By Janna Cunningham
I came out when I was 18 years old as a freshman in college. I had fallen in love with a soccer teammate and wholeheartedly dove into the beautiful world of being gay. I put rainbow stickers on my car, went to gay bars, and celebrated Pride events in whatever city I happened to live in each June. I was never scared of being out, except when it came time to tell my parents that summer. My mom was open-minded almost immediately, and my dad needed more time, but he eventually came around. I was lucky.
Pride events became even more special to me in Minneapolis in the 2010s. My partner—who became my wife when same-sex marriage was legalized in Minnesota in 2013—and I brought our two young children in a wagon decked out with rainbow streamers. We hooted and hollered as we marched in the parade down Hennepin Avenue to Loring Park. Some years we tossed candy into the crowds. The overwhelming feelings were love, joy, and acceptance.
At the park, we indulged in food truck treats and gathered every free rainbow sticker, whistle, hat, sweatband, and pencil we could fit into our backpacks. We often went out to dinner as thirty-something gay moms with our close friends, who were mostly other thirty-something gay moms. We felt like warriors leading the charge for visibility and acceptance. It was an exciting and memorable time in our lives.
However, building our LGBTQ+ family was not easy. I remember having to ask each of our mothers to write and mail notarized affidavits to the family court so that my wife could legally adopt her own children. We used a sperm donor, and I was the only parent biologically related to them. To protect our family and ensure our parental rights were recognized, we had to navigate a lengthy legal process that cost approximately $3,000 per child. We were fortunate to have the financial means to cover those expenses.
We relocated to a small town on the coast of Maine in 2017, near where I grew up, to be closer to my family.
I wish I could say that things have improved significantly since 2010. While there has been important progress, including marriage equality and stronger legal recognition of LGBTQ+ families, recent political developments have shown that rights and protections many of us once believed were secure can still be challenged. In some ways, it feels as though we have moved backward.
In Maine, legal recognition of LGBTQ+ families has improved considerably since 2010. Married same-sex couples generally receive the same parental presumptions and adoption rights as other married couples. Maine also continues to protect reproductive freedom and access to abortion care. Through the Maine Parentage Act, which took effect in 2016, the state specifically recognizes and regulates surrogacy, making Maine one of the more surrogacy-friendly states in the country.
Yet even with those protections, progress is not always permanent. LGBTQ+ families are still encouraged to pursue confirmatory adoptions or other legal safeguards to ensure parental rights are recognized across state lines. Across the country, rights that many of us once assumed were settled continue to face challenges, reminding us that the work of protecting families like ours is ongoing.
I haven’t attended a Pride event since moving to Maine, and I think it’s well past time. I sometimes feel guilty that we haven’t been more involved in recent years. Our children are now busy teenagers with little interest in joining their moms at a parade, but that isn’t really the point. We need to reconnect with our roots. Now is the time to show up, to be visible, and to be loud.
This year, we plan to celebrate all LGBTQ+ families at our local pride event.
