Shell Gottsagen

Shell Gottsagen is an activist and social worker. Shell played instrumental roles in many feminist political actions over the years, often facing arrest for her outspoken dissent of patriarchal oppression. Shell took part in several experimental women’s communities and even worked for a time at a lesbian-owned restaurant in Brooklyn called La Papaya. A proud mother of two, Shell was an early user of In Vitro Fertilization at a time when it was still illegal for lesbian and gay couples to adopt in many states. This conversation was recorded on August 1, 2019 at 12pm by phone.

Gwen Shockey: I always start with the same question, which is to describe the first place you ever went that was occupied predominantly by queer women or lesbians and what it felt like to be there.

Shell Gottsagen: Ok. Well, let’s see. The first place that I remember going was when I was in college at Penn. State but it was a gay bar with lesbians and gay men so I don’t know if that really fits but it was called the My Oh My!

GS: Amazing name!

SG: Yeah! (Laughing) It was right on the main street up in State College, Pennsylvania. I would bring my books and do my studying there and everything because it just felt like a safe place to be.

GS: What first brought you there?

SG: Probably the first woman that I was involved with when I was in college.

GS: Were you out at the time?

SG: Yeah.

GS: Did you grow up in Pennsylvania?

SG: I’m from West Philly!

GS: Ok! So that was your first kind of queer or lesbian experience?

SG: Yeah, I mean there was another place that we would go to when we were in Philly but I don’t know that it even had a name. This is going back to maybe 1974 – it sounds strange but you had to go in through like an alley kind of thing and ring a doorbell next to a garage door and somebody would come and you had to say a certain thing before they would unlock the door. You would go in and it was all lesbian. I guess they had alcohol. I never drank so I didn’t really pay attention to that part. It was a lot of slow dancing. I remember a woman came up and asked me to dance. The women were older and very much into dressing butch/femme. The woman that asked me to dance was wearing a dress and she had so much perfume on I thought I was going to get sick.

GS: Did you consider yourself butch or femme?

SG: No. It was just different. I have no idea what the name of the place was or if it even had a name.

GS: Did it feel safe to go to places like that in Pennsylvania?

SG: Yeah! Nobody knew about that place. It wasn’t a store front or anything like that. The My Oh My in State College I think was a little bit riskier especially back then in the ‘70s. I only remember being harassed once leaving there and I’m not sure if I would have been harassed anyway on the street. It was some man who was really aggressive and right before that I had been in a self-defense class and I’m not sure how but I ended flipping him over my shoulder and laying him out flat.

GS: Are you kidding me? Wow!

SG: No! (Laughing) I had just learned that move that night and I thought it was good practice!

GS: Wow! That’s so badass!

SG: It was! It’s very much not characteristic of me. So, those were my earliest experiences.

GS: Did it feel pretty natural to call yourself a lesbian when you were younger or was it challenging for you?

SG: It wasn’t really that challenging in a way I had read like every book when I was young that came out on feminism and I was a very strong feminist and was involved when I went to college in consciousness raising groups. I also grew up in a family where Civil Rights was a very important thing so I viewed everything from a Civil Rights perspective.

GS: Can you tell me a little bit more about your family and the importance of Civil Rights?

SG: I was born in 1955 so back then the schools were not racially integrated and there was still segregation and my mother was a strong activist fighting for racial integration in the schools so we would have Civil Rights meetings in our living room. I grew up also listening to my great aunts who were very much involved with Civil Rights. My one aunt was eating at a restaurant and an African-American man came in and tried to sit at the counter and they tried to make him leave and she stood up at her table and said, “Excuse me he’s with me!” She didn’t know him but then he was allowed to sit and have a meal. So I think that was just a value within our family and I saw lesbian and gay rights from a Civil Rights perspective. I was also very involved in disability rights when I was in college. I had friends who used wheelchairs and needed curb cuts to be able to access campus. They were fighting for curb cuts and things like that. I was always an activist. That was really important to me.

GS: Was your family accepting of your sexuality when you came out?

