During her early school days, 13-year-old Sol Kelley-Jones couldn't find storybooks about families like hers, although her story would make a great read.

She and her parents backpack and bike. They volunteer for food drives and collect money for underprivileged kids' school supplies. Theirs is a friendly, multicultural neighborhood with huge back yards and a community garden. Her parents built a stage in the basement of their Madison, Wis., home, where she and her friends put on skits.

Family values are the core of the Kelley-Jones household: One parent is the principal breadwinner, the other is home for Sol after school.

Yet some people refuse to accept that theirs is a family at all.

Sol is the child of two lesbian mothers and a "donor" dad. Her birth was the result of alternative fertilization, also called donor insemination. Her biological mom, Sunshine Jones, and her mother, Joanne Kelley, together for 21 years, selected the donor because they wanted to be able to tell their child that he was "a tremendous person." Sol has met her biological father.

But the only family she has ever known is her two moms.

When registering for kindergarten, she couldn't understand why the school insisted on listing Kelley as "a friend of the family" instead of as a parent.

Sol is not alone.

Researchers have discovered "a baby boom among lesbians," the result of increased access to donor insemination since the early 1980s. Although the numbers are tough to pin down, studies employing a variety of assumptions estimate that from 1.5 million to 5 million lesbian mothers are now living with 6 million to 14 million children, some from previous heterosexual marriages.

Like Sol, these children are caught in the middle of a raging national debate, with underlying questions: What is a family and who is defining it?

Policymakers, legislators, school boards, courts, employers and religious leaders are battling to come up with answers as to whether our society's extensive marriage benefits -- referred to in 4,000 separate federal laws -- should apply to the increasing number of homosexual couples in long-term relationships who are rearing children.

In Wisconsin, Sol has become a significant figure in the debate.

Too young to give much thought to her own sexual orientation, she has become a highly visible spokes-kid for gay rights and is bent on winning for her family and other gay and lesbian families like it the same legal rights that any other 13-year-old kid has.

Child custody and inheritance laws, Social Security death benefits, family health insurance policies and the Family & Medical Leave Act are among the issues at stake.

"I really wanted to speak from the perspective of the kids," Sol says about testifying at age 10 before a Wisconsin legislative committee on a bill prohibiting same-sex marriage, which has since been tabled. "I think a lot of times we're really left out. They don't think about how this all affects our lives. We have great families. We need the laws that protect us, so we know we can always stay with our families and are always secure and protected."

When angry sign-wavers protested outside the legislative hearing room, one of them snapping Sol's picture as she clutched her moms' hands, she admits to being frightened.

"What are they going to do with that picture?" she asked Jones, who along with Kelley worries that Sol takes on too much.

"My parents really want to protect me. They want me to just be a kid," says Sol, who plays basketball and writes poetry when not influencing legislation or educating kids about the contributions gays and lesbians have made throughout history.

"But I always want to do more," she says, recalling Ruby Bridges, the African American 1st grader who had to be escorted by a cordon of federal marshals when integrating schools in New Orleans in November 1960, and the nine Arkansas youths, recently awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, who faced jeering crowds when they integrated Little Rock Central High School in 1957.

"I try to take the courage they had, to find that kind of courage inside myself," says Sol, aptly named for a Scandinavian sun goddess eager for peace and harmony -- not the chariot-driving Roman sun god of the same name. "Even if I only make a difference for one kid.

"My family has always lived a very honest life. They've given me the courage to speak out and hold my head high" when other people are hurling epithets because her mothers are lesbians, she says.

Wisconsin State Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Madison) considers Sol Kelley-Jones to be one of the state's "most influential people" regarding gay rights, with as much access to top-name politicians "as a $100,000 a year lobbyist."

At a recent press conference to promote a statewide domestic partnership registry, "the most articulate and effective person in the entire group was Sol," Pocan says, explaining that the group included a state senator, two state representatives and five other adults.

Last year she testified before the Madison City Council and the Madison Metropolitan School District, both of which now provide family health insurance benefits for the families of gay and lesbian employees.

