— They tend to meet in moments of extreme emotional and financial crisis, amid lives already ragged from abuse and despair. They come together in prison, on line at the methadone clinic, during coffee breaks at Narcotics Anonymous meetings.

Across the country, lesbian couples of color are creating families — sharing money, homes, child-rearing, romance — in impoverished urban communities where few of the men are regarded as suitable mates and the traditional family structure has long since vanished.

For many of them, the experience of homosexuality comes relatively late in life and only after years of disappointing, often violent, relationships with men.

These women generally exist outside the political debate over civil unions and gay marriage, are historically undercounted by demographers and rarely appear on the radar screens of academic trend-spotters.

But front-line social workers, church pastors, prison resettlement counselors and court and hospital personnel are increasingly familiar with the phenomenon.

For at least a decade, these professionals say, they have seen a growing number of women living openly as lesbians after being in prison, drug treatment and psychiatric hospitals. By committing themselves to each other, and to each other's children, the women are structuring families that mirror old-fashioned, two-parent households.

"There is just a basic human need that everyone has," said Maureen Price-Boreland, executive director of Community Partners in Action, a nonprofit prison rehabilitation program in Hartford, Conn.

So many men in urban areas "are not really socialized to understand what it means to be in a nurturing, loving relationship where you take care of your significant other and your family."

The Rev. Antonio Jones, who leads an Atlanta congregation of black, same-sex couples, said his church has an active outreach ministry in that city's homeless shelters, where many of these women live.

The growing visibility of homosexuals in the heart of the Bible Belt is particularly noticeable and has led to a growing debate among black clergy in cities such as Atlanta, which is known as a mecca for black homosexuals. And it has set off a firestorm in black churches, where some ministers blame homosexuality for destroying the black family.

But at Jones' church on Atlanta's Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, it is clear that the word "family" is more loosely defined. Two women attending Unity Fellowship church one Sunday morning held hands, showing off their red and burgundy fingernail polish when they weren't turning pages of a King James Bible.

"Folks are looking for love. The sexual orientation of their new partners is less significant if they are receiving love, safety and support," Jones said. "That speaks to their brokenness, (which) comes with poverty, oppression and trauma."

Seven lesbian couples interviewed at length during the past year by The Hartford Courant fit the profile described by these front-line observers.

All but one of the couples includes a partner with a history of abusive relationships with men; in some cases they were sexually molested as children. Drug addiction and mental illness are common threads. At least one woman in every couple engaged in her first lesbian relationship after age 30.

Conclusions about this population as a whole are difficult to make, experts agree, because black and Hispanic lesbians are underrepresented in academic and government studies. And women of color historically have been less willing than their Caucasian ounterparts to live openly as lesbians because of cultural stigmas.

But U.S. Census Bureau data from 1990 and 2000, as well as dozens of interviews with state and national sources across a broad range of fields, indicate that is changing.

Not only does the census show that the number of black and Hispanic same-sex couples increased at a greater rate between 1990 and 2000 than with white and other minority couples, it also shows that the percentage of these couples who are raising their biological children far outstrips that of white lesbian partners.

The Courant's own analysis of the 2000 Census further shows that women who are living with same-sex partners are identifying themselves in some of the nation's poorest neighborhoods in states such as Connecticut, New Jersey, Texas, Georgia and Michigan. According to these findings, the neighborhoods with the highest percentage of same-sex female households in the five states also are neighborhoods with significantly high poverty rates.

Monica Taher, a media director for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, said she isn't surprised that census data shows more same-sex minority female couples are raising their own children, indicating that many of these women are entering their first lesbian relationships at a later age.

"In the Latina community, homosexuality is still taboo. It's still hard to come out to your families," Taher said. "We have encountered many cases, many women, who got married to a man because of family pressure and they could not bring themselves to identify themselves as lesbians. They tried to do the right thing."

Although a few of the women interviewed by the Courant said they pushed aside their recurring thoughts of partnering with a woman for years because of religious and cultural pressures, all of them described specific life experiences that led them to their first lesbian relationships. The most common of those experiences were domestic abuse, rape, drug addiction and prison.

All of these relationships appear to be founded on not only a desire to be with a woman, but also a complex set of circumstances that meet at the intersection of sexuality, poverty and race. These women have been left in need of the love and support they had never received from men.