SG: Not great. Not horrible. I was closeted with them and then my mother called me and said they wanted me to come over to talk to me. I had brought a woman home who I was seeing in college and there was a lesbian bookstore in Philadelphia and we had gotten some books and newsletters and materials. I put it in one of my drawers under all of my clothes. We had gone out and when we came back to my parent’s house my mother had obviously gone through all the stuff and put it all on top of my dresser. My mother was extremely confrontational. The time I actually came over and came out to her was pretty funny because the first thing she said was, “No, no, no! Now I’m never going to get to be a grandmother!” And I said: Oh yes you are! I’m planning to have children! And she goes, “That’s even worse!” (Laughing) The other thing she said was, “Do you think it’s not obvious? Even your grandfather asked if you’re a lesbian!” My father was even more accepting I think. I remember one of my siblings saying to him as he walked across the floor that he was walking like he was gay and he said, “So what if I am!” Yeah.

GS: That’s awesome! That must have felt good to hear.

SG: Yeah. It was ok. It wasn’t the best reception but it wasn’t the worst by any means.

GS: After college did you move to New York right away?

SG: No. I wanted to start a women’s environmental community so I went back to Philly and moved in with a woman who I had lived with before. I’ve lived in a lot of communal houses. This friend of mine, Barbara, let me stay in her apartment. I told her I didn’t have a cent to my name but let me sleep on your sofa and I promise you within a month I’ll have a job and I’ll find us a place to live in the country and we can start a women’s environmental community. Just give me 30 days and I can do it. So I did it! I found a job and I found a three-story house for rent in Glenside, Pennsylvania and we were able to grow some food. There was enough land there to grow a garden. We were able to try to recycle everything.

GS: That sounds quite utopian.

SG: I thought it would be that way but the neighborhood wasn’t exactly accepting. Not at all. First of all we were a multi-racial group of women and we just did not fit into their neighborhood. Somebody ended up setting our house on fire to get us out. It was pretty bad. I remember we had two bathrooms in the house and I was next up to take a bath and I had been waiting all evening because everything was on a schedule in the house. (Laughing) I had just sat down in the bathtub and somebody yelled, “Somebody just set our house on fire!” And I said: That’s ok, I’m in water. (Laughing) I was like, I am not getting out, this is my turn!

GS: That’s communal living for you!

SG: Exactly. (Laughing) The firetrucks came and I don’t know if it was intentional or accidental but they plowed into all of the women’s cars. They really wanted us out of the neighborhood.

GS: God that’s so sad!

SG: It really was.

GS: Was that the end of it? After the fire?

SG: No! The women stayed and I ended up leaving the house because I had a dog that bothered all of the other women in the house. They told me either the dog had to leave or I had to leave with the dog so I ended up leaving with the dog. My dog… if somebody was harsh to her she would look them in the eye, run up the stairs knowing exactly who it was, jump exactly in the middle of their bed and urinate. (Laughing)

GS: Smart dog!

SG: Yeah! So then I moved with a friend of mine named Sharon. This was interesting – this was probably 1977 or 1978 – and she was an African-American lesbian and had graduated like number one in her class at University of Pennsylvania and could not get hired anywhere as an attorney. She struggled to find a job. Finally she got hired at a domestic violence shelter. Whereas our neighbor who was just an average student and a white male got all of these job offers and was hired immediately. The discrimination was clear. I decided I wanted to live in the country and sort of meandered my way. I rented a place on seven acres of land in Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania and we had a women’s collaborative where we did different projects. The women came out to the land and we decided to heat the place completely with solar energy. Women came with all different skills. We’d go to junk yards and pick up scrap metal and glass in order to build our own solar collectors.

GS: How did you learn how to do that?

SG: Everybody had a different knowledge base and we just kind of pooled our knowledge and research together and figured it out. Everything was built out of materials we found for free in the junk yard. We build two solar collectors because there were two structures. I used the property as a place for women who were going through emotional breakdowns to come and to be at peace in a place where they wouldn’t have to be institutionalized.

GS: I wish there were places like that now.

SG: It was hard. I thought it would be easier than it was. But the solar collectors were really cool! For the cells we got beer cans or soda cans, chopped them in half, dipped them in black paint and then we got a large piece of sheet metal and screwed them on and built them as cells that collected the solar heat. I had a wood burning stove out there too.