To U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Congress' first openly declared lesbian, "Sol helps people move past their stereotypes. She puts a face on the families that are involved in these policies. As soon as you listen to her description of her life, one instantly wants to promote policies that support people like Sol and her family."

But Sol pays a price for being out front on gay rights.

Because she openly acknowledges that her parents are lesbians and is proud of her moms, she is frequently the brunt of verbal attacks.

"There are kids who refuse to sit with me at lunch. They call me ugly. Some get right up in my face and call me a fag because I speak out about homophobia.

"This year, it's way over the top," says Sol, about her second year in junior high. The "really cool posters" she worked hard on in her campaign for student council president were defaced when someone scribbled "faggot" all over them.

"That's one example of many such incidents. I can't even name all of them," she says. "It would take weeks and weeks.

"But I try to hold my head high because I know of plenty of other kids who have gay parents but they don't feel safe about coming out about it because of who their parents are or just because the whole environment is so hostile. I want to wear my rainbow (the gay-lesbian rights symbol) so that they know someone else is out there."

Teachers, too, are part of the problem.

"Their silence is taking a stance, and it really hurts people," Sol says, explaining that many teachers ignore sexual orientation slurs.

"If you say the `N' word at the back of the class you get sent to the office, but if you say faggot or homo or queer or fruit, nothing happens. You don't get into trouble for that," she says.

Indeed, homophobia in the schools "is one of the last frontiers to be really addressed" by educators, Jones says. "It's the acceptable way to harass today," she says.

She and Joanne Kelley chose to rear their daughter in Madison because of its progressive reputation. They've worked tirelessly with the schools to try to create a positive environment for Sol.

Juan Jose Lopez, a Madison school board member and executive director of Briarpatch, the city's runaway and homeless youth center, acknowledges that "homophobia is really entrenched in many of our communities.

"As progressive as Madison pretends to be, we still don't deal with sexual orientation because there's a lot of resistance and opposition from people who don't want to talk about it," he says. "It's a very sensitive issue. I think it's mainly fear."

However, Lopez says that as a school board member he is "110 percent" behind a lesbian and gay educational workshop that Sol has presented in several schools.

"Homophobic harassment can't be changed," Sol says, "until kids know about models of gay and lesbian people throughout history. They really need education. They need to know that we (children of gays and lesbians) come from diverse races and have great families and very normal lives."

To find out if a kid-to-kid education campaign would change students' attitudes and knowledge about gay and lesbian people, Sol created a pre-survey, a multimedia workshop and a post-survey that she introduced in 4th and 5th grade classrooms two years ago. Her thesis proved to be right.

But one of her biggest problems was teacher resistance. Only four teachers allowed her to conduct the workshop without sending permission slips home to parents, one of her criteria.

"They felt as strongly as I did that permission slips sent the message that there was something wrong with learning about families such as mine and people like my parents."

Indeed, several students were kept home from school on the day of the presentation.

On her Web site, (www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Heights/6502), which her uncle created for her, Sol describes her workshop. She asks students: "Have you ever felt scared of gay and lesbian people or heard someone act like they were scared? Maybe you've heard kids act like gay and lesbian people can give you cooties if you're near them. Or if you're near a gay or lesbian person, you'll be gay or lesbian, too -- like you can catch it. Well, people have those fears when they don't know much about gay and lesbian people."

This year she plans to be part of a theater troupe whose mission will be to dispel misunderstandings about gays and lesbians in Madison schools.

As to how much help she receives from her mothers on such projects as her educational workshop and legislative testimony, she says, "You know I'm a kid. I have my parents help me and support me, but they don't do it for me."

"That's a rule in this house," chimes in Jones, a marriage and family therapist. "Even with homework."

Sol finishes her sentence. "They won't tell me the answers."

As for the hostile attitudes that Sol frequently faces in school, Jones says, "As a parent, that breaks my heart." She and Kelley, community service director for a Madison utility company, knew that "children in (lesbian and gay) families have additional challenges. That's why we are committed to having one of us home after school."

But they couldn't have predicted everything their daughter would be forced to endure. Nor did they expect a child as committed as Sol to protecting her family.

"Sol is one of the seed planters," Jones says. "She probably won't see in her middle school years the fruits of her work."

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