Georgette called it a rescue. This is how she remembers it:
It was the fall of 1975, and she and her husband were separated. He had taken their 3-year-old daughter, Kara, and moved her to another state. Georgette wanted to fight for custody, but she knew she probably wouldn’t win. She was a lesbian, and the family courts almost never sided with gay parents.
Convinced she had no other choice, she bypassed the courts entirely. Georgette and three other women drove to her husband’s home in Michigan. His twin brother, Roy, answered the door.
One of the women, older and sophisticated, posed as a real estate agent. Two others stood close behind, shielding Georgette and chatting with Roy to create a distraction.
Georgette stepped through the entryway. “Kara,” she said. She wrapped the little girl in a blanket and turned toward the door. Roy blinked in confusion, Georgette recalled.
“George? What are you doing here, can we talk?” he asked.
“No,” she responded, heading to the car and to a new life with her daughter.
Kara’s memory is spottier, but she is sure of some things. She was playing with her doll, Linda, when her mother arrived. The women put her in the car so fast the doll was left behind. Kara, in the back seat, pressed her forehead to the car window, not wanting to look at anyone. She remembers drops of rain on the window. Streetlights passing by. Darkness.
To her, it was a kidnapping, and it led to years of secrecy, fear and longing.
“Somebody just snapped me up,” she said. “They didn’t realize I left my doll. I just cried and cried. I wanted my dad.”
The rescue — or kidnapping — played out entirely in private and was known only to the people involved. It also occupies a small but meaningful place in the history of the gay rights movement. Georgette DuBois was part of an underground group of lesbian mothers who worked together to take and hide their children because most courts considered gay parents unfit.
“Lesbian moms knew that they would have their kids taken away,” said Daniel Rivers, an Ohio State historian who studies gay history. “They knew there would be no question.”
Georgette and Kara appreciate the historical implications, but for them the story is personal, and in many ways painful. Fifty years later, they are just beginning to have the hard conversation about what was gained and what was lost.
Married at 19
On a warm Sunday morning in late spring, I met Georgette and Kara at GET Café, an L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly spot in their hometown, Narberth, Pa., just west of Philadelphia. A rainbow Pride flag hung in one window.
Kara, 52, had her fingernails painted red and her toenails pale purple in black rhinestone sandals. Her earrings dangled beneath her shaved head, and she wore striking blue eyeliner. Georgette, 76, wore no makeup, just green earrings and a blue embroidered top. A faded tattoo showed under one sleeve.
When they told stories, it didn’t feel as though they were reminiscing. Rather, they were reconciling different versions of a shared past.
Kara recalled her early days back with her mother. They lived in hiding in a lesbian collective in Rosemont, near Narberth. Kara remembered it as “this whole other world” where the women embraced nudity and wore no makeup. Georgette had changed their last names from LaRosa to DuBois to make them harder to find. It was one of many secrets Kara was uncomfortable keeping.
“I just remember it being really hard and stressful when I was young when I’d be asked questions about my name,” she said.
“I don’t remember being in a position of having to explain your last name,” Georgette mused.
“You don’t remember having to explain it?”
“No,” Georgette said. “I don’t have a memory of saying to you, ‘You know that when you go to school, you can’t talk about this.’”
“It was just understood,” Kara replied.
Later, she told me she had worried constantly about being found out. “It didn’t feel fair,” she said. “I was not a lesbian, but yet I had to be in the closet with my mother.”
Georgette grew up in a traditional Catholic household in New Jersey and married Raymond LaRosa when she was 19. “I thought I was doing the right thing,” she said. They began to raise Kara together in Upper Black Eddy, Pa., but Raymond had an affair and Georgette developed feelings for another woman.
“I didn’t think of myself as a lesbian,” Georgette said. “It was just ‘Oh, I’m in love.’” Raymond died in 1993, so I couldn’t ask him how he reacted.
As Georgette remembers it, he told her that if she wanted to be with a woman, she should leave, so she did. At first she and Raymond got along and shared custody informally, Georgette said. But she said Raymond later took Kara and moved to Michigan.
His sister-in-law, Candy Brule, said Raymond thought he had to do it to protect Kara.
“I don’t think he was thinking with a clear head,” Ms. Brule said. “He was just thinking, Oh my god, my daughter’s living with these lesbian women. What’s going to happen to her? I got to get her out of there.”
Georgette said she was reluctant at first to fight for custody, partly because she had internalized society’s view of lesbian mothers. “I already had such a sense of guilt that some part of me felt like, well, I’m not entitled to anything,” she said.
That was the way the law saw it. Even after the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973, courts continued to deny custody to lesbian mothers. Children were placed with their fathers, aunts and uncles, grandparents; in foster care; and even in a juvenile detention center to keep them away from their gay mothers, regardless of the mother’s stability or caregiving abilities.