GS: How did you find women to get involved in this with you?

SG: There was a project in Philadelphia and I can’t remember the name of it… I think it was the Free Women’s School? It was a kind of grassroots project that women had started. It was great! I had taken auto mechanics there and learned how to tune up my own car. I did all the work on my car back then but cars weren’t all electronic the way they are now. I had this old Toyota station wagon that was my first car. It was a stick shift that I bought used and before I ended up moving to New York somebody broke into the place I was living in Upper Black Eddy and when I came home everything I owned was gone. I mean everything! Including my towels, my underwear, everything in my refrigerator – there was just nothing left in the place! Someone must have come with a moving truck and cleaned me out. It was really crazy. So I was dating a woman in New York so I called her and asked her if she’d ever thought of us living together and she asked if I’d want to do that and I said, well I could be there within two hours! (Laughing) I packed up my dog and two cats and drove into New York City and went from living alone on seven acres of land to the sixteenth floor of an apartment complex in Manhattan.

GS: Wow, what a way to enter New York with not one object and three animals!

SG: Yeah! It was an easy move! Like, hi I’m here can I wear your clothes? (Laughing) Yeah, so that was pretty crazy.

GS: Did you become involved in activism right when you moved to the city or did it take you some time to acclimate?

SG: I met women right away! I found a really cool job immediately which was great. It was in an art studio working for a gay man who was a designer and there were five of us: three gay men and two lesbians. We worked together making decoupage boxes and lamps and all different kinds of things and then he’d sign everything. It was all sold in a 5th Avenue show room. It was really cool. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven! I got to do artwork all day long and got paid for it. So, that lasted for a while but I still had that dream of living in a lesbian community in the country. Growing my own food and stuff. I was involved with political activism while I was there in the 1970s. Anyway, I found a group of women and we rented a place up in Connecticut and moved to Connecticut. We had a bunch of land and it even had a pool, which was really cool. There was an old barn which we fixed up and there was a woman who ran a summer camp and needed someone to take care of her horses during the winter so we took a couple horses in. That was my first experience with horses. I worked for the Y and ran and after school program for kids. I’m a social worker. It was cool! It lasted for a while. I had an art studio there and sold some of my stuff in Provincetown.

GS: About how many women were living there with you?

SG: It was only like six women. It was a three-story house with lots of bedrooms. We had a lot of animals too.

GS: So, I have to ask: was there any drama in terms of people sleeping together?

SG: Just one couple moved in. I had left the woman I was living with in New York. She was supposed to move up there and she had become abusive and I was like, I’m out of this. This isn’t going to happen. So, I left her one night in the middle of the night. I couldn’t even get to my shoes I just walked out barefoot in the snow just to get away from her.

GS: I’m so sorry. That’s horrible.

SG: Yeah. I wasn’t going to put up with that. That was just a whole other ball of wax. She had mental illness. She was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic and got locked up in Bellevue and she wanted to get out when we were still living together. I pretended to be her psychiatrist. (Laughing) I had a couple of friends answer the telephone with the name of an institution that we’d named Wile Away. (Laughing) I went and met with the folks over at Bellevue and said that I’d been her therapist for a long time and that I’d really like to have her reassigned to a private institution that I’m involved with. They said they needed to call there so they called and the women answered Wile Away, they asked a few questions and the women answered correctly and she was released under my care. It was crazy. It was crazy times back then.

GS: They didn’t ask for any paperwork or anything?

SG: Nope! You just dress up right and come with a nice briefcase and you speak their language!

GS: Wow. It’s just so different now. I could never imagine that happening.

SG: It was all pre-internet and nobody knew anything. So, we were up in Connecticut for a while and then I got involved with a group of anarchists. First I got involved with environmental activism and then I did a lot of anti-Klan work too. We went to cross burnings as a multi-racial group and did non-violent protest. Prior to moving out to the country I had work in the emergency room with pediatric rape victims. When I was in college I was part of a group that started the Rape Crisis Center in State College Pennsylvania, which still exists. I got involved with a lot of stuff back then. We actually got the whole football fraternity suspended. When we opened up a hotline we were getting more and more calls from women who had been gang raped at football fraternity parties. This was still under Joe Paterno and the man who was just recently convicted of raping boys up at Penn. State. Jerry Sandusky. I organized big protests up there and we got international press. We were able to shut down the football fraternity which was where all the money came in from.

