What does it mean to build a queer family? For these four Pittsburgh-area families, the answers are as different as the people themselves and as universal as love, stubbornness, and showing up.
Through Their Eyes
I caught up with Travis Simpson-Hunt as he was dropping one of his sons off at an activity. “Bye, love you,” called out Michael, and Travis answered the same. A car door shut, and the boy was off. That easy back-and-forth was sweet.
For Travis, the best thing about being a father to Michael and Parker is seeing the world through his sons’ eyes, like the time they camped in Yosemite.
“It’s a little like coming through the Fort Pitt tunnels into Pittsburgh,” Travis says. “You come through a tunnel inside the park, and when it opens up, the whole valley is there with three waterfalls pouring into it, and the rivers.”
“It doesn’t look like it should be real,” said Travis’ son, Parker.
“No, it doesn’t,” replied Travis. “Seeing it fresh through his eyes will always stay with me.”
Travis and his husband Stephen work hard to give their sons that kind of wonder. The boys have steered sailboats in Marbella, crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on foot, spotted dolphins off the coast of Florida. “There’s dolphins! There’s dolphins!” Travis laughs, remembering them jumping up and down.
The dads have made deliberate choices about how their sons spend their time. The boys don’t own cell phones or video games. Instead, Michael plays piano and bass guitar, and serves as youth elder at St. Paul Episcopal Church. “They just elected him to that position,” Travis says proudly, then makes sure to mention that Parker does theater, sings, and serves as ethics coordinator for two Scout troops. Both are working toward their Eagle badges.
Both Travis and Stephen take community service to heart. Travis is a minister and deacon who makes himself available around the clock. “I put my number out for people to call,” he says. “Sometimes a woman needs baby formula or food and we’ll run it to her in the middle of the night. Or someone on hospice, and we get up, take off and go. It’s service above self.” Stephen is one of the chairs of the Rotary national youth exchange program. The boys are watching all of it, learning what service looks like up close.
“Above all else, be kind,” Travis says. “Love your children. Love your neighbors.”
We Expect You to Protect Them
Carol and JoAnn Chonoska’s kids struggled at the beginning of their relationship. Both women had been married to men, and the children ranged from elementary to high school.
“It was rough going for a while because they had to deal with divorces and splitting time between us and their dads,” says Carol. “Adjusting to the divorce was harder for them than to our relationship,” adds JoAnn. They’ve been together 27 years and are coming up on their 16th wedding anniversary. “Now the kids are pretty good friends and think of themselves as family.”
Being able to marry mattered. “We knew what it meant legally, economically, socially, and also emotionally — what the commitment to each other felt like,” says Carol. It also mattered to the kids. “It made a difference that the other adult was a stepparent,” says JoAnn. “It carried a little more authority and made it more difficult for them to deny our position within the family.”
Faith has always been central to who they are, and finding a church community that accepted them was essential. “It made such a difference in our life,” says Carol. But acceptance wasn’t easy to find. Their original congregations weren’t supportive and staying meant navigating what JoAnn calls “macro and micro aggressions.”
The church struggle hit the kids hard. “The way the churches treated us really made it difficult for them to accept going to church,” says JoAnn. One June, her daughter noticed vacation bible school had come and gone without JoAnn teaching crafts, something she’d done for years. “I had to say I wasn’t allowed to,” says JoAnn. “Those kinds of direct things just made it difficult.”
Still, Carol and JoAnn didn’t hide from the contradiction. “We could very openly say to our kids: our church is wrong on this,” says JoAnn. “They’re just wrong about this right now.” Eventually they found East Liberty Presbyterian, which boasts “radical hospitality” and has an amazing LGBTQ community.
The kids had their own journey, learning how to navigate having two moms, figuring out what to tell friends, and whether to defend their parents. To help ease their path, Carol and JoAnn went to the guidance counselors at their schools before anything could go wrong.
“We said, ‘This is who we are, these are our kids, and if one of them comes to you, we want you to know so they don’t have to explain,'” says JoAnn. “‘We expect you to protect them.'”
Now adults with spouses and children of their own, the kids take great joy in telling everyone about their two moms.
Becoming Mom
When DJ Stemmler flew to Russia to bring home her new adopted son, she found a six-year-old boy who weighed 19 pounds, was still in diapers, and had multiple untreated medical issues.
“He wouldn’t have lived another year if he’d stayed there,” she says.
