Margaret Mooney, "Radical Family: Trailblazing Lesbian Moms Tell Their Stories"

Stu Levitan welcomes Margaret Mooney, editor of Radical Family: Trailblazing Lesbian Moms Tell Their Stories and her wife Meg Gaines to discuss this collection of nine first-person accounts from mainly Madison-area lesbians who gave birth, adopted or came out between 1980 and 2003. Just out from the good people at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, the collection offers many important insights into the pressures and pleasures of participating in what Newsweek magazine called "the gayby boom" in the years before the US Supreme Court recognized the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Among the well-known contributors:  Mooney, former Meteorologist-in-charge at the Madison National Weather Service and Gaines, founding emerita director of the UW Law School's Center for Patient Partnership; Community Shares of Wisconsin co-founder and retired Project Home executive director Denise Matyka and her wife, education consultant Margaret McMurray; retired Madison Police Detective Alix Olson and her late wife Martha Dixon Popp; former Dane County Judge Shelley Gaylord; former Wisconsin Historical Society Press editor-in-chief Kathy Borkowski, and Janet Wright, one of the co-founders of the Advocates for Battered Women, now known as Domestic Abuse Intervention Services.   From Left: Meg Gaines, Stu Levitan, Margaret Mooney