History of Rainbow Flag Health Services
Part I: Origins
In March 1990, Newsweek reported on what it called a “gayby boom” in the LGBTQ community, noting that in the San Francisco Bay Area alone, at least 1,000 children had been born to gay or lesbian couples in the previous five years.[1] By that point, lesbians had already been finding ways to conceive outside of the medical system. Sperm donors were located through parenting groups such as Prospective Queer Parents, personal ads, longtime friends, or even brothers-in-law. These arrangements were typically informal and private, without medical oversight, legal contracts, or consistent testing.
When sperm was exchanged without a medical intermediary, the donor was considered the legal father under the law.[2] Using a medical service changed that legal status, but most medical facilities were unwilling to participate in “fresh” inseminations because of HIV liability. Institutions such as Kaiser required donor sperm to be frozen for six months, and the donor was retested for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections before the sample could be used. Freezing sperm destroys a large percentage of sperm cells and significantly reduces fertility. Many men do not produce sperm that survives freezing well. For older women, the required delay was itself a serious barrier, and for some men, freezing effectively disqualified them from donating at all.
Instead of choosing a known donor, another option for lesbians and unmarried women was to purchase frozen sperm from a sperm bank. The Sperm Bank of California opened on 5 October 1982, in Oakland. At the time, most sperm banks restricted services to married heterosexual couples, effectively excluding unmarried people, lesbians, and single women from medically supervised donor insemination. TSBC emerged from the Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Center, a family-planning clinic best known for fertility-awareness classes focused on pregnancy prevention. Those classes were also attended by lesbian couples and single women attempting to conceive at home, often with known donors. Their presence exposed the lack of a safe, legal, and inclusive fertility option, which led directly to the creation of TSBC.[3]
TSBC made several innovations that reshaped donor conception in the United States. It was the first sperm bank to allow donor-conceived adults to learn the identity of their donor. Before this, sperm banks offered donors anonymity that was permanent and absolute. TSBC’s Identity-Release Program allowed donor-conceived people to request identifying information when they turned eighteen. TSBC sperm donors had the option of being in the Identity-Release Program or to remain anonymous.
Despite these advances, TSBC adopted tissue-donation guidelines that excluded so-called “high-risk” donors. Under the FDA non-binding guidelines of sperm banks at that time, men who had had sex with another man within the past five years were barred from donating sperm, despite rigorous testing that eliminated the risk of HIV transmission.[4]
In 1992, Leland Traiman, RN, FNP, founded Rainbow Flag Health Services and Sperm Bank in Oakland, California, in response to restrictions that excluded LGBTQ people from legal and medically supervised fertility care.[5] RFHS was the first sperm bank in the world to accept gay and bisexual men as sperm donors, alongside straight men. Leland intentionally designed RFHS as a 100% known-donor sperm bank. Mothers would learn the donor’s identity when the child was three months old; anonymous donation was not permitted.[6] The mothers would decide whether and how to define a relationship with the donor, but contact with the donor at least once before the child’s first birthday was required. Leland pushed identity-release further than anyone else at the time, believing that children should not grow up with secrets about their origins and that donor conception could build community and family amongst queer folk. RFHS clients were primarily lesbians or lesbian couples who sought out a known donor connection with a gay or bisexual man.
Leland also required that any child conceived with RFHS assistance not be circumcised. This policy drove some clients away, but it was a position he and his medical directors felt strongly about.[7] Fred Strauss, MD, served as the first medical director, and I later assumed that role after obtaining my medical license.
A two-story building at 543 30th Street in Oakland was purchased. The seller had acquired it in a poker game and wanted to cash out quickly. The building sat in a mixed residential and commercial neighborhood near Sutter Hospital. The downstairs unit was rented to tenants, while the upstairs was converted into a waiting room, exam room, donation room, laboratory, and liquid nitrogen storage area. Leland registered a fictitious business name with Alameda County on 18 May 1992.[8]
In 1995, when the internet was still commonly referred to as the World Wide Web, I taught myself HTML and launched what was likely the world’s first sperm bank website at the unambiguous URL of www.gayspermbank.com. At the time, with the internet being relatively new, Leland did not see the need for a website. As the world changed, however, most RFHS clients ultimately found the practice online. The business phone number was 510-763-SPERM. The website is now only available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.[9]
Leland actively recruited donors, particularly gay and bisexual men, though not exclusively. Recruiting Asian, Black, and Latino donors proved difficult.[10] RFHS did not impose a height requirement, unlike many sperm banks, but experience showed that donors of short stature were rarely selected. Over time, a donor catalog of approximately thirty-five men was assembled.