Getting there at all was a Herculean task. DJ uses a wheelchair, and she was in a same-sex relationship when she kicked off the adoption process. Both things almost disqualified her. “Even in the US at the time you couldn’t adopt or get married as a gay couple,” she says. To get around the homophobia, she adopted as a single person, leaving her partner off all the paperwork. Project Star, a Pittsburgh adoption agency that places children with disabilities, did a home study that made them sound like the ideal placement and pushed it through.
Coming home was a joy — over 50 people met them at the airport, many of whom are still in their lives.
Then the family moved to Harrisburg, where things fell apart. “I hated Harrisburg, I was alone out there, I had no friends,” DJ says. “Then she decided we should split up.” So she and Sergei moved back to Pittsburgh, where she knew people and had queer community. They eventually landed in Allison Park, renting the first floor of a farmhouse with an acre of yard and a good school district for disabled kids. They stayed 17 years.
Sergei came out as gay as a teenager, and had his own hot fireman moment. When his Access van got rear-ended, he called her to the scene. A firefighter asked which kid was hers. “The one that doesn’t shut up,” she said. “Oh yeah, he’s in there.” He got lifted out by the firefighter, and DJ heard about how handsome that man was for weeks afterward. Mother and son still swap pictures — she sends hot guys, he sends back memes of animals and crocheting.
Today Sergei lives in Swissvale and runs his own life, the person everyone gathers around. DJ calls him the most thoughtful person she knows. “That was unexpected by me,” she says. “Nurturing didn’t come naturally to me. But it does to him.”
It took her a while to get out of his way. “I might have been the biggest deterrent to him actually becoming independent,” she says. “I had a lot of plans for him and he didn’t want any of those things.” When she finally let go, he flourished.
“He’s one of my closest friends right now,” she says.
Being with the Fullness of Her Partner
“Lauren isn’t family,” the child announced one day. She is Lauren’s partner Kyrie’s daughter, referred to here only as “Kiddo” at her family’s request. It was a statement rooted in what she’d absorbed from school, books, TV. Family had a shape, and Lauren didn’t fit it.
Her mom asked her to think about it. What is family? She worked it out slowly. “People who live in the same state?” Her mom pointed out relatives out West. “Well, Lauren can’t be family because I don’t call her parents grandma and grandpa.”
Lauren Steele, a therapist who thinks carefully about belonging, heard all of this and sat with it — then wrote about that moment in a recent essay for Public Source.
She hadn’t planned on having children, but she’d been with her partner Kyrie for four years, and Kyrie has a child. So, here Lauren was, living with her, responsible for her, loving her, without a word that quite fit what she was. “You’re coming in mid-story a little bit,” she says, “and that can bring up a lot internally.” For a queer person, the feelings aren’t unfamiliar, the sense of not fitting in, not belonging, wondering if you have a place here.
She leaned on presence, showing up day in and day out, meeting Kiddo where she was. Not with long explanations but with playfulness, silliness, and paying attention to what makes her feel seen. “It’s thinking about what does this child respond to, not what I respond to,” Lauren says. “You gotta pay attention.” She let the relationship emerge from consistent effort, even without a guarantee that it would. It was a long, slow burn.
Then last year at Disney World, Kyrie was exhausted by evening and went back to the hotel. Lauren and Kiddo decided to hit the short lines, riding Dumbo and Aladdin’s Magic Carpet and Astro Orbiter through the warm Florida night. After the fireworks, Kiddo looked up at Lauren and said her mom would have loved that. It was the kind of moment you can’t manufacture, only wait for.
Is it worth it? “Yeah. Yes,” Lauren says. “I see it not just as a relationship with this kid, but my partner is a mother and that’s part of who she is. It’s a big part of her identity and how she sees the world and thinks about kids, how to treat them, how society treats them. It’s being with the fullness of my partner as well.”
When Lauren went looking for resources for queer stepparents early on, she found straight stories and conventional families, none of which reflected her experience. Queer people, she believes, have had to reimagine family structures out of necessity, and that hard-won expansiveness is something worth sharing. So, she founded Building Blended Bonds (buildingblendedbonds.com). “Being queer helps us see through the matrix a little bit,” she says.
It takes hard conversations and real self-reflection, examining the patterns and instincts you bring without thinking. Learning, failing, trying again. It can bring up a lot of pain.
“Anyone who’s feeling that,” she says, “I want to validate that’s normal and part of the process and it’s good and worthy work. And that they’re not alone.”