Nanette Gartrell
American psychiatrist, researcher and lesbian activist
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Among other works, Gartrell is the author of My Answer Is NO. . . . If That's Okay with You: How Women Can Say NO with Confidence. She was also a co-author of an essay in the 2017 book (and subsequent editions) of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.
Gartrell is probably best known for being the principal researcher since 1986 for the US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, which is the longest-running investigation of lesbian mothers and their children in the world.
Early life and education
Gartrell was born in 1949. Both of her parents dealt with "significant mental illness", and Gartrell and her two younger siblings grew up with family trauma and economic hardships as a result.
At age 11, Gartrell realized that for her own survival, she needed to move to another city once she finished high school. She worked very hard on her studies and earned an academic scholarship to Stanford University. To better understand her family's mental health challenges, she set her sights on becoming a psychiatrist. Within a few months of beginning her studies at Stanford, Gartrell fell in love with a woman, came out as a lesbian, and "ended up face to face with my sexual identity and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders", which at that time said she was mentally ill due to her homosexuality. Knowing that was not true, she said "I decided that I would become a researcher with a goal of learning how to conduct scientific investigations that would provide a much more accurate picture of LGBTQ people than observations of psychiatric inpatients or prison inmates who were forced into experiments that were attempting to change their sexual orientation to heterosexual."
During her senior year at Stanford, Gartrell was required to perform a research study under the guidance of a faculty member. She approached H. Keith H. Brodie, then an assistant professor of psychiatry, who became her mentor and began to teach her how to do research. Gartrell's senior project was a survey of psychiatrists' attitudes concerning lesbianism, which was the first of her many research studies on LGBTQ people.
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Career
After earning her undergraduate degree in 1971 from Stanford, Gartrell earned her medical degree at the University of California, completed a psychiatry residency and fellowship at Harvard Medical School, and has been a Williams Institute Visiting Distinguished Scholar at the UCLA School of Law since 2009. She served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School from 1976 to 1987, and was on the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco from 1988 to 2011. She had a guest appointment at the University of Amsterdam from 2009 to 2025.
For 13 years, Gartrell volunteered her psychiatric services to chronically mentally ill homeless people. An experience in one of these shelters became the basis for her 2006 article in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, "A Tenderloin Tail."
The Nanette K. Gartrell papers, a collection of Gartrell's personal, professional, and political life, are archived in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.
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.
In June 2010, the NLLFS study US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Psychological Adjustment of the 17-Year-Old Adolescents was published in Pediatrics. 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, The Telegraph (UK), Time, and a mention on The Colbert Report. Discover magazine named this story as one of the top 100 stories of 2010, as number 88: "Same-Sex Parents Do No Harm". In 2012, UCLA Today published an article titled "Researcher sorts out fact from fallacy in three-decade study of lesbian families", 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". 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".
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.
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".
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.
Personal life
Gartrell is married to Dee Mosbacher MD, Ph.D., a documentary filmmaker whose film Straight From the Heart was nominated for an Academy Award in 1995. The two live together in San Francisco, California.
Gartrell's 20th birthday coincided with the start of the Stonewall riots, which are generally acknowledged to mark the beginning of the modern gay rights movement in the United States. Since then, she has enjoyed pretending that the annual Pride parades in San Francisco were held to celebrate her birthday.