"From Pain, Family"

Brown and Hamilton won a 2007 Casey Medal in the category of Single Story, 75,000 to 199,000 for their story.

On a slow day in 2003, Tina A. Brown walked into arraignment court to see who had been arrested over the weekend. She noticed a well-dressed, young black woman sitting with her baby and crying. Brown wondered about the man who had hurt this woman.

The woman perked up when the sheriffs brought the defendants out of lockup. Her love interest was wearing a dark plaid shirt, baggy jeans hanging around the waist, a do-rag tied around braids and steel-toe Timberland boots. It wasn’t until she turned around and smiled at her woman that Brown realized the defendant was female.

Brown perked up, too -- this wasn’t what she expected. She asked a court counselor if more lesbian couples were coming into family violence court. The counselor said bluntly, “Where have you been? They’re raising children together.”

 
Were more urban women living as lesbians? After a quick conversation with her editor, Kate Farrish, Brown approached Mike Swift, the paper’s census reporter. Hartford had seen an increase in gay couples in the 2000 census. But the increase wasn’t among gay men; surprisingly, it was among women with children living in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. That trend was enough to get the story on the newspaper's enterprise budget.

As Brown covered Hartford’s crime scene over the next two years, she met a few women like Claudia Terrell-Smith, who had chosen a female lover during a prison stint she served for driving without a license. Terrell-Smith was a mother and the guardian of three boys, ages 13 to 16, who were charged with two other teens in the fatal assault of a mentally retarded man. She believed her boys beat and pelted the man because they were upset that she had left her abusive husband and was living as a lesbian.

Brown’s editors wondered: Was there any possible connection between these women’s traumatic experiences with men and their later choice of a female lover? Brown was reassigned to the investigative team to work on the story with fellow writer Beth Hamilton (the "we" in the rest of this story); John Ferraro, the investigations editor; and photographer Patrick Raycraft. Barbara Roessner, the deputy managing editor, suggested we approach the project as anthropologists might.

We began by acknowledging that we knew nothing about prison intimacy or lesbians, particularly lesbians in poor black and Latina communities who were raising their children together. We read every relevant study and at least five books about women in prison and homosexuality. No one had done extensive research on this population. These women seemed to be invisible to mainstream America. If our project was successful, we’d be breaking new ground by reporting on same-sex minority couples and their families in poor communities.

We started with lists. Lists of names and telephone numbers of experts on the front lines at prison resettlement centers, drug treatment facilities, and counseling groups in the Greater Hartford area; lists of academics and authors who’d written on the subject; lists of women who were interested in telling their stories. Mike Swift expanded our census research and found that the neighborhoods with the highest percentage of same-sex female households in five states also had high poverty rates.

Once we found our subjects -- through previous contacts, social workers and prison resettlement staffers -- we recorded interviews and shared notes with the team. We immediately noticed common threads of abuse, drug addiction and isolation experienced by at least one partner in each couple. Many of the women had their first lesbian experiences in prison or after meeting someone in drug treatment, two places where many of these relationships seem to develop. Most had numerous failed relationships with men. Almost all of them had children. Later we learned that the percentage of these couples raising their biological children together far outstrips that of white lesbian partners.

We made great progress with our research but following the story to its conclusion was not easy. We started with 10 couples; three of them quickly backed out, afraid that the stigma of homosexuality in their communities would cause them to lose their jobs, or their children. Some of the women were worried about whether their participation in our story would cause family members to reject them because of religious beliefs. Those women who stayed in the story were difficult to follow. They’d tell us horrific things about their childhoods, their relationships with men and their struggles with poverty or addiction and then they’d disappear. For weeks. We spent many days hanging around outside their homes waiting for them to show up. When we’d finally track them down, they’d agree to continue, make another appointment and then disappear again. But the cat-and-mouse game paid off; they gradually grew accustomed to our presence in their homes and we were able to witness first-hand how they interacted with each other, their children and the people around them. This proved to be more valuable than any of the studies we’d so carefully read.

Writing the stories was equally challenging, partly because we were aware of how sensitive the subject would be for many readers, including lesbians and members of the black and Latina communities. Our interviews with academics had also demonstrated just how controversial it would be to draw a connection between abuse, poverty and sexual behavior. Or to question in any way the notion that a person’s sexuality could be influenced by life experiences, as opposed to being born homosexual or heterosexual. But most daunting was the awareness that we had been entrusted with the stories of women who had felt powerless for much of their lives; we had a responsibility to tell their stories as honestly as they had told them to us. And, finally, we wanted to write respectfully and knowledgeably enough that the stories informed, rather than outraged, our readers.

It was no small task, but we hope we succeeded. The response varied. A few readers canceled their subscriptions. Some appreciated the thorough exploration of the issue, and others say they are still discussing the stories in chatrooms across the country. Overall, the response was positive.