Editor's Note: Smith College students in a Journalism in the Field course were asked to practice reporting in the community. Students then worked with their professor Dusty Christensen and NEPM to to edit and promote the pieces. This is Charlotte's piece. Read the others here.
At the Division Q championship basketball game earlier this spring, the atmosphere inside the Mountain View School gym in Easthampton was electric. The audience packed into the stands roared.
The two teams, Grouchers and Homo Improvement, faced off against each other hard, each fighting to win. On the stage behind them, the “Valley Queerleaders” — founded to support Division Q this fall — cheered, “Lets go, homos, let’s go!” They wore hot pink skirts and jerseys with a pink triangle on the front, shaking rainbow pom poms with enthusiasm. Children darted giggling around the edges of the stands, uninterested in the basketball game’s outcome and eager to race down the hallways of an otherwise empty elementary school.
Division Q is a community-organized, all-gender LGBTQ+ basketball league founded in 2023. It’s an example of the spaces queer people are making for themselves in the Pioneer Valley.
In 2024, the U.S. Census Bureau confirmed what many in the region have long known: the area is a stronghold for the queer community. The census revealed that Hampshire County had the largest share of same-sex female couple households in the country. Neighboring Franklin County ranked number four.
During the 20th century, generations of young, single queer people came to the upper Pioneer Valley because they were not accepted in their hometowns. The region, particularly near women’s colleges Mount Holyoke College and Smith College, became a hotbed for lesbian feminist activism during the mid twentieth century.
“Nobody looked at the town and said, ‘Here’s a great environment for women.’ But that’s what happened,” Judith Fine, president of Northampton’s Downtown Business Association, told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. “The economics of urban renewal and the politics of the women’s movement happened to converge.”
And in a trend that started as early as the 1990s, more queer couples in the area are having kids, who they can raise in a community of their LGBTQ+ peers. That’s obvious at Division Q games, where familial scenes are a staple.
“[I love] seeing all the young kids there and getting to experience a space I never did as a kid,” league organizer Hannah Bevis said.
The census revealed that Hampshire County had the largest share of same-sex female couple households in the country. Neighboring Franklin County ranked number four. — U.S. Census Bureau, 2024
Nationally, the number of LGBTQ+ families has only increased over the last 30 years. A 2019 study conducted by the Family Equality Council found that many more young LGBTQ+ people were parents or considering becoming parents, leading the organization’s CEO to suggest “a dramatic growth in the number of LGBTQ-headed families in the coming years.”
But despite the valley’s status as a queer refuge, like everywhere, the picture is complicated, according to interviews with LGBTQ+ families across the region.
Effects from federal restrictions on LGBTQ+ expression are being felt here also. In February, Baystate Medical Center announced it will be ending gender-affirming care treatment for minors after the Trump administration threatened restricting funding for hospitals that provide this care.
And in Hampshire and Franklin counties — on the other side of the so-called “Tofu Curtain” from the more diverse Hampden County — racial and class divides within the LGBTQ+ community persist.
“Getting white people to be uncomfortable with the level of privilege they have, even queer white people,” is a challenge, said Leigh-Ellen Figueroa, a queer mom of Puerto Rican descent. She moved her two kids from Northampton to Holyoke in part because she felt her kids were singled out as Hispanic students in Northampton public schools.
One family at the Division Q championship game understands this complicated picture well. For them, this area is a queer refuge, but it also presents challenges.
Jill and Sarah Soller-Mihlek are both involved in Division Q. Jill is a Queerleader, and Sarah plays for the Grouchers. Their 10-year-old daughter Louise climbed through the stands at Division Q games this season selling Girl Scout cookies.
The Soller-Mihleks moved to Westfield from New York City in 2017. Jill recalled going to the “New York City Dyke March” after moving to western Mass. Her friend brandished a sign that said “Queer Utopia Now.”
