Two Moms Are Better Than One : FAMILY VALUES: Two Moms and Their Son, <i> By Phyllis Burke (Random House: $21; 233 pp.)</i>

Phyllis is the mother of 3-year-old Jesse. She picks him up from nursery school, eats rice cakes and apple slices with him as they watch “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” prepares Macaroni and Cheese Wheels for his dinner, reads him “Peter Pan” and tucks him into bed at night. Cheryl is also the mother of Jesse and she too does those normal things for him. Phyllis Burke’s “Family Values” is an autobiographical story about her legal struggle to establish a lesbian family with her partner Cheryl and their son Jesse, who was conceived by Cheryl through donor insemination. This book is an eloquent response to right wing groups such as the Traditional Values Coalition, which attempt to portray lesbians and gay men as being anti-family.

Burke, a San Franciscan, sets her own struggle against the backdrop of the “mainstream” gay and lesbian fight for civil rights and the radical protests of Queer Nation. Her story is thus both an account of one lesbian family and a history of the contemporary political life of the San Francisco homosexual community. By far the most compelling part of “Family Values” is Phyllis Burke’s story of her family. That story begins when Cheryl, who is in her 30s, becomes pregnant after realizing, not unlike many childless women her age who hear the biological clock ticking, “I want the meaning in my life that only a baby can give.”

The lesbian community of San Francisco is well set up to support Phyllis and Cheryl. The two women first join a “Lesbians Considering Parenthood” workshop, which nicknames itself the “Maybe Baby Group.” Pacific Family Services provides them and other non-traditional families with insemination. Phyllis attends birthing classes with Cheryl, and their lesbian doctor encourages Phyllis’s presence in the delivery room. Jesse’s arrival sets off what Burke calls the “lesbian tom-toms,” and he is deluged with gifts and love. “When there is a birth, or a new child comes to our community,” she explains, “that child is welcomed as an honored guest.”

Burke discovers that while she had helped prepare everything for Jesse’s coming what she had not prepared for was the depth of her love for him. Cheryl encourages the close bond between them. When he begins speaking Jesse calls his birth mother “Mama Cher” and his other mother “Mama Phyllis.”

The complication arises when Burke realizes first that if Cheryl took time off from work to be with the child, neither Cheryl nor the baby could be covered under Burke’s insurance. She next realizes that should anything happen to her partner, Burke would have no legal claim to her son. When she tells Jesse’s pediatrician that she and Cheryl decided she should adopt the child, Burke downplays the intensity of her feeling. “This isn’t such a big deal,” she says, “I just want to be able to cover Jesse under my health insurance.” But the heterosexual woman doctor wisely and lovingly replies, “That’s not why you’re adopting him. You’re adopting him because he’s your son, and you’re his mother.”

The state is not as quick to respond as the doctor. After Burke applies for the adoption months pass before she is granted the requisite “home visit” by the Department of Social Services. It is during those painful months of waiting that Burke, who had lived her lesbianism in the closet, explores the homosexual political communities of San Francisco. She comes to understand their importance and how much she needs their help.

While in terms of her age and demeanor Burke is much more suited to the moderate gay and lesbian civil rights movement, her increasing impatience with the interminable wait she must endure before the State will even deign to consider her case radicalizes her. Her anger is exacerbated when a massive number of Prayer Warriors from the Jubilee Christian Center of San Jose invade San Francisco one Halloween for a mass exorcism of demons, focusing on “sexual perverts” and screaming that homosexuals are child molesters. She finds herself avidly attending Queer Nation meetings, and cheering the actions of their focus groups such as GHOST (“Grand Homosexual Outrage at Sickening Televangelists”). She becomes active in a Queer Nation protest against the film “Basic Instinct,” which depicts lesbians as homicidal maniacs who would like to kill all males, including male children.

Burke finally returns to her adoption story when the Department of Social Services grants her a home visit. She and Cheryl prepare their house with care, throwing “into the closet” any items about which a conventional social worker might have reservations, such as unisex toys. The social worker’s report is not positive. She is forced to admit that the two women “have lived in a stable, monogamous, marriage-like relationship for 5 1/2 years,” that the child’s nursery school teacher says he is well-adjusted and well cared for, that “a normal, affectionate, parental relationship” exists between Burke and the child. Nevertheless, without giving further reasons, she recommends against adoption because “the State Department of Social Services does not believe that his adoption is in the best interest of the minor.”

However, the report is positive enough so that Burke and her family can get a hearing--in San Francisco, where gays and lesbians have succeeded through their various political movements in raising consciousness. At the conclusion of the book Jesse sits on Mama Phyllis’ lap, takes her hand in both of his and pulls it to his chest, and the judge announces that she is approving the adoption “in the best interest of the child.” The reader can only cheer the judge’s perception. Burke succeeds in this memoir in charging the fanatical right with the intent to tear apart loving families that do not conform to their narrow definitions and in wrestling from the right their claim to a monopoly on “family values.”