Lemon Mousse

Rainbow parenting—it’s everywhere. In LGBTQIA lifestyle magazines, peer support groups, Pride events. All of them crammed to bursting with sunlit nuclear families, parenting advice and face painting. When did our beautiful, sexy, rainbow become so insipid and anodyne?

It’s a striking contrast to the 1990s— a time when it was assumed that queer people would not (could not) reproduce, a time of Pride t-shirts declaring ‘the family line ends here’, a time of university LGB Societies (as they were then called) promoting events as being ‘Breeders also welcome’, mischievously reducing heterosexuals to biology while centring the rest of us.

It was a joke of course. But it captured our sense of being different, counter, oppositional. We celebrated our difference and built a vibrant culture around it, around our same sex or both/any sex attraction, love, desire, bodies - an edgy, grown-up fiesta that was deliberately and defiantly not family friendly.

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Clepsydras were ancient clocks that used a controlled flow of water to determine the time. One version, a water outflow clock, was a vessel that slowly empties its contents through a small hole. Hmmm.

As if it needed saying, queerness does not switch off your biological clock.

Mine started to drip in my mid to late 20s. To quiet it, I sought models of older women who were not yet parents, who were living other lives. Take Madonna - the pointy busted iconoclast was 32 years old, courting controversy on her Blonde Ambition tour and showing no sign of reproducing.

Then my grandmother died. Me aged 31, her death turned the drip drip into a fast-moving tide. Mortality was real and coming for us. Suddenly my family was reduced to two generations. Overnight, it became my responsibility to do something about that.

But I was six years into a longterm queer relationship in a remote, rural backwater, more in the closet than out, and unable to talk to anyone.

After deciding with my (now-ex) partner that the male friend option was too emotionally risky, I researched the medical route. A consensus emerged: same sex couples had to go private. So I wrote to fertility clinics in three different, distant cities.

Meanwhile, an update to the Human Fertility and Embryology Act was going through parliament which, by 2008, would give both my partner and I the right to be registered as legal parents, but would waive sperm donors’ right to anonymity. On reaching 18, any child could access information about their biological parent. The result was a national shortage of sperm donors.

Replies came back from the clinics—‘national shortage’…’prioritising couples already on our waiting list’. We felt unwanted, unworthy, not good enough.

Eventually a clinic in Birmingham agreed to see us. My supportive GP confirmed it would be a private referral. I’d looked into costs and calculated we could afford perhaps three attempts, and if it was going to happen it would happen.

Medical tests and mandatory counselling followed - scrutiny that fertile straight couples get to skip as they fall, sometimes unprepared and unthinking, into parenthood. It felt ironic, laughable.

I started taking folic acid and suddenly it was real. I went down to two cups of tea a day and two small glasses of wine a week - saved for my weekly visit to my parents so they wouldn’t suspect a thing.

The lies, the deceit, the evasion. The roulette wheel of predicting annual leave to coincide with a purple line on a dipstick. The sudden 400 mile round trips, elaborately hidden from family and colleagues. One time I took a call at work telling me the donor planned for the following day had withdrawn his consent.

On our forth and final attempt, the nurse suggested we look elsewhere if this one failed. Perhaps we were dragging the clinic’s success rate down.

My GP continued to nudge me. There was still time, still some water left in the outflow clock. But by then the stress had become intolerable.

—

Why am I writing this now? For sympathy? Not really. I’ve come to terms with what happened - or didn’t happen. But with queer parenting now the expectation, the entitlement even, rather than the exception, there are no safe spaces to talk about these things.

Living with childlessness brings its own level of visceral, DNA-deep pain. What is the existential point, when it all ends with me? I’m terrified of dying in a way that friends with children and grandchildren will never understand.

And there’s something about the unrelenting pronatalism that infuses every fibre of life in 2025 that makes this journey harder still —the ‘hard working families’ rhetoric, the daily hacks by which parents in public contexts signal their hero status to one another. Suddenly ‘the school run’ and the school holidays are cultural signifiers.

And the flip side: the derision, shame and stigma around childless people. A primal closing of ranks. What are they so afraid of? Anyone who lives against the grain? Who lives queerly, without the easy map of marriage, children, grandchildren?

The overdue acceptance of LGBTQIA people into the mainstream has opened up pathways to parenthood for far more of us. All of my queer friends now have children, as do most in the public eye. I’m delighted for them. And each one feels like a fresh personal loss.

A queer culture that 30 years ago was a joyous refuge from shame and stigma, a safe and celebratory space for different ways of being and connecting, now feels normative and exclusionary, taking on every pronatalist shape of wider society.

Gone are the heady days of finding a copy of the Pink Paper in a dark corner of a gay pub, devouring it with a pint and some nachos, feeling like a revolutionary. I haven’t read Diva for decades, its grown-up frisson now replaced with lilac-coloured ads for fertility clinics and adoption agencies. And I rarely go to Pride events whose family craft activities and face-painting have come to feel much the same as any other event.

There’s a flatness, a ubiquity.

I miss who we were when we were uncompromisingly us.