GS: Wow. What year was that?

SG: That would have been ’75. Yeah. So I ended up doing rape counseling. When I was in Connecticut I ended up getting together with two other women – I had done rape counseling, one of the women worked in a domestic violence shelter and the other was an emergency room nurse and we did a non-violent protest at a store that sold books on how to rape women and children and metal spiked dildos to rip women apart. It was called The Bare Facts the front of it was lingerie and then there was a back room.

GS: That’s horrifying.

SG: Yeah. They were having a big thing for men on Valentine’s night so what we did was arrive there just as it opened and we had baby bottles filled with human blood and we sprayed all their materials with blood and we sat down and waited to be arrested. Our defense was that what this man sells leads to women and children bleeding and that the blood was already there, we just made it visible. We were arrested and refused to post bail because it’s a system that discriminates against people without money. So we were put in prison. I was put in solitary confinement because they said I was a threat to everyone. So, I went on a hunger strike. All three of us did. We had nothing to eat for eight days. I could talk to women on the other side of the wall in the cell I was in and I remember one woman was crying and crying. I asked her what was making her so sad and she said she needed to talk to her children and she couldn’t because she only had one phone call. So when they gave me my phone call I said I don’t want it, I want to give it to her. I guess she and some other women knew we were on a hunger strike and all the women had canned peaches with their dinner so all the women collected their juice from the peaches into three cups of juice for us so we would have something to drink. I just really… it just made me want to devote time to helping women in prison. People were there for mostly economic crimes.

GS: What ended your hunger strike in the end?

SG: The judge released us on recognizance without any bail. They charged us with two felonies and a misdemeanor. So we went on trial. We were on trial for six weeks. We wanted to do our own defense because we said it was an act of conscience and nobody could defend us. I was passing out fliers to drum up support the lesbian bar in Hartford, Connecticut and there were some women there who were law students at the University of Connecticut and I got a call from the President of the Law Department there and he said they wanted to help with our defense. When we said we didn’t want a defense he said, “What if you came in and we taught you how to do questioning and cross examining and we can video tape you doing it and show you how to be effective?” And that was like: YES! The other two women weren’t really that interested in the legal part of it but I was. So, I went in and learned how to do all the questioning and everything. They did a great job and they came to our trial every day. A lot of people came and supported us. We spent several weeks choosing a jury and we questioned each potential juror for a very long period of time. We asked things like, can you tell the difference between a metal spiked dildo and a nuclear submarine? We had potential jurors break down crying on the stand. We had one admit that she was a Nazi and we had crazy stuff. We asked how they felt about unions, all different kinds of things to get at the core of who they were and where their values were. We ended up choosing a jury and the trial was very, very intense. We got the man who owned the store up on the stand and I questioned him for three solid days. He was saying that we destroyed his property and I said, we have pictures of the property you say we destroyed and we’ve enlarged them. We made him read the title of every book in his store. It went on and on and on. Each one of us testified about our experiences. I talked about the rape victims and children I had counseled. Jane testified about the domestic violence shelter. Linda talked about being an ER nurse and assault on women and children. We all admitted doing what we did. For their side they brought a woman who would model the lingerie. I could just tell from when she was testifying and I got and instinct and I looked at her and said, you were raped when you were a child weren’t you? She just gasped and said she’d never told anyone and asked how I knew. I told her I just knew it, I could feel it. I said, was it your neighbor or a relative? She said, “My neighbor! How do you know?” I said, because I was a rape counselor. I can tell. I said to her, if you felt you could do something and it meant even destroying property and you thought it might prevent one woman or child from being raped, would you do it? And she said, “Yes.” She turned from his side to ours. That was like, amazing. Anyway, Andrea Dworkin testified on our behalf. She talked about the effect of oral rape after the movie Deep Throat came out. We said that we didn’t believe in censorship but we belief in personal responsibility and that pornography leads to violence. We had a young woman come to testify who had been raped by her father from the age of five years old on. The only period of time that he left her alone was when they lived in a country in Europe where there was no pornography allowed. That was really intense. The jury ended up deliberating for about two and half hours and even though we admitted everything they came back and found us not guilty on all charges.