The first two times Adrienne "River" Lauray went to York Correctional Institution in Niantic, Conn., in the early 1990s, after a series of arrests for shoplifting clothes for her family, she kept her headphones over her ears and her nose stuck in her Bible.

The third time she went in, in 2000, for illegal use of a credit card, things had changed. Lauray had grown bitter about relationships with men. So when women flirted with her in prison, she flirted back.

Lauray, who went to prison looking feminine, came out wearing a short haircut covered by a do-rag, men's boxer shorts over her jeans and Timberland boots. Her transition into a lesbian lifestyle was swift.

Lauray said that decision had a lot to do with her past relationships with men. "If I had to take care of a man, I may as well be with a woman," she concluded.

Lauray and Christie "Love" Mackey, 31, have been living together as a couple in the Hartford area for the past six years. The couple is raising Mackey's daughter and teenage son, who is paralyzed from being stabbed, on the salary Lauray earns as a dietary aide at a nursing home.

Deborah Rogala, director of the prison resettlement program run by Community Partners in Action in Hartford, said, "We're definitely seeing more women staying in their relationships with women than we used to." The program serves 130 clients annually and includes a support group for women after they've been released from prison.

The apparent increase may reflect changes in the prison population. The U.S. Department of Justice reports that since 1995 the annual rate of growth in the number of female inmates has averaged 5 percent, compared with 3.3 percent for males.

And across the board, black men and women are incarcerated at far higher rates in the U.S. than whites or other minorities. Black women have an incarceration rate of 359 per 100,000, compared with 143 per 100,000 for Hispanic women and 81 per 100,000 for white women.

For black women, the prison rate is highest in the 35-to-39 age group — 993 per 100,000 — roughly the same age at which experts believe some women of color begin to explore their sexuality.

"Most women are likely to be electing to be lesbians in college," said Lisa Bowleg, assistant psychology professor at the University of Rhode Island. "For the poor, it is prison."

Just as college is an escape from family and community pressures and a place of exploration for young people, Bowleg said, prison might be the first time women of color are away from their families and the men in their lives.

Susan Quinlan, executive director of an ex-offender support organization called Families in Crisis, sees the connection. Quinlan believes the numbers of women going to prison now makes it more likely that many of them will stay with their "cellies" — or prison lovers — especially if they are rejected by their families when they are released.

"If they have no one to turn to, they are creating their own families," she said. "Anyone in this business knows (homosexuality in prison is) pretty common. Maybe it crosses over when they are released. You are so disenfranchised. There is no place for you to go. Your extended family doesn't exist as it used to be. I think you have to survive."

Janette Rodriguez estimates she had been in prison in Connecticut and New Jersey at least 15 times on prostitution and drug charges before she entered York Correctional Institution the last time, in 2002, on a larceny charge.

She met her partner, Yvonne Collins, during her last prison sentence. When Rodriguez was released and went to live at YWCA in Hartford, Collins stepped forward to help her rebuild her life.

Abigail Zavala was only 17, a high school dropout with a baby and no job, when she left her mother's house in Hartford in 1990 to live with the baby's father, Felix Alberto Cruz. Cruz was sent to prison twice for beating Zavala.

But she stayed with him for seven years, giving birth to two sons and developing a dark well of disappointment and anger and an enduring drug addiction. Rather than pay the rent and buy food with their welfare checks and food stamps, the couple bought heroin and cocaine and were evicted by the end of their first year together.

"My father used to beat on my mother," said Zavala, now 33, who met her live-in partner, Cynthia Vary, 43, at a methadone clinic. "So I grew up in an environment where you stick with your man no matter what. Spanish people are like that. They cheat. They beat on you. That's just how it is."

Janette Rodriguez, who was pregnant with her first child by the time she was 13, recounts numerous beatings from men and said she was raped repeatedly during her years as a prostitute and drug addict.

"I don't want nothing more to do with men," Rodriguez said. "I felt that men — all they want do is take from you, they take take take and they don't give nothing in return. They beat you up when they want to. They think you're their slave. That's how I feel now, due to the men that have been in my life."

Regina Dyton, who mentors lesbians, gays and transgender teenagