was something we kept coming up against, too, and continue to sort of fight, around, you know, love makes a family and, yeah, anyways, and that all people should feel entitled to love and make the choices that they want to make.

But we did have, you know, we had the names of some quite good lawyers in Toronto that were very supportive of lesbian mothers and felt very strongly that, you know, that they would represent guys quite well. When we published Grapevine, we would often publish sometimes, you know, positive stories. Like, one time, in the Grapevine, there was this front page story of these two lesbian grandmothers in Vancouver winning custody, you know, and stuff like that. So, and Grapevine had, like, a mailing list of about 1,500 people and organizations and stuff. So, that was – but –

We also had – my friend actually, Velvet, one of her aunties, Shelley, she actually put together a children’s page. So, kids could now contribute to it. And so, we would always make sure that there was, you know, some stuff at the back, which was the children’s page. And I do remember my daughter Jolene, she actually has this big picture of herself with a big smile on her face, it was just this really colourful drawing that she did, I think she was about six. And it just says, “This is me looking pretty,” and she signed her name, right? [Laughs] So, I thought, you know, but I just thought, you know, and I got pictures in the kids page of Velvet sitting next to somebody else on pride day. You know, so the – I think the Grapevine was a very good tool in terms of bringing political news, bringing, you know, just a sort of connection with people. Like, we sent this Grapevine to people all over North America. So, it was very popular, and it was very – it was a very, very well-written article and articles, yeah.

And I do know, you know, attimes, you know, lesbian mothers were considered, you know, not an appropriate parent because they didn’t have good morals, or they, you know, they were not hiding their affection for their partner, or, you know, they were not making enough money, or they were not, you know, the home that they provided was not adequate enough, you know, or something. And it was all – and it really, really – it was just so much to … like, it was just a blacklist, a blacklisting moms. Like, just made them – and, you know, made the Defence Fund feel like it was actually that, a defence fund, right? Like, we ended up having to protect ourselves, protect other women, and, yeah, and I’m not sure if – well, the question number five about in the early 80s, and I wanted to speak to this, is that in the lesbian movement itself in the 80s, many lesbian women felt that women in the 70s and 80s who had children were not real lesbians, because they had had relations with men.

And there was also another thing that was just horrendous, a lot of women, be they lesbians or – felt that women who had male children was something else against them. And when you look at the history of the Michigan women’s folk festival, you know, male children – and I guess I can understand it, because a lot of the women were, you know, nude – but male children were put in a camp separately from the lesbian – like, from the Michigan festival. So, you know, so, I know that for me I felt that that was a choice that they made, but I was not going to go there and enjoy anything because I thought, you know, first of all, it’s not a woman that determines the sex of a child, and secondly, it’s a child. You know, it’s a child. And to say that, you know, like, the lesbian community is saying that women who are mothers are not lesbians, well, I just think to myself, I think, well, what are these women who are “mothers and lesbians” risking? They’re risking losing their children to come out as a lesbian woman, and yet, we’re not getting the support until much later. But we weren’t getting the support of the rest of the lesbian community.

So, one of us would stay home and watch the kids, the other one the next day would stay home and watch the kids, and the other one would stay home from university, and it would go like that. So, but, you know, the thing is, I know that we also were fortunate that we lived in a co-op where … being different was OK, was OK, it was, like, you know, of course there were some people who would always have an opinion to say that it’s wrong, and I found it really grating because they would not just say it’s wrong, but it’s, like, morally wrong or religiously wrong or something, you know. It was this sort of higher power saying that it was wrong, which was just – you know, when I think of all of the, you know, abuses again children and, you know, about all the statistics about heterosexual abuse, like, it just, you know, to come around and say, “Well, it’s against God’s will to have a gay mother or a gay father.”

Huge, three-storeys. And we would send some of us, like, myself, I would be the rep for our group, to a gay community dance committee meeting, and we would agree to provide members of our organization to, say, staff the bars, staff security, do two-hour shifts. If it was later in the evenings, say, from 1:00 to 4:00, we would get double the credit of a shift. And, you know, we had on the tickets, we had all of the organizations that were involved. Members or people who were coming to enjoy the dance would tick off where they wanted their money of ticket to go to, which organization. And then, every sort of six months, the gay dance committee would then pick an organization, like, say, for example, on a march dance – and these dances were held every month, and they’re, like, you know, you’re talking about 3,000 gay people dancing on three floors. It was a phenomenal experience.

And, you know, I’d be sitting there taking tickets or I’d be pouring drinks, which was just, you know, wine and beer, so it wasn’t that complicated. And we would have a lot of money from there, you know. So, for example, if we were picked as the main organization, then all of those tickets that weren’t marked would go directly to us, and then, a huge percentage of the proceeds would also go to us. So, we would get quite a bit of money, but also, too, people who would come to those dances on other days would often mark our group. And so, their ticket proceeds would go to us. And then, there was another organization called the gay community appeal, and we used to ask for – for what we would do, then, is we would actually go to people’s private homes and they would have, like, a potluck or whatever, we would present the gay community appeal, what the gay community appeal does who it funds, all that stuff, are you interested in, you know, donating to the appeal. And then, you know, once all the funding is gathered, then, for example, different groups write different proposals to the appeal.

So, then, we would basically write, you know, we need money because we have three court cases coming up, can you spare – and we’d pick a number out of the hat, can you spare $1,500? And then, divvy it up, give $500 to each of the women So, and I just have to say that given that it was the early 80s too, you know, ’84, ’85, we were starting to wind down, probably ’84, all of the organizations were volunteers, right? So, that is a very, very significant and powerful thing in the lesbian and gay communities. All of those groups, even ours, were all volunteers. Nobody was getting paid. So, you know, people who organized the dance committees, people who organized our dances, our gay – the gay community appeal, it was all staffed by volunteers. So, you know, you can look at the gay archives and all of those groups when they started, you know, I don’t – they’re all volunteer people.