In response, some lesbian mothers went underground with their children. They forged documents, changed names and crossed state or even national borders. That era is recorded in books like “Radical Relations” and documentary films like “Mom’s Apple Pie.”
Informal networks emerged to help the women.
“I would get called and told, ‘Pick this woman up here and bring her here and keep her for a while,’” said Kris Melroe, who allowed her home to be used as a safe house by the Lesbian Mothers National Defense Fund on the West Coast.
Paola Bacchetta, a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley, knew several lawyers who represented lesbians in custody cases. “The mothers would pursue it legally in the courts first, not jump to ‘Let’s go kidnap,’” she said. “But the kidnapping was Plan B and it was carried out quite a bit.”
Georgette decided she wanted Kara back. She got in touch with a Philadelphia lawyer, Rosalie Davies, who had founded a group called Custody Action for Lesbian Mothers. The organization educated lesbians about custody issues and represented them for free when they went to court.
Ms. Davies referred her to a lawyer, who said that if she wanted her daughter, she would have to take action herself and go underground.
Georgette found a credit card bill addressed to Raymond in the mailbox outside the house where they once lived. It helped her track him to Michigan.
For the mission to get Kara, Ms. Davies recruited Sherrie Cohen, a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and Kathy Hogan, a musician who agreed to join at the last minute. (Both women confirmed their participation to me.) Georgette also brought along the woman who was then her partner. Everything went as planned — posing as a real estate agent, creating a distraction, grabbing Kara.
Raymond wasn’t home. There was no struggle. Just a moment of confusion and they were gone.
‘I Just Wanted to Fit In’
After Georgette brought Kara back to Pennsylvania, Ms. Hogan recorded a song called “Kara,” now archived at the Smithsonian, about what the women had done. Performing under the name Kathy Fire, she described the night as a “victory,” singing:
Kara be a strong loving woman like your mama was
For she carried you home safe and warm
At the time, Georgette was overjoyed to have her daughter back. She told me, “I remember being in the back seat of the car with her and feeling like this is a miracle, here she is.”
For Kara, that night didn’t feel triumphant. She was losing her dad.
Still, she has fond memories of growing up with her mom: camping at Assateague Island among the wild horses, painting her fingernails fire-engine red with Georgette’s help, Georgette piercing a second hole in her ear and helping her dye her hair blue-black.
“My mom has always been supportive of me, with artwork and just being creative,” she said.
At the Rosemont house, Kara spent her days picking berries in the yard (“like shiny rubies,” she remembers). And she said Georgette seemed happy and had a clear sense of belonging. Today, Kara considers herself a strong ally of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, though she is not gay herself. But at the time, she said, living in a lesbian collective was hard for her.
“I still had the fear that someone would find us out,” she said. “And this house full of women was like a flashing red light.” She recalled telling others that her mom’s partners were her roommates because she believed she had to lie to survive socially. “I would run around saying ‘That’s so gay,’ just like everybody else, so that I would not give away any signs,” she said. “I just wanted to fit in.”
At work, Georgette wore dresses and heels and was closeted. At home, she was proudly out. The dissonance unnerved Kara.
“I just remember her shoes clicking on the floors of Bryn Mawr Hospital. She was a social worker for a while. And then at home, with her friends especially, it was more ‘put on the flannel and go cut some wood.’”
Even as Kara missed her father, she was scared of him. Throughout her childhood, she said, she was alert to the possibility that he would show up to take her back. “Walking down the street it was like, is my dad going to get me?” she said. “Are we going to get caught? Are we going to go to jail?” She lived with that paranoia into adulthood. “I was in fear and hiding until I was 19,” she said.
Yet Georgette said Raymond never filed court papers to get her back. This struck me as one of the great mysteries of the story. How could he have accepted his former wife’s stealing their daughter from his house?
Ms. Brule, Raymond’s sister-in-law, said Raymond simply moved on. He remarried, moved to California and had another family. He didn’t harbor any animus toward Georgette — “as time went on, I think he even learned to respect her,” she said.
“He just said that she was happy where she was at, and that’s what was important to him,” Ms. Brule said. She added: “I know he worshiped Kara. He would do absolutely anything for that little girl, absolutely anything.”
When Kara was 15, she and Georgette learned through relatives that Raymond had brain cancer. “I didn’t know if he was alive or dead until he contacted us,” Kara said. At his invitation, Georgette took her to California to visit him. They spent several days together.
“He wanted to meet me before he died,” Kara said. “I give my mom and him and his wife a lot of credit for doing this. Me and my mom went out to see all of them, including the second wife, and meet all the kids, my half siblings, and there was like a little shrine up for me. And apparently he always made the kids aware of me and would say when it’s my birthday and stuff like that.”
