a documentary short by Christina Sunley and Vicky Funari
1985 / 35 minutes  /  color
Produced on ¾” NTSC video, available as digital file or streaming

“The lesbian baby boom has broadened the definition of the ‘nuclear’ family… Alternative Conceptions looks at a single parent and a couple at the forefront of this reproductive revolution.”  – San Francisco Bay Guardian

Synopsis

Alternative Conceptions was filmed in the early 1980’s, when open lesbian and gay parenting was a pioneering social phenomenon.  At the time, artificial insemination and sperm banks were offering new hope to infertile heterosexual couples, and lesbians seeking to become parents seized upon this new opportunity.  This highly informative film confronts and clarifies the controversy that at the time surrounded donor insemination for lesbians.  April and Susan, a New York City couple, are mothers to two children conceived through anonymous donor insemination.  Mary, owner of a Long Island lesbian bar, conceived her child with sperm from a gay male friend.  Through the choices and experiences of two lesbian families and the perspectives of medical, legal and social services professionals, Alternative Conceptions documents a historic moment in the evolution of gay and non-traditional families.  The out-of-the-ordinary physical arrangements, the legal entanglements, and the down-the-road dilemma of children coping with their parentage are key issues of lesbian parenthood candidly addressed in this film.   

Filmed during the first years of the AIDS crisis, the film is made all the more poignant in consideration of the subsequent social and political transformations engendered by that crisis, as well as by the great strides towards equality for gay families taken in ensuing decades.

Filmmakers’ Statement

When we made this film, the phrase “lesbian mother” seemed to many like a contradiction in terms – perhaps almost as much to us, as young queer filmmakers, as to the mainstream world.  But to the pioneering lesbians across the U.S. who were choosing motherhood through donor insemination, the phrase described a natural and important part of their lives.  With Alternative Conceptions, we wanted to explore a choice that we imagined we would face down the road:  to parent or not, if so how, and what would it mean for us as members of the LGBT community?

Two major historic processes cast a new light on our now 30-plus-year-old documentary:  First, given the stigma that gay parents faced at the time, we could barely imagine that within our own lifetimes gay marriage would be legalized and gay families would begin to be accepted into the mainstream of American life.  The women in our film seem even more heroic to us now than they did in 1984, when they shared their lives with us, because they paved the way for these changes.

Second, as we were making the film, the AIDS crisis was beginning its deadly sweep over the gay community.  It changed everything:  the atmosphere of infinite possibility that had pervaded our coming-out years was replaced by a struggle to survive and by a new solidarity between gay men and lesbians.  The epidemic made the health information in our film outdated.  Because of this, we withdrew the film from circulation:  since it was made just as the cause of AIDS was being identified, the film had not been able to answer health questions surrounding the use of sperm from potentially HIV-positive donors.  It took some years for those answers to become clear.  We felt it was irresponsible to have a film out in the world that did not address such a major question about donor insemination for queer families.