GS: God how amazing! What a story Shell! Mind blowing.

SG: It was! We don’t know who did this but that night somebody went and blew up the store and it was in the news the next morning. We have no idea who it was.

GS: This might seem like a silly question but were you afraid during the trial?

SG: Not really. I was young and I thought that I would probably spend a large portion of my life in prison.

GS: Wow.

SG: I felt like I needed to do something. I couldn’t do nothing. When I was living in Philly right after college I was part of a group called Dyke Tactics. We went in when they were showing snuff movies and women were being murdered in these movies and we would run into the theaters that were showing them, jump onstage and slash down the screens and run out. It was a pretty crazy time.

GS: It sounds like your activism brought you to a lot of different places and kept you moving over the years.

SG: It did. We were facing seven years following the trial. Technically the way we got off on that trial was that he was asking for repayment for the carpeting but we only got blood on the merchandise so it needed to be a certain amount of dollar damage to constitute a felony and I was able to prove that there was no blood on that rug through pictures and therefore that took off the amount of money that he was asking for the carpeting and that technically made it no longer a felony. We did really strong closing arguments. That was the only time in the trial that we allowed someone from the University of Connecticut to participate. The president of the department begged and pleaded that he would also be allowed to do a closing argument and he did and it was very effective. His wife was there and she was very pregnant and he started to cry and said, “What if something were to happen to my daughter. What if something were to happen to my wife. What if men like this are allowed to continue selling these things and promoting this violence.” So, we were lucky and what I decided when we were found not guilty was to devote the seven years that I would have spent locked up working on issues relating to women in prison.

GS: Is that what led to your work with No More Cages?

SG: Yeah. So, I moved to New York to work with No More Cages, which published the writings of women in prison and psychiatric institutions. While I was on trial at the same time there was a woman named Rita Silk Nauni she was a native woman who was on trial in Oklahoma. She was a domestic violence victim and she was trying to escape with her ten-year-old son. She flew to Oklahoma which has a large Lakota population and she thought that her people would accept her and her son. When she flew in no taxi cabs would give rides to Native Americans. So, she and her little boy were walking along the side of the highway and they couldn’t carry their stuff anymore so they put some of their older stuff along the side of the road because they just couldn’t carry it and they were trying to walk all the way to where the Lakota people were living. They were stopped by two officers and one put a gun to her little boy’s head against the squad car and she was only like four-foot-ten but she flipped out when she saw a gun to her kids head and grabbed it to get it away from the police officer and she shot the cops. She killed one of them – the male cop – and the shot the female cop in the leg, put her child in the squad car and drove off. She was facing the death penalty. I decided to devote myself to Rita’s case, which was pretty amazing. One thing I had to do for her case was to travel throughout the U.S. and Canada to all of the reservations to raise awareness. In the end she was convicted and sentenced to one hundred and fifty years and now she’s free. Somehow she got out. It was amazing. No More Cages was a lesbian collective that put out a publication, I think quarterly? It was writings on women in prisons and psychiatric institutions. It ran for years and became international. We also ran support groups. We realized that all of these women that ended up incarcerated were victims in some ways. We were really able to connect with the women who came to these groups. It was just wonderful. Some of them were famous, for instance women from the Weatherman group [The Weather Underground Organization] and Jean Harris who murdered the Scarsdale diet doctor. There were some interesting characters. Then what I started doing was opening up my apartment that I lived in, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, because when women get out of prison they have nowhere to go and they’re given like seventy-five dollars or something so I started taking in homeless women. I did that for a long time.

GS: Was this around the same time that you were working at La Papaya?

SG: Yes. La Papaya was apparently a slang term for vagina. (Laughing) That’s where they got the name from. It was owned by two lesbian women, Lucy and Elie.

GS: Can you tell me how you met Lucy and Elie.

