This project was funded in part by a CSWS grant.

In 2007, CSWS awarded Melissa Hart a grant to work on this book. 

“In the 1970s and early 1980s, mothers who came out as lesbians routinely lost custody of their children to homophobic court systems and outraged fathers,” says author Melissa Hart.  When she was 9 years old, this happened to her mother in Southern California, and Hart and her younger siblings weren’t allowed to live with her again until they turned 18. Hart documented this era in her new memoir Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood."

Seal Press, 288 pages