“Oh honey,” Jill recalled saying to her friend. She told the friend about the home her family had found in the Pioneer Valley. “It exists, and it’s here.”
But the couple also say that in Westfield, they field consistent questions about how their daughter was born. And when they put a gay pride flag up when they first moved into their house, somebody tore it down.
Jill, who is white, is from Westfield and Sarah is a Filipina-American woman from Brooklyn. For Sarah, moving to a suburb whose population is 85% white was a challenge.
“When I first moved here, it was pre-pandemic, and we went to a diner around the corner, and I was like, ‘I am the only brown person in this entire diner,’” Sarah recalled. “I just felt like it was really, really hard for me, like it was a culture shock coming from New York City to Westfield because it was very homogenous.”
Sarah said it took a few more years for her to get comfortable living in their neighborhood -– she started to meet other people of color by playing basketball at their local YMCA. And today, she works as a music teacher at the Community Music School in Springfield, which has a diverse faculty and student body.
Jill and Sarah conceived Louise using Jill’s egg and an anonymous Filipino sperm donor. Sarah said people still ask sometimes if Louise is Sarah’s “real” daughter. Questions like that are “debilitating,” she says.
Still, Sarah said she didn’t see a lot of queer representation growing up. She had to seek it out, she said, and that eventually led her to the valley.
Many LGBTQ+ parents raising kids in the Pioneer Valley today say that their kids are experiencing a different reality – one where having gay parents is normal. One where children discuss gender identity in their classrooms starting in kindergarten.
Northampton — the epicenter of queer culture
It’s been 40 years since Dawn Geller visited Pearl Street in Northampton for the first time.
Groups of queer women lingered in the street, many of them visiting The North Star bar on “gay night.” Geller was in her 20s; she’d been staying in Cape Cod with a friend during the summer. In a group of straight women, Geller and her friend were the only lesbians. Visiting Northampton was her first time being in a group of lesbians – she was “blown away.”
“My age group, everyone, everybody has a story a
bout their first gay bar,” she said.
For more than 50 years, Northampton has been the epicenter of queer culture in the Pioneer Valley, particularly for lesbians.
“Starting in the 1970s, I would say, [Northampton] started to become ‘Lesbianville’ in the way that we know it now,” said Kelly Anderson, a lesbian oral historian and professor at Smith College. “People sort of knew about this place in terms of activism, in terms of culture and in terms of gay life.”
The Northampton that Anderson describes between the 1970s and 1990s was young and radical. Many queer businesses thrived then that don’t exist now. The Northampton Women’s Karate and Self-Defense Dojo — known in the lesbian community as the Nutcracker’s Suite — taught lesbian women how to defend themselves against male aggressors. And Womonfyre Books, open from 1978 to 1989, was a women-only bookstore geared towards lesbians.
In the 1990s, though, things began to shift. In 1993, the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalized second-part adoption, lifting some previous restrictions on same-sex parenting. Queer people became increasingly integrated into public life in Massachusetts.
In 1992, Karen Bellavance and Beth Grace became the first lesbian couple to announce their marriage in the Daily Hampshire Gazette. The tabloid National Enquirer picked up the story and ran with it, publishing a salacious article that referred to Northampton as “Lesbianville, U.S.A.” — a “strange town where men aren’t wanted.”
“People sort of knew about this place in terms of activism, in terms of culture and in terms of gay life.” — Kelly Anderson, Smith College professor
The article threw a spotlight on Northampton, whose queer residents had long called it “Lesbianville” affectionately. But now it gained prominence nationwide as the purported lesbian capital of the country.
The 2000s and 2010s saw more wins for queer parents. In 2004, Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage, and in 2015, gay marriage was legalized federally with the U.S. Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges.
“It was quite a party,” Geller said.“It was just hundreds of us outside of the Town Hall. People just lined up getting their marriage licenses. There was some, like, giant wedding cake.”
Both Dawn Geller and Kelly Anderson had children born in Northampton during the early 2000’s.
“The community of people we found here means that we really did create family and raise children in a lesbian family,” Anderson said. “Most of my kids’ friends have two or three or many more lesbian moms.”
As LGBTQ+ life in Northampton and the wider Pioneer Valley has become more family-oriented, though, bar culture and queer spaces have changed.
“This place had a huge ‘gayby’ [baby] parenting boom,” Anderson said, referring to the high numbers of gay couples having babies during the ’90s and onward. “Like a lot of queer areas. And so your spaces change. You’re gonna find a lot of lesbians at the music group for toddlers.”
“Gay life has changed,” she said, “but it’s not gone.”
"Queers Gotta Dance"
At the New City Brewery in Easthampton, just a few couples were left standing on the dancefloor on a chilly night in April. But although they’d been spinning beneath technicolor lights and disco-glinted reflections for hours, their enthusiasm hadn’t wavered. And when DJ Chris Bigelow faded out the track one last time, a partygoer shouted out a final request: “Play Frank Sinatra!”
Bigelow laughed and played “Fly Me to the Moon.” Justine Sheffler and Rae Walker swayed gently near the wall. Sheffler rested her head on Walker’s shoulders.
The two have been coming to the monthly dance at the New City Brewery – called Queers Gotta Dance – for a few months. Sheffler and Walker are millennial newlyweds. Walker has a 12-year-old and 14-year-old at home. They said that having queer spaces to come to like this are essential for finding joy.
“Look at what’s happening in the world,” Walker said. “What’s going to save us is relationships with each other.”
Geller started Queers Gotta Dance last year. She said she noticed a decline in the number of queer bars in the Pioneer Valley. She wanted to create a place that reminded her of the lesbian bars and clubs she went to with her friends in the ’80s and ’90s.
“Trump was coming back in. I love to dance, it’s my joy. I’m depressed. I want to find joy. And so I said, ‘I’m gonna start a dance,’” Geller said. “You know how many people came to the first one? One hundred and sixty people. You know why? Because people crave that space.”
One of those people is Sue Zegarra. Zegarra moved to Northampton in the ’90s when she was in her 20s. When she first got to Northampton, she said, “it just felt like all of these layers of insecurity just peeled away.”
Queers Gotta Dance, she said, is “a nice little reminiscence of what [Northampton] used to be” prior to mass integration of queer people into public life.
Queer adults who’ve lived in Northampton for decades rattle off legendary bars that served the queer community and no longer exist, including Diva’s, the North Star and the World War II Club.
The decline of explicitly queer spaces is a trend Gwen Bass refers to as a “crisis of assimilation.” During the 2000s and 2010s, Bass, a gay mom living in Northampton, said LGBTQ+ people made massive strides towards integration and acceptance. But in order to prove that they were just like everyone else, the queer community at times lost what set them apart and united them in the first place.
“All of a sudden, you’re like, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve lost my queerness in the process,’” Bass said. She is a social worker and parent to four kids between the ages of 12 and 17. She encourages them to come to her Division Q games to “turn the volume up on that aspect of their identity.”
“Instead of saying, ‘I’m just a person who’s also gay,’ it’s flipping it to say, ‘I’m a gay person,’” she said.
Hannah Bevis, one of the Division Q organizers, argues that even in a space as LGBTQ+-friendly as Hampshire County, explicitly queer spaces are still needed, especially in sports.
“Having a space where trans women and other queer people can come and experience even a couple of hours of feeling safe and welcome and be able to play a sport hard and have fun, there’s nothing else like it,” Bevis said.
Queers Gotta Dance and Division Q are arguably a revival of queer spaces. As queer businesses have closed, LGBTQ+ community members and their allies have taken it upon themselves to create explicitly queer spaces.
Bigelow served as the DJ at the World War II Club for over a decade. “I’m just a straight, cis, white guy, but the queer community has always been very important to me and has always been my people,” he said.
