Our history
Founded at the Gay and Lesbian March on Washington in October 1979, Family Equality has provided LGBTQ+ families with community, support, advocacy, and storytelling for more than 45 years.
A patchwork of potlucks
With shifting culture and increased visibility following the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969, the 1970s saw an increase in gay men across North America coming out. Many had children and were married to women, which meant they were left to navigate challenging and often discriminatory custody battles alone.
In need of community and support, these dads formed local groups in cities like New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Together, they hosted potluck dinners, discussion groups, and family-friendly activities.
Founding fathers
Connected through newsletters and phone lines, representatives from these local groups—Alan Ross (Philadelphia), Dave Berube (D.C.), and Al Luongo (New York)—agreed to meet up at the first Gay and Lesbian March on Washington in October 1979.
There, they decided to host a national convening of gay father groups, reaching out through cold calls and hotlines to invite members to Ross’s home in Philadelphia. At this meeting in February 1980, the Gay Fathers Coalition was officially established.
What’s in a name?
While the Gay Fathers Coalition began largely as a group for LGBTQ+ dads with children from former marriages with women, the mid-1980s saw an increasing number of out LGBTQ+ people expanding their families through adoption, surrogacy, assisted reproduction, and other methods. The Gay Fathers Coalition responded to this shift by changing its name to the Gay and Lesbian Parents Coalition International (GLPCI) in 1986. More than ten years later, in 1998, the organization became the Family Pride Coalition to include anyone under the LGBTQ+ family umbrella.
In the 2000s, the organization became a national force in the policy sphere and changed its name twice more: Family Equality Council in 2007 and, in 2019, Family Equality.
Providing community and connection
In the early years, Family Equality operated as a volunteer-run organization providing parents with resources through a mailed newsletter, staff referrals, and annual meetings hosted by one of its 160 local chapters.
Family Week: A Provincetown tradition
In 1994, Family Equality’s volunteer executive director, Tim Fisher, and his partner and future Family Equality board member, Scott Davenport, took their family to Provincetown, Massachusetts for a vacation. Over the course of the week, they meet other LGBTQ+ families and invite them to a barbeque at their rental. And so, Family Week was born.
The first formal Family Week in 1995 welcomed nearly 45 families to the shores of Cape Cod for a week of community and connection. Just one year later, 100 families joined in. Today, Family Week is the largest annual gathering of LGBTQ+ families in the world.
As the organization grew, so did its programming. Family Equality entered the millennium with a suite of in-person community-building events, educational workshops, and resources covering issues related to LGBTQ+ families and schools, law, adoption and foster care, finances, and advocacy. This programming has evolved over the years, adapting to the realities of the times: In 2018, just before publishing the landmark LGBTQ+ Family-Building Survey that showed we were on the cusp of an LGBTQ+ millennial “baby boom,” the organization merged with Path2Parenthood to better support prospective parents and in 2020, we launched virtual programming, including peer support spaces that continue today, to support families at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Advancing equality for LGBTQ+ families
Protecting LGBTQ+ families
Family Equality’s policy work began in the mid-1990s with local and coalition-based work. In the years that followed, our burgeoning policy team focused on pushing back Defense of Marriage Acts and fighting anti-LGBTQ+ adoption and foster care bills in states like Florida and Texas.
Through the decades, this work continued, as Family Equality sued Mississippi’s Department of Human Services in 2015 and later the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2020 for their respective anti-LGBTQ+ adoption and foster care policies.
But, our policy work also involved work to protect existing LGBTQ+ families. Since the early 2000s, Family Equality worked with schools and teachers to protect families in the school system. In 2023, Family Equality, alongside LGBTQ+ students, teachers, and families, sued the state of Florida for their harmful “Don’t Say Gay and Trans” law. In 2024, an historic settlement was reached rolling back key provisions in the dangerous legislation.
Family Equality is on a roll!
Since the beginning, Family Equality has strived to put a national spotlight on LGBTQ+ families — because we know the more visible we are, the more momentum we have as a movement. In addition to collaborating with media outlets to tell our family stories in the early 2000s, Family Equality made waves mobilizing dozens of families to attend the White House Easter Egg Roll under the Bush Administration, which was, at the time, the largest example of LGBTQ+ family visibility in American history.
Creating positive change
In addition to protecting LGBTQ+ parents during challenging political moments, Family Equality took every opportunity to advance equality during pro-LGBTQ+ administrations. This includes playing a key role in the introduction of the Every Child Deserves a Family Act, a bill that would end discrimination in child welfare that was first introduced in 2009, and leading efforts to update federal forms like Social Security forms, passport forms, and FAFSA to remove gendered fields like “mother” and “father.” We also led efforts in New York state to legalize surrogacy in 2019 and worked alongside movement partners to pass the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022.
Telling our family stories
For Family Equality, policy and storytelling go hand-in-hand. As the country witnessed a cultural and political shift in favor of marriage equality in the early 2010s, Family Equality worked with movement partners to submit Voices of Children amicus briefs that highlighted the importance of marriage equality on children with LGBTQ+ families. In total, the organization submitted 22 briefs for cases across the country, earning explicit mentions from Justice Kennedy in oral arguments for United States v. Windsor and his decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.
Family Equality continues to write amicus briefs, including a brief in Fulton v City of Philadelphia highlighting the impact of discrimination on children in child welfare.
Our work today
So much about our world has changed since Family Equality was founded in 1979. Thanks to the outspoken change makers who make up Family Equality’s history, social, cultural, and political norms have shifted significantly. Today, 8 in 10 Americans support marriage equality, and 63% of LGBTQ+ millennials are considering expanding their families in the years ahead.
Yet, too many LGBTQ+ families struggle to find communities that respect, support, and value them. LGBTQ+ people must jump through financial, legal, and emotional hoops on their paths to parenthood, and, once they achieve their dream of expanding their family, they struggle — just as our founders did — to find communities and resources that reflect their experience moving through the world.
That’s where Family Equality comes in. No matter what the future holds, the mission of our organization remains the same: To advance full lived and legal equality for LGBTQ+ families so that everyone can experience the unconditional joy and belonging of family. We’ve been protecting and supporting families like yours for 45 years — and we’re not going anywhere.
The information above was collected as part of Family Equality’s oral history series. Thank you to Family Equality’s early leaders and friends for providing their insights and reflections on the history and work of this national organization.
