Our Family History: a Review of Two Books

A good friend bought me The Log Books as a birthday gift.

My friend and I had been having conversations about human connection and practical organising – what to say to someone in crisis, how to listen, support, signpost. The Log Books is real queer history told through the worknotes of callers to the Lesbian & Gay Switchboard, a pioneering LGBTQ helpline which ran from 1974-2003, based in a flat above Housmans bookshop in North London.

What was especially thoughtful about the gift was how relatable and fascinating the struggles were. It was a history of ordinary queer people, of all ages and circumstances, looking for support sometimes therapy – putting complete trust in each other through the strength of the community they built. Logging calls, collecting the best information, endless filing, listening, spreading the word by getting Switchboard's number under as many eyes as possible.

The Log Books is easy to race through, and also to chat to your Mum about, because so much of Switchboard's history is in the 70s and 80s – AIDS, Section 28, Women's Lib. This led my Mum to lend me the book A Family Matter by Claire Lynch from her bookclub. It's a fictionalised account of a lesbian mother who battles for custody of her daughter. Both Log Books and A Family Matter flick between timelines; the 2020s and 1980s, daughters grown to adulthood; mothers discovering themselves; fathers trying to find roles that fit the socially acceptable ‘code’; our lives and our parents' lives as part of an important history.

Log Bookswrites, ‘For decades...

hundreds if not thousands of lesbian mothers fought for their right to be seen by the courts as a lesbian and a mother – a direct challenge to the idea that these two identities were incompatible.’ (p. 174)

In A Family Matter, the narrative thread of Dawn is 1980s small village life, a nuclear family, saving pennies for bring-and-buy sale clothes. Her life revolves around the things she believes it should – married to a man in her twenties, raising and dedicated to her three-year-old daughter. When she meets, befriends and falls in love with Hazel, Dawn plans how she will tell her husband, how her and Hazel will make space for her daughter in their flat together; they write each other letters imagining lives away by the sea without having to hide their relationship.

Dawn's shy husband, set in his habits, reacts with outrage that Dawn hopes will cool. He doesn't shout or get violent, but he changes the locks when she's out of the house, dropping their daughter on Dawn during the day so he can go to the office, and seeking legal advice about custody — because he believes it's the best thing for her.

The father, Harry – nicknamed Heron isn't a string-vest wearer. His patriarchy is quiet, deeply held, motivated by guilt and shame. When he takes her daughter, author Lynch paints a picture of a man in submission to the rules, patronised and out-classed by the lawyers: ‘He looks around at all the officials, their legal fees and Latin phrases, and sees that he has not lived the kind of life that would have prepared him for a day like this… Deferring to men who know which fork to use. Depending on the advice of men who wear cufflinks.’ (p. 151)

Terrified of losing her daughter, Dawn seeks support. She learns her legal defence won't be enough to overcome the deep homophobia and sexism of the family courts.

From Log Books, a call to Switchboard: ‘24 Sept 1975. A woman rang to ask if I knew anything about the case of a woman who was living with another woman who was refused custody of her child inspite of medical evidence that the child would have been better off with mother. This was for a case on now (very similar) which she wanted the info to help her with…’ (p. 174)

Something I found brilliant and inspiring about the feminist volunteers at Switchboard is the simple matter of getting the phone number ‘under women's noses’:

‘They needed to know all the publications and places where women might stumble across an advert for a support line. In the case of women who were living as straight, in probably quite conventional family homes not in London, this posed its own challenge... Lisa remembered placing an ad in Women's Own... not long after the ad ran, Switchboard's phones began to ring.

‘Suddenly we were getting calls from married lesbians who were literally sneaking downstairs at one or two in the morning to phone us while the family were asleep. They knew they were lesbians – quite often they were in love with the woman next door, or something like that, or their best friend or whatever – and they had agreements that they would not tell their husband or leave their husband until the kids had grown up and left... They were literally just waiting to be able to come out until it would not destroy the family.’ (p. 178)

In A Family Matter, Dawn finds an ad for a magazine in the back of a Sunday newspaper: ‘she thinks it's a miracle, or a trap... Dawn writes a letter in her neatest handwriting, addressed to a PO Box in West London. The reply arrives a week later, an ember of hot white hope landing on the doormat’ (p. 116). After a call in a phone box behind a car park, tracing the route to the meeting place and months of hesitation, Dawn joins the mothers' support group and is alarmed at how commonplace her story is. She wants them to be shocked, to call the police, but finds they are not surprised.

‘Dawn comes back to the group the next week and the next. She learns about the never-ending battles with social workers, the cost of solicitor's letters. She listens to the women who strike deals with husbands, the ones who find a way to make it work. The ones who don't... It is just like every other mothers' group Dawn has been to. Tired women, doing their best.’ (p. 119)

The Switchboard volunteers had to signpost and give advice as best they could to address the problem of lesbian custody. ‘Volunteer Femi Otitoju told us how women like her had to collect and share the best advice with lesbian mothers, such as leaving the family home with the children before the father found out they were lesbian’ (p. 176). The wellknown campaigning group at the time, Gay Liberation Front, didn't take the issue of lesbian custody seriously, so a group formed in 1976 called Action for Lesbian Parents.