“Fly Me to the Moon” was his signature closing song at the World War II Club. Playing it at Queers Gotta Dance is bittersweet.
Transphobia still exits in the Pioneer Valley
When Amherst Regional High School English teacher Sarah Barber-Just took one of the greatest risks of her career, it was just her and a student alone in a room, staring at the same computer screen.
Barber-Just’s finger hovered over the button to publish a long-form feature article her and her journalism students had put together. She felt “sick and terrified.”
It was 2023, and what they ultimately published was an exposé about allegations of transphobia at Amherst Regional Middle School. Transgender students at the school spoke with high school reporters in Barber-Just’s journalism class, alleging that they had endured transphobia at the hands of both their peers and guidance counselors at the school.
The story rocked Amherst. Some 33,000 people viewed the article in the first few days. Parents and queer community members turned up at school board meetings and in the streets, protesting to show their support for transgender students at the school.
Many were surprised to learn that students experienced transphobia in Amherst, considering its LGBTQ+-friendly reputation. Some people questioned if Amherst is less progressive than it seems on the surface.
Even if that’s true, Barber-Just said, that wasn’t her main takeaway.
“Anywhere you live in the United States right now, you certainly can come up against different forms of discrimination against queer people,” Barber-Just said. “[The transphobia] was terrible, but when I think back on it, I’m really amazed by the work of all of the student journalists who wanted to find out what was really going on.”
Barber-Just also noted the support students received within the town.
“Members of the queer community came out for years afterwards to support, to ask for things to change. It was pretty powerful to see,” she said.
Barber-Just moved to western Massachusetts with her wife in the ’90s. Their kids attended school in Leverett and Amherst in the 2000s and 2010s. Barber-Just started working at Amherst Regional High School in 2000, and in 2002 she started an LGBTQ+ literature course — one of the country’s earliest of its kind in a public high school, if not the first. Barber-Just says she has seen the class widen the perspectives of students she teaches and help some students grow in confidence.
“You get a window into this world that you don’t inhabit when you gain knowledge and empathy and understanding about something that’s not your experience,” Barber-Just said. “And also, students really need a mirror that says, like, ‘You exist and your life matters.’”
Barber-Just’s push to promote empathy and provide representation for students is mirrored in other schools in the Pioneer Valley, educators and queer parents say.
Zevey Steinitz, the director of teaching and learning at Northfield’s Pioneer Valley Regional School, said that representation of different types of families is a key part of their curriculum. Steinitz herself is a queer parent. Earlier in her career, she worked for Welcoming Schools, an organization that travels to different schools to help them develop educational tools about the LGBTQ+ community.
Steinitz encourages her teachers to ask themselves: “What are those little daily ways that we can signal inclusivity? What are the speech changes we need to do to make our language more inclusive?”
On the whole, queer parents raising kids in the Pioneer Valley today say that their kids are growing up in a completely different reality.
Kids born in the 2000s and 2010s grew up, or are growing up, during a time when gay marriage is legal. In places like Northampton, the already flourishing queer community became full of families.
Gwen Bass, the gay Northampton mom of four, grew up in Amherst as the child of lesbian parents during the 90s. Born in 1982, she was one of the first children born to lesbian parents via artificial insemination. She didn’t know any kids like her growing up, even surrounded by a strong lesbian community of her mom’s friends.
This isn’t the case for her kids, who are now teenagers. They began talking about gender identity in their classrooms in kindergarten. They’ve never been the only child with gay parents.
“I feel like what I’m watching my kids experience is the opportunity to think about their gender in a conversation with other kids that’s maybe facilitated by an adult that knows what they’re talking about and can create safety,” Bass said. “It’s just like a culture of understanding.”
Non-binary parent Rae Walker said that their kids’ relationship with queer identity is like “night and day” to their own experience growing up. Walker grew up in a conservative family in Virginia. Their kids come home talking about gender identity and sexuality often and openly.
“They have a whole vocabulary,” Walker said. “I love that for them.”
