Even so, Mom never directly came out to my father. According to her, much of it was unspoken and tacitly understood, as they lived in a time and place where homosexuality was unspeakable. After completing his first doctorate, my father accepted a job in his home state of Maryland. My mother refused to go, saying only that something was wrong with the marriage and she and I needed to stay in Athens.

Mom told me that while their relationship was strained for many reasons, her decision not to move with him to Maryland came down to the fact that she was gay. "Had I not been gay," she said, "I would have gone with him. I'd been taught that women suppressed their own needs for the wellbeing of their husbands and that in return, they'd be taken care of. But being gay pushed me beyond the limits of what I had been taught to do. It was nature. I couldn't ignore it."

***

The evening of the abduction, my father called from the airport in Greenville, South Carolina. He'd taken me across the state line, out of the jurisdiction of Georgia law enforcement. "His voice was calm, measured," Mom said. "He told me he was taking you to Maryland. Then, he hung up."

Of course, I have no recollection of the journey. I try to imagine myself sitting on his lap on the plane, doing what babies do. Did I give him much trouble? Did I need a diaper change mid-flight? How and what did he feed me?

Mom found out later that his mother had joined him on the trip to help with these and other logistics. The idea to take me had been hers and she'd persuaded my father to go along. She met him at the airport in Greenville and they traveled together to my father's boyhood home in Silver Spring, Maryland.

A friend in Athens put Mom in touch with a civil rights lawyer, whose advice to threaten my father's career was critical. "I called your father and told him I would make it known what he'd done, that I'd embarrass him professionally," she said. "That's what he cared about more than anything, his reputation."

***

For gay and lesbian fathers and mothers of that era, the threat of losing a child was very real. The loss came suddenly for my mother, but well into the 1980s it frequently happened via the courts. And while they're less common now, discriminatory rulings persist to this day in some states.

Christina Cash, publisher of the LGBT news outlet The GA Voice, recounted her partner's battle to win custody of her son in a Clayton County, Georgia courtroom in 1987. The case was widely publicized on TV and in local papers. "We proved that the child's father was an alcoholic -- he's an alcoholic to this day -- but that wasn't enough. We lost custody because we were gay. It superseded everything."

In Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States since World War II, Daniel Winunwe Rivers catalogs a litany of judicial arguments from the era for denial of custody. They read like an official handbook of homophobia: Gays are child molesters. Gays are felons afoul of sodomy laws. Children of gays will not learn proper gender roles and will end up gay themselves. Children of gays will endure undue shame and stigmatization.