SG: Everybody kind of knew each other. I’m not really sure how we met. I would fill in there. They opened up this restaurant… I texted a friend to ask if she remembered anything about it. She used to eat there a lot. She said she thought it was near Prospect Heights on Flatbush Avenue and that she remember the sign being very sexy. I don’t remember the sign at all!

GS: Do you remember what the inside of the restaurant looked like?

SG: I remember you walked in and it was a great big room. It was very open space. I remember the table along the left side of the wall and if you walked all the way straight back was a big kitchen. A lot of prep space.

GS: Was it decorated or kind of simple?

SG: I remember it was very clean looking but simple.

GS: Would Lucy and Elie be there often?

SG: They would be there all the time! They did all the cooking, they did all the major work. It was their baby. They were a couple.

GS: What was your experience like working there?

SG: It was really fun! I just filled in and did dish-washing or whatever they needed here and there if they were understaffed. It wasn’t really a gig or anything. I was working as a medical social worker in a hospital. So, I would do evenings and weekends and stuff like that.

GS: You may not know since you were filling in, but you were friends with them I believe… do you remember if it was hard for two women especially two lesbians to own a business together?

SG: I think Lucy had owned something before. If I remember correctly I think she had a coffee house or something in Chicago. I think she had business experience. There was an incident though in which two or three men came into the restaurant – I wasn’t there when it happened – but they came in and made all the women lay down on the floor and hand over their wallets and then they picked some of the women and raped them. It was just horrible. It was scary. I don’t think they closed right after that. I think they stayed open for a little while longer.

GS: That must have been really hard for them.

SG: Yeah, I don’t remember all the details.

GS: Was the clientele at La Papaya mostly lesbians?

SG: Yeah, it was all lesbians I think. I don’t remember ever any men in there. It was vegetarian. I remember it mostly just being for eating but people would come and socialize and you would go for the evening. It was a whole social evening and really great quality food. It was delicious. The environment was great. It was a great resource.

GS: You had mentioned to me the first time we spoke that you would spend a lot of time with Lucy and Elie’s children. What was it like for two lesbians to have children at that point?

SG: Probably by this point it was the early 1980s. Lucy had children from when she was married to a man and then she had adopted several children. Elie decided to adopt when I knew her so she had a daughter. One day a week I would go spend time with her daughter so she could either get some time to herself or work or whatever. I wanted experience around kids before I decided whether I was going to have a child or not.

GS: It wasn’t possible at that point for two women to adopt a child together, right? It had to be a single parent adoption?

SG: Yes. In New York, yes. In Florida where I ended up adopting it was not legal for a lesbian or a gay man to adopt. It only changed a couple of years ago. When I adopted my daughter it was illegal for a lesbian to adopt.

GS: How did you manage to maneuver around that?

SG: I was just extremely fortunate that when they sent out a social worker the social worker happened to be a gay man. He didn’t ask me if I was a lesbian and he didn’t tell me he was a gay man but I could tell. I thought he was. (Laughing) When they did the home study he never asked my sexuality and I never volunteered it. I did it as a single mom and I already had my son through artificial insemination while I was still in New York. Artificial insemination was used for many years. I actually grew up with a friend who was my age who was conceived through artificial insemination. When I inseminated it was August of 1984 and it was that month that they realized semen could transmit HIV. Prior to that they didn’t know how HIV was transmitted. So they stopped doing any inseminations for a time until they learned how to test for HIV.

GS: You must have been pregnant at that time when they found out right? Were you frightened that your child could have HIV?

SG: It was a possibility. Two other women I knew ended up with HIV and so did their children. I went to the largest sperm bank in the world called Idant and they screwed up a lot. Seriously, I mean there were couples who went – for instance a woman and her husband who was dying and they froze his sperm so she could have his child and then the child was born a different race than the husband. Obvious mistakes. My son was born with Down syndrome and I took him to the Institute of Basic Research in Staten Island to be studied when he was a newborn. They tested my DNA and his and they called me in and said all children born with Down syndrome have a certain marker and I didn’t have it. They asked me if I was sure he was my kid and said, yes of course this is my kid. I had him with a midwife, there was nobody else giving birth! They contacted the sperm bank and found out that they had messed up in the defrosting process.