Although queer parents in the Pioneer Valley agree that their kids have robust exposure to LGBTQ+ culture inside and outside of the classroom, their experiences vary depending on their race and income.
Northampton and Amherst have been cherished as a haven for queer people for years. But both towns are majority white and increasingly expensive. Some queer Pioneer Valley residents say that they have more fulfilling lives in neighboring towns.
Queer families across the Pioneer Valley
Leigh-Ellen Figueroa loves the community of queer Black and brown people she has found in Holyoke. Figueroa is the health and prevention programs coordinator for Communities that Care, an organization that provides free restorative justice training and counseling services for students affected by drug use.
Figueroa grew up in a Puerto Rican family in western Mass. She initially raised her two kids, who are Puerto Rican and Mexican, in Northampton. But her kids had a difficult time in the Northampton Public Schools system. She said her daughter felt pressured to distance herself from other Puerto Rican kids because they were known as the “bad kids.” Figueroa also said that Northampton High School did not provide sufficient support for her daughter’s learning disability.
“Growing up in a white liberal area is a different kind of violence,” Figueroa said. She said it was difficult to get white community members to admit wrongdoing, particularly when her daughter was experiencing bullying.
Moving to Holyoke was the right move for their family. Figueroa said her experience as a queer person in Holyoke is “great” — “No one cares.”
“The thing about it in the culture is that you just don’t talk about it, and it doesn’t really matter,” Figueroa said. “There’s a really big queer scene in Holyoke … There’s a different level of understanding.”
Jill and Sarah Soller-Mihlek in Westfield also compare their experiences as a queer couple living in the Pioneer Valley outside of Northampton. They point to the division between working-class and upper-class queer people in the region.
“The thing about it in the culture is that you just don’t talk about it, and it doesn’t really matter. There’s a really big queer scene in Holyoke … There’s a different level of understanding.” — Leigh-Ellen Figueroa, Holyoke resident
For them, living in Northampton was too expensive. But as queer people radiate outward into surrounding towns, thriving LGBTQ+ enclaves are budding across the Pioneer Valley, they said.
Sarah is pleased to see the change in her hometown since her childhood.
“I like to tell people now that Westfield is still very purple, but that there’s more rainbow flags than Trump flags at this point now,” she said.
Their daughter Louise, 10, attends the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School in Hadley. She loves art, science, video games and cats. When asked what it’s like to have two moms, she shrugged.
“Sometimes people ask me how I came to be,” she said. “I usually tell them magic.” She flicked a toy wand to emphasize her point.
For Louise, having two moms isn’t super out of the ordinary. There are other kids with gay parents in her class and she’s friends with a boy down the street who has two gay dads.
Her ambivalent attitude towards growing up around queer parents is mirrored in the teenagers who attended Queers Gotta Dance in late April. Dani Hazen Shelfy, Milo Young and Michael Tauer were the only teens in a sea of Gen Xers and millennials dancing to ’80s and ’90s hits.
The three teenagers all go to Northampton High School. Hazen Shelfy, 17, is living with Geller for the year. Her mom is friends with Geller. She grew up in Tel Aviv, Israel, with a lesbian mother and two gay fathers. A few years ago, she became involved in the Pink Front – an activist group protesting Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime.
Hazen Shelfy says that in Northampton, she feels free to explore her bisexual identity and dress as masculine or feminine as she wants.
Her friends joined her outside of the New City Brewery in Easthampton to take a break from dancing. They sat around an outdoor fire pit, huddled together in the chilly spring night. Tauer and Young both grew up in Northampton. To them, the idea of not growing up around queer parents sounds “exotic,” Tauer said.
“I think one of the greatest things I’ve learned here is just if you come to places with an open mind, and you come to people with open arms, and you allow them to mess up, you will find greater community in your shared humanity,” Tauer said.
“I think that’s the lesson that I’ll take from this place wherever I go.”