She talked about the fact that, you know, she’s not asking for permission to have sex on Yonge Street or, you know, she doesn’t want to seduce a child, she would never want any child to be seduces or molested, And, you know, and she talks about – she just talks about the fact that, you know, it’s very difficult for gay mothers – I mean, for lesbian mothers, too, because, you know, to say – for example, to your boss, I don’t want to go to a social event at work because I’m a lesbian, I’m not comfortable. Because you risk losing your job. I don’t want – I want to rent an apartment with my partner, we’re lesbians, no, we’re not sisters, we’re lesbian, right? No, because then you’ll have all these questions, why, don’t you have a husband? Don’t you have a friend? Like, you know, so, she was putting that out, as well. And she was pointing out the things, like, you know, on the loss of a job, the loss of housing.

Also, having her partner, Flo, named as a beneficiary of her insurance without answering a million questions. See, this was, like, the day long before same-sex marriages, like, long before all that stuff. So, and then, one of the things that still just makes me just really, really tearful is when her final, you know, and she talks of that, being a lesbian mother is very, very difficult, because you could have your children one day, and then, the next day, you don’t have your children. And she talks about saying to Anita Bryant, you know, God forgive you, you know, never mind this God wants to save this anti-crusade, but, you know, God forgive you as a mom.

And it didn’t quite make sense, really, because, you know, it just, yeah, it didn’t make sense in terms of, you know, women and men and whatever, they’re so different, everybody’s so different and individual, how can you say, “OK, this group, because they have children, are not real lesbians,” you know? But at the time, when we started getting to know – getting to be known better, a lot of – a lot more women, a lot more younger women, and, you know, like, even after the Lesbian Mothers Defence Fund closed, or, you know, shut down, there were a lot more women who wanted to have children and, you know, then there were women who would just have, like, very casual affairs with somebody, lie, you know, just pick up a guy, have an affair, get pregnant, goodbye, you know. And, you know, what are you going to – and that’s how they had their children. But then, there was also children – I mean, there was also mothers who had artificial insemination.

And, you know, they were children whose … parents were either, like, two gay men and two lesbian women, and they became a family with their children. So, you know, I think as things – as the lesbian movement and feminist movement got used to the fact that lesbian mothers, you know, were real lesbians, that, you know, this was, you know, to say that you are not a real lesbian and to look at the fact that what you’re putting at stake to say that you’re a lesbian and to have somebody say to you, “Well, you’re not real,” is really insulting, you know. It’s just – but I think, you know, you have to understand now that the movement to be a parent, the movement to have children, I mean, I actually maybe 20 years ago, I worked with a couple who were able to adopt their children from CAS. Like, this would, you know, this would never have happened in the 80s.

Rachel Just a little aside, because I think you’re describing, like, really, the 90s was really a turning point, because I know – I interviewed a woman who lost her children, a lesbian who lost her children, in 1994, as late as 1994, right? But in 1997, we started the Dykes Planning Tykes course, right? So, there was this – the 90s things really shifted, I think, away from that, you know, that almost automatic loss of custody into that, what you’re describing, is that real sense of, we want to have kids within our queer identities, right? Velvet, you wanted to say something, I think.

And, you know, when I talk to Francie and stuff like that, even about this interview, and we talk about what really, really great work that we did as an organization and as, you know, there’s, like, maybe five or six of us on a steering committee, and organizing everything from Grapevines to dances to staffing the gay community dance committee to going on a road show to, you know, Kingston and Brockville and doing all of these living room speeches or radio shows or TV shows and just, you know, talking about lesbian – you know, like, it was just so hard. Like, I remember one time [laughs] being on the radio, on this family show, and we were talking about the lesbian mothers as a family, as a family organization, and people were calling in to the show and were saying, “I think you guys are horrible, I think you should be punished by God,” and I remember getting so pissed off at this one woman who just went on and on and on at how disgusted she was that we were on the radio. And I finally just said, “Well, why don’t you turn your dial off?” And I just sort of lost it, right? I just thought – so, you know, I mean, even those things, like, you know, it takes a lot of energy and – but, you know, it’s just –

And many people who’ve taken your Dykes Planning Tykes course. But it’s been interesting to be on the other end of their experience, where I become part of the chosen family as an “aunt,” and where we are raising these kids together. And one of the things I’ve learned is that even though we’ve come a long way and that there was significant work done in the 70s and 80s and 90s, that up until, you know, 2016, families were still struggling to be recognized as legal guardians of kids. And so, I wanted to acknowledge that, you know, at the time that my best friends had kids, one of the parents wasn’t legally acknowledges as a parent unless they adopted. But since 2016, the legislation that All Families Are Equal Act, that is now recognizing the intention of people who want to have families and recognizing the role of different adults in those kids’ lives. So, you know, there’s still work to do, but we’ve come a long way, and it’s because of the hard work of folks like the LMDF and – yeah, just extremely grateful for that.

And so, to look back on the years of the LMDF and, you know, all of the things that we accomplished, and how hard we tried to, you know, make women who were making decisions, whatever those decisions were, whether they were going to leave their children, whether they felt that they didn’t want to get involved with a custody battle because they were frightened, you know, or all of those things, that that – whatever their decision was, took immense courage. And I think when you acknowledge that and you look at the background that we have, like, that the archives have, I hope women who become, like who are researchers or want to look at the history, can actually see that that is intertwined in the whole movement of the LMDF.