RFHS offered vaginal and intrauterine insemination using banked sperm, fresh insemination with designated donors, and worldwide shipment of frozen sperm. The first child conceived with RFHS assistance was born on 8 June 1997. In 2000, after another property purchase, the sperm bank relocated to Central Avenue in Alameda.
What Newsweek described in 1990 as a “gayby boom” was not theoretical at Rainbow Flag Health Services. By the time the clinic closed, it had helped 108 mothers bring 127 children into the world. These families were created because one small clinic refused to accept the exclusion of queer people from reproductive medicine.
Part 2 – Fighting discrimination
[1] “The Future of Gay America,” Newsweek (12 March 1990), p. 25.
[2] Cal. Fam. Code § 7613(b) (donor of semen provided to licensed physician/sperm bank is not treated as natural parent in law absent written agreement).
[3] “Vision, Values and History,” The Sperm Bank of California, (https://www.thespermbankofca.org/about/vision-values-and-history/ : 30 Jan 2025)
[4] U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Guidance for Industry: Eligibility Determination for Donors of Human Cells, Tissues, and Cellular and Tissue-Based Products (HCT/Ps). Silver Spring, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Food and Drug Administration, August 2007, page 14; ( https://www.fda.gov/files/vaccines%2C%20blood%20%26%20biologics/published/Eligibility-Determination-for-Donors-of-Human-Cells–Tissues–and-Cellular-and-Tissue-Based-Products–Guidance-for-Industry.pdf, accessed 4 Jan 2026).
[5] “Gay Sperm for Sale: New Oakland Clinic Offers Lesbians a New Set of Options,” article, Bay Area Reporter (San Francisco, California), 6 Jan 1994; California Digital Newspaper Collection (https://cdnc.ucr.edu/ : accessed 12 January 2021), p 5. And, “Sperm Donors, Rainbow Flag Health Services,” advert, Bay Area Reporter (San Francisco, California), 16 Jun 1994; California Digital Newspaper Collection (https://cdnc.ucr.edu/ : accessed 12 January 2021), p 62.
[6] Rita Rubin (USA Today), “Fathers without faces,” article, Arizona Republic (Phoenix, Arizona), 20 Nov 2000; Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/ : accessed 11 January 2021), image 59. And, Don Oldenburg (Washington Post), “Point, click, procreate,” article, The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 19 Mar 2000; Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/ : accessed 11 January 2020), p 21. And, Sue Montgomery, “Selling the seeds of love,” article, The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 10 Dec 2005; Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/ : accessed 11 January 2020), p 40.
[7] Leland Traiman, RN/FNP, “Removed at birth?,” letter to editor, Bay Area Reporter (San Francisco, California), 4 Jul 2002; California Digital Newspaper Collection (https://cdnc.ucr.edu/ : accessed 12 January 2021), p 8. And, Angelina Malhotra-Singh, “The unkindest cut: Circumcision ‘ban’ splits queer-parent community,” article, The San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, California), 18 Feb 2003; Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/ : accessed 11 January 2021), image 6. And, Tim Hammond, “Body Integrity,” letter to the editor, The San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, California), 21 Feb 2003; Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/ : accessed 11 January 2020), p 13.
[8] Alameda County Clerk-Recorder’s Office, “Fictitious Business Names,” database, Alameda County, California, Clerk-Recorder Web Access (https://rechart1.acgov.org/ : accessed 9 February 2021), Rainbow Flag Health Services, 180456 (1992), 270539 (renew 1998), 308553 (renew 2001), 389594 (renew 2007).
[9] Rainbow Flag Health Services, original site preserved on Internet Archive Wayback Machine, (https://web.archive.org/web/20000510203003/http://gayspermbank.com/ : accessed 30 Jan 2025).
[10] AP, “Donors in the Minority: Black couples facing infertility find limited resources,” article, The Daily Advertiser (Lafayette, Louisiana), 6 Jul 1999; Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/ : accessed 11 January 2020), p 11.
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