She said she loved meeting her siblings and envied the way they lived. “They had a swimming pool,” she said. “That had always been part of my fantasy, living in California, having a big family, and a pool.”
Nicki Wells, one of Raymond’s daughters from that marriage, told me life with him wasn’t as idyllic as it might have seemed.
“My dad had gotten into some illegal activity related to drugs,” she said. “He was responsible for selling and transporting, and my mom was an addict. For a number of years when I was little, our life was gnarly.”
Nicki added: “Kara needed something that we all needed, which was a safe home with responsible adults who don’t hurt us. And, you know, I don’t know that any of us necessarily had that back then.”
When Kara was 6, her mom put her in therapy. “I just wasn’t OK,” she told me. Kara stayed back a year in elementary school and described herself as a rebellious teenager. She talked back to her mom, drank and did drugs. Georgette felt “a lot of guilt, so I was allowed to get away with all kinds of stuff,” Kara said. On at least one occasion Kara was suspended from school. She also experienced sexual abuse early in her childhood and eventually checked herself into a psychiatric program for people who have survived that trauma.
She enrolled at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, specializing in ceramics, but dropped out and went through a period of homelessness. “Not crashing on people’s couches,” she said. “Like pushing a grocery cart with all of your stuff.”
Sitting on her green plush couch, Georgette spoke to Kara. “I remember asking you, maybe more than once, ‘Looking back, would you have preferred to be raised by your dad?’”
Kara replied: “Well, I can say that his kids are much more functional than I am, and that’s appealing to me. It’s such an abstract question. I feel like you both did the best you could with the knowledge that you had. Do you?”
“Overall …” Georgette said, and paused for a long beat.
“Overall, I don’t feel like I did the best I could have,” she said. “There’s just different ways that I could have done better, just as a mother. Never mind lesbian mother.”
Georgette told me later that she was so relieved to have Kara back that she wasn’t tuned into her daughter’s emotional state, especially in the early years. She now appreciates how hard it was for Kara to be taken from one parent and then the other and to live without her dad but with a lot of secrets.
During their conversation, Georgette offered Kara a simple explanation for what she did: “I gave birth to you. I wanted you back, you know?”
“That’s the part I understand,” Kara said. “I would definitely want my baby back, too.”
When Kara was 47, she was diagnosed with end-stage heart failure. She’d had five heart attacks and a stroke and was placed on the waiting list for a heart transplant. As she grappled with her own mortality, Kara said, she felt her dad’s presence despite his death a few years after they reconnected.
“The day I got the call for my heart, there was a rainbow outside my window, and it ended on the helicopter pad where they deliver organs for transplant,” she recalled. She had her transplant in August 2020, she said, after a friend of hers died in the hospital, still waiting. “I felt like he pulled strings and made that happen, that I was able to get a heart.”
‘Families Under Siege’
Today, Kara spends about half her time with Georgette. They are close, but their relationship, like their shared history, carries the complexity of pride, sadness, love and grief. They talk now about the exhaustion of living under assumed names, the nights they spent worrying about who might be watching, the price they paid to stay together.
Kara still struggles with a lingering reflex to hide parts of herself and with the fear of being exposed. Dr. Rivers, the Ohio State historian, told me that these survival instincts aren’t just personal scars. “The custody cases affected a whole generation of kids and families in lesbian feminist communities,” he said. “Because we grew up in an atmosphere of fear as families under siege.”
Cases involving L.G.B.T.Q. parents look dramatically different today. Obergefell v. Hodges and V.L. v. E.L. reshaped the legal landscape. Same-sex couples can now marry, adopt and seek custody rights they were once denied. But the victories Georgette’s generation won came at a cost.
One afternoon, sitting beside her mother, Kara pulled out a psychedelic-print card from her father. The inside read: “Thank you! For the Father’s Day card. You have made me very happy,” with three lines under the word “very.” It was sweet, but also a reminder of what she had lost.
“The bottom line is you’ve really suffered in all kinds of ways, including because I’m a lesbian and what that has meant,” Georgette told her. But she added, “I think we have a good relationship that I really treasure.”
Turning to me, Georgette said: “She’s an only child of a single parent. So I’ve always been responsible for everything, and it has made us especially close.” She looked again toward Kara. “And also, do you want me to use the word that you used, codependent?”
“I think the more appropriate word is enmeshed,” Kara said.
Georgette considered the word and laughed. “Enmeshed,” she said. “Definitely.”
Susan C. Beachy and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
Sarah Diamond is a Times audio producer, based in New York. She also writes a biweekly column, Word Through The Times.
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