Gay families, keep out! The recent case of a straight couple denied an occupancy permit in Missouri has once again shone a light on city ordinances that forbid unmarried couples with children to live together. Gay families are particularly at risk.

"Donna and Sue" thought they had found the perfect place to live and raise their children. The couple--who asked The Advocate not to use their real names--were planning on buying a surprisingly affordable house in the affluent St. Louis suburb of Ladue, Mo., four years ago. It was close to work and near the school Donna was eyeing for her 9-year-old son.

Then a real estate-agent friend informed them that Ladue had an ordinance preventing two unrelated people from living together. Police and municipal officials played down the implications, but Donna--who hoped to have more children--had her doubts. "I felt like it was a situation where we could live there and wait and see if something happened," Donna says. "It's similar to waiting for a bomb to drop, to see if it's actually going to happen to you. That's not a good way to raise a family."

Indeed, Ladue has a history of ousting families who violate housing ordinances. In 1985 the city won a case against a straight couple--E. Terrence Jones and Joan Kelly Horn--who lived together for four years and who each brought children from a previous relationship. Ladue officials had told them they should marry or leave their home. The Missouri court of appeals sided with the city, stating, "There is a governmental interest in marriage and in preserving the integrity of the biological or legal family."

Ladue is not alone. Connecticut-based land-use lawyer Dwight Merriam estimates there are thousands of similar ordinances in municipalities across the country--most of them conceived 30 to 50 years ago--that are typically designed to prevent single-family residences from being used as boarding or fraternity houses.

But some of the ordinances are enforced on moral grounds and fail to allow for the growing number of "nontraditional" families, he says. "Virtually every community I've seen in my practice--which is a nationwide practice--has a definition of family that is a variation on persons related by blood, marriage, or adoption [which may include] up to three unrelated persons," Merriam says. "Our zoning ordinances reflect an Ozzie & Harriet world, a concept of family that is bygone. A husband and wife living together with children under 18 is by far a minority today, maybe one out of four."

Olivia Shelltrack and her male partner, Fondray Loving, feel "like a married couple," but they haven't tied the knot. They were denied an occupancy permit in the working-class St. Louis suburb of Black Jack in January after they moved into a five-bedroom house with their three children. A city ordinance prevents more than three unrelated individuals from sharing a single-family residence. Shelltrack, 31, and Loving, 33, are the biological parents of two of the children, but Shelltrack has a daughter from a previous relationship living with them.

"At first I'm like, 'Are you serious? What do you mean I don't fit your definition of a family?'" recalls Shelltrack, who has been with Loving for 13 years. "Then I thought, My kids are so happy in their new house and with their new friends at school. We've put everything into this house, and now, oh, my God, what are we going to do?"

After a flurry of local and national media attention, Black Jack's planning and zoning commission proposed revamping its ordinance to allow more than three people not related by blood, marriage, or adoption. But on May 16 the council rejected the proposal in a 5-3 vote.

"Going into that meeting, my biggest concern was that if they vote to change it, even that change isn't good enough," Shelltrack says. "Then, it happened so fast--I looked at Fondray and said, 'What happened, did they just vote no?' I got up and walked out. It hit me, and I broke down and started crying. It was hurtful that these board members had chosen to discredit my family--and that they seemed to have so much support."

The city has said it won't pressure Shelltrack and Loving to leave, but the couple may have to paya $500-per-day fine. Black Jack mayor Norman McCourt--who did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment--has repeatedly said this year the city isn't concerned with mandating morality, only with preventing overcrowding. But in a November 1999 letter regarding a heterosexual unmarried couple with triplets, McCourt wrote that Black Jack officials and residents "do not believe that an unmarried couple having children residing in our community is an appropriate standard that they wish to approve."

"You can only imagine what he must think of a gay or lesbian couple moving into the neighborhood, which, the way it is right now, wouldn't happen," says Shelltrack, who is working with the American Civil Liberties Union and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to keep up the fight against the restrictions. "The council vote clearly sends a message that says these are their moral views: Don't be gay, don't be unmarried, don't have children out of wedlock, and don't be a foster parent."

Merriam predicts that revising outdated definitions of family will be a piecemeal effort, not a sweeping revolution. Most changes trickle down from state law, so he advises activists to start by checking if and how their state constitution defines a family, and appealing to their state legislators.

Meanwhile, same-sex couples looking for a house should check with municipalities about their definitions of family, advises Donna of St. Louis. They should also seek out gay real estate agents, or at least agents familiar with issues affecting the changing face of American households. "We're moving toward the type of society where families are blended, and in different ways," Donna says. "But we all cook dinner and do the laundry and take the dog for a walk. We're basically just average people. My concern is, Is this going to happen to someone else? Do they even know it could?"

Since the landmark 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas that struck down sodomy laws in part on the basis of personal privacy, housing ordinances based on moral values alone no longer hold up to constitutional scrutiny, says Jon Davidson, legal director for the gay rights group Lambda Legal. "What the Lawrence case said was that unless you have something more than morals, then that's not a basis for interfering with people's private decision making," he notes.

Back in Ladue, where Donna and Sue declined to live, times have changed, says city attorney John Maupin. If a gay or lesbian couple were to square off today with the city over the housing ordinance, he claims, city council members would be eager to legislate their municipality into the 21st century. "It doesn't seem to be the sort of issue our families get excited about," says Maupin. "Barking dogs, that's one thing. Or a fence in your back yard. Those are the things people get excited about."

Larson is editor of the LGBT-focused progressive independent newspaper Vital Voice, based in St. Louis.