In 1993, Meredith Baxter received an Emmy nomination for her role in the CBS afterschool special Other Mothers, a controversial episode about a teenage boy with lesbian parents. At the time, it was a unique and bold initiative, as it was extremely rare to see lesbians on television, let alone lesbian parents; most people thought "lesbian" and "mother" were incompatible.

In the ten years since then, the number of lesbian characters on TV whose storylines revolve around their role as a mother (or desire to be a mother) has grown to such epidemic proportions, it now appears that all lesbians do is have and raise children--when they're not losing custody of them and fighting to get them back.

Some TV series lesbian characters are clearly positioned as mothers from the beginning, such as Carol and Susan on Friends (1994), Laurie Manning on Ellen (1997), and Melanie and Lindsay on Queer as Folk (1999).

Motherhood is introduced early on as one of the defining characteristics of these characters, and most of their storylines revolve around parenting in some way.

A more recent trend in ensemble series is the lesbian-insemination storyline. While it was unique when Norma Lear on Sisters first did it in 1993, it's now such an oft-used plot device as to be almost boring. From Det. Abby Sullivan and her partner on NYPD Blue in 1996 to Dr. Kerry Weaver's decision to have a child with her girlfriend on ER to Sharon Stone and Ellen Degeneres' wacky insemination antics in the 2000 Showtime movie If These Walls Could Talk 2, it's a trend that will not die.

Even Showtime's new lesbian series The L Word, premiering next summer, includes a couple trying to get pregnant.

Another popular plot device in recent years is to make the mother of a main character gay, such as Roseanne's mother on Roseanne (1996), Steve's mother on Beverly Hills 90210 (1999), Harrison's mother on Popular (1999) or Raina's mothers (played by Sally Struthers and Debbie Allen) on The Division.

There have also been numerous television movies about revolve around lesbian parents. Some focus on lesbian parents fighting for custody of their children, beginning with 1978's A Question of Love, then Two Mothers for Zachary (1996) and What Makes a Family (2001), or coping with unexpected parenthood, as in Bobbie's Girl (2002), or dealing with the implications on your children of coming out, as in Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammerymeyer Story (1994) and the upcoming movie An Unexpected Love (2003), which Lifetime describes as a movie about "a mother dealing with divorce and her sexuality."

In fact, the only broadcast or cable television movie about a lesbian who wasn't a mother was The Truth About Jane (2000), and that was only because the character was a teenager. In fact, teenage lesbians are about the only other kind of lesbian character you will find on television besides the Lesbian Mother.

Let me be clear: there's nothing wrong with storylines about lesbian mothers. In fact, they would be welcome if they were well written (which they usually aren't), and if they were included among a variety of different storylines about lesbians. But trying to conceive, adopt, get custody, or otherwise deal with children are the only stories adult lesbians get on TV anymore (besides coming out), and the reason TV writers fall back on this storyline is less about exploring the joys of motherhood than it is about desexualizing lesbians and making them more palatable for straight viewers.

Although television has always been about finding a good idea and beating it to death, the lesbian-as-mother trend has lasted longer than most because it is rooted in deep-seated stereotypes about women and lesbians.

The first is the notion that "woman" is synonymous with "mother." The endurance of this stereotype has resulted in a persistent double-standard in television roles for men and women--male roles only sometimes revolve around parenting issues, while roles for women overwhelmingly do

This is slowly changing with the popularity of shows like Everwood and 8 Rules for Dating My Daughter, which revolve heavily around fatherhood, and the proliferation of shows like Law and Order, Alias, and ER, which feature women in roles that focus primarily on their professional life. But it's still hardly a level playing field.

It isn't even that so many of the lesbian characters are mothers that is the problem--it's that their storylines so frequently revolve around their role as a mother, as if this defined them exclusively.

There are some exceptions, such as Dr. Weaver's role of as physician on ER and, occasionally, Melanie's role as a lawyer on Queer as Folk, but for the most part, the storylines for lesbian characters who are mothers overwhelmingly focus on issues related to motherhood.