For 13 years, Gartrell volunteered her psychiatric services to chronically mentally ill homeless people. [11] An experience in one of these shelters became the basis for her 2006 article in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine , "A Tenderloin Tail." [12]
US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study
Gartrell has been the Principal Researcher for the US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS) since 1986. The NLLFS followed lesbian mothers and their children who were conceived by donor insemination during the 1980s. The study examined the social, psychological, and emotional development of the children as well as the dynamics of planned lesbian families. This has been the longest-running and largest prospective investigation of lesbian mothers and their children in the world. [14]
In June 2010, the NLLFS study US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Psychological Adjustment of the 17-Year-Old Adolescents was published in Pediatrics . [15] The study's results showed that the 17-year-olds of lesbian mothers were rated significantly higher in social, academic, and total competence and significantly lower in social problems, rule-breaking, aggressive, and externalizing problem behavior than their age-matched counterparts. This publication prompted international media attention including articles in the Los Angeles Times , [16] The Telegraph (UK), [17] Time , [18] and a mention on The Colbert Report . [19] Discover magazine named this story as one of the top 100 stories of 2010, as number 88: "Same-Sex Parents Do No Harm". [20] In 2012, UCLA Today published an article titled "Researcher sorts out fact from fallacy in three-decade study of lesbian families", [21] highlighting Gartrell's 30-plus years of work on the NLLFS study.
In 2018, the New England Journal of Medicine published follow-up findings on the psychological well-being of the NLLFS offspring when they were 25 years old, representing the sixth wave of the long-running study. The report concluded that "in a large, prospective study involving 25-year-olds with sexual minority parents, there were no significant differences in measures of mental health between those who were conceived through donor insemination and enrolled before they were born and those in a U.S. population-based normative sample". [22] Subsequent articles in the mainstream press picked up on the NEJM findings and reported that the subjects of the study "were just fine" when compared to "a sample of typical U.S. 25-year-olds matched on sex, race or ethnic background, and educational level". [23] [24]
In 2021, the Journal of GLBT Family Studies published an article on the sixth wave of the study, focusing on the history of the study, its then-92% retention rate of the original cohort families over the years, its research methodologies and the strategies used to retain participants. It also discussed the "changing cultural, legal, and political landscape for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people over the past 35 years" as an unforeseen factor in the study results. [25]
The researchers have acknowledged that the NLLFS families studied were a predominantly white, well-educated and cisgendered nonrepresentative sample, and that "future prospective longitudinal studies would benefit from an intersectional approach that explores family dynamics in more diverse samples, including people of all sexual and gender identities, races, ethnicities, socioeconomic groups, and regions of residence". [25] [26]
Gartrell and her co-authors' research, including the NLLFS, were cited among amicus curiae briefs and other legal documents related to same-sex marriage cases, including some that led to the 2015 landmark United States Supreme Court Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which ruled that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples. [27] [28] [29]