GS: Wow! What did you feel when you heard that?

SG: I was like really pissed! I was curious why the doctor kept doing EKGs on me – I mean was 29 years old – and then I found out that he wasn’t even a gynecologist he was a cardiologist and that was the only thing he knew how to do!

GS: What the fuck!

SG: I know! And the woman who worked in his office who was supposed to be his nurse was actually his wife. (Laughing)

GS: That’s insane! But you ended up with an amazing child!

SG: Absolutely! At that point I could have sued but in order to sue what you have to do is claim that it was a wrongful life and I would not testify to that because my child’s life was not wrongful. I was also afraid it would take away the right for lesbians to inseminate. I just didn’t want to risk it for other women. They said it was a clear-cut case and I would have become a millionaire but it wasn’t worth it to me. My conscience was more important to me than the money.

GS: What were the early years like for you being a mother and a lesbian?

SG: The hard part was that a large part of the lesbian community rejected me. Partially because I had a boy, partially they were really uncomfortable with the disability… I was living in Park Slope and I would be pushing the stroller down the street and women that were my friends or part of the community that I had always associated with would cross the street and walk away.

GS: That must have been so hard!

SG: It was. I felt really ostracized. It was really crazy. I had him on my own but I had planned him when I was in a relationship and then we broke up right before I was going to inseminate and I decided to go ahead with it any way. I got into another relationship and that woman kept insisting that it better be a girl and I was like, we better break up because I don’t know what my baby’s going to be.

GS: That’s just so strange to me – to feel so strongly about boys and men – even to a point of turning from a child. That sounds like it was very difficult to navigate.

SG: She was a woman from a different culture and didn’t even really believe me about the insemination, which was interesting too. When I was six months pregnant I ended up getting into a relationship. She was wonderful. When she met me we had been at a party and the next morning I said to her, by the way you do realize that I’m pregnant, right? And she was like, “WHAT?” She told me she just thought I had a big belly! (Laughing) I said: Surprise! She used to talk to the baby through my belly all the time and the first thing she bought when Zack was born was this clown puppet. She put the puppet on her hand and started to talk to him and he recognized her voice it was really cool. The bad part was when he was a little bit older I took him to a restaurant and there was a clown there and he ran up to the clown and said, “Are you my daddy?” (Laughing) He thought every clown was his parent! It was really crazy. I moved down to Florida because of his health. The climate here was too tough. He couldn’t breathe the artificial heat from the radiator. He would get the croup and end up in the hospital. They wanted to put a trach in him but I didn’t want him trached so I just left. I signed him out against medical advice, put him the car with my dog and cats and drove as quick as I could.

GS: You’re a good mom! That’s quite a drastic life change all of the sudden!

SG: Yeah! I quit my job, lost all my friends… it was just everything. But he survived without being trached which was important to me. And then we just fought for education! He was the first person with Down syndrome in Palm Beach County to go into regular education. I refused special ed and fought for him. I went through the Office of Civil Rights and took the school district to court constantly and got him into the Dreyfoos School of the Arts and Dreyfus School for Performing Arts because he always wanted to be an actor since he was three and then I adopted my daughter down here! When she was three she told me she wanted to be a lawyer! I asked her why and she told me because she could argue better than anyone. And she was right. So, I have these two awesome kids and at age 60 I married my partner Trish Carland. So, that’s my crazy story!

GS: And now you have a big world tour with Zack for his movie The Peanut Butter Falcon?

SG: Yeah! We’re so excited because if all goes well he’s been asked to dance with Ellen on The Ellen Show!

GS: That’s so cool!

SG: Yeah! He’s been great! He’s very, very open! Every time he speaks he says, “I want to thank my two moms!”

GS: That must make you feel proud!

SG: It does! And my daughter for her Master’s Degree paper in sports management wrote about the LGBTQ community in the sports community. She was a gymnast and a soft ball player.

GS: Very cool! Well, I can’t thank you enough for sharing this with me. Have an amazing time traveling with Zack!

SG: You’re welcome!