The group that received most referrals from switchboard, however, was a broader feminist group Rights of Women, campaigning for women's legal equality.

‘18 July 1984. Please could all the men note (all the women already know, I hope) that the correct org to refer to is RIGHTS OF WOMEN for all 'technical' stuff on and lesbian custody.... RIGHTS OF WOMEN have a lesbian custody specialist worker on staff.’ (p. 176)

Dawn's support group receives legal advice from a solicitor, ‘a serious woman in a dark blue suit’ (p. 120). ‘There's more chance of salvaging something ... if you can prove to the court that you live alone ... an out-of-court settlement is usually safest ... if you're willing to play the good girl ... if you can get your husband to sign up to it, that is.’

‘And if he doesn't?’ they ask.

Hopefully the advice Rights of Women were able to offer was more useful than Lynch's solicitor. Dawn's court case itself is typical of the many experiences documented of lesbian custody battles. Julia Anne Brophy's PhD research with 22 lesbian mothers recounts lawyers interrogating women in court: on how they reached orgasm with their partners; husbands intercepting letters and phone calls to be used as ’evidence’ and read aloud; jurors lecturing women about ‘wifely duties’ and ‘perversion’. In A Family Matter, Lynch paints a picture of the social worker of nightmares:

‘...houndstooth jacket sloping from his shoulder. It is his view, he says, then, correcting himself, it is his professional opinion that they are discussing a child at risk. Dawn lets out a noise at these words, a sound of deep surprise that escapes her against her will.

‘“You mean to say you think Mrs Barnes will harm her own daughter?”

‘“Not physically, perhaps,” the social worker says, “but morally. This is a moral question.”’ (p. 150)

During the court hearing her husband begins to doubt himself, seeing the cruelty of it. He doesn't feel that he has the confidence and moral high-ground his barristers expect him to have. But Heron's cowardice and shame push him forward: ‘He cannot face a lifetime of seeing the way Dawn looks at him now. As if he is the one who has changed, become unrecognizable.’ (p. 153)

The barrister grills Dawn on the letters sent between her and her partner, hidden around the house to be read privately when they were apart. Now uncovered, read aloud in court, used as evidence against her.

‘There is so little lust to find in the letters; they weren't fools. Is this what they are accusing her of, Dawn wonders, the dream of swapping one kitchen sink for another?

‘There is the evidence, he says, written in biro, a house by the sea.

‘“You are planning to abandon your child, Mrs Barnes?”’

The courts rule that Dawn's daughter be taken from her, for ‘It is widely understood that such women are incapable of natural maternal feelings’ (p. 182). The pompous language would be comical. Lynch writes Dawn's last heartbreaking night with her daughter, that had me choking back tears on the train:

‘When her bag is packed, Dawn goes into the kitchen. She cracks the eggs into the brown Denby mixing bowl her grandmother gave her for a wedding present. She creams the butter and sugar, she adds the flour. Dawn waits as it bakes then she watches the cake cool and the night pass. She does not rush, sieving the icing sugar to avoid lumps, spreading one layer of buttercream between the sponges, another on top. She arranges the chocolate buttons, as she has promised she would, in the shape of the number four. Carefully, Dawn lowers the cake into a tin and puts the pink birthday candles in beside it. She knows that Heron does not know where the birthday candles are kept.’ (p. 183)

The Log Books' authors interviewed Elaine Fitzgerald, who in 1981 battled for custody of her sons. ‘I was made to feel like an animal... the price was that I would hopefully get to keep my sons.’ (p. 176)

Elaine won her battle, and had to come out in court. Thanks in part to her battle and bravery, things began to change.

In 1982 the Lesbian Custody Group & Rights of Women surveyed 36 lesbian mothers and made 17 recommendations, including education, court reform, and anti-discriminatory laws (Lesbian Mothers on Trial, Nov 1984). The law changed, gradually, as more and more lesbians were granted custody – many personal trials stacking up and eroding some of the judiciary's bigotry. ‘Various laws passed in the 2000s made claims that women like Elaine would be unfit mothers impossible to make, and the Equality Act 2010 bundled these laws together in even stronger provisions against discrimination.’ (Log Books, p. 180)

It frightens me how much power a court can have over matters so personal and intimate. Fictionalised by Lynch, and backed up by Switchboard testimony, homophobia and misogyny in the legal system weaponise social prejudices and have the power to make cruelty a sellable commodity. Court battles break open the complex and private details of human beings to pass judgement, interrogate, frame events the way the lawyers want them to be. Our society leans on laws to protect us, and support ‘what's right’, but we cannot rely on that. We know how dangerous it can be to enable a higher authority to intervene in what is most personal and precious to us.

In the custody support group, Dawn asks another mother, ‘What harm are they doing to anyone?’ She replies, ‘They are terrified... Think about how it looks to them. Mothers, housewives, shacking up together. We'd bring the whole system down.’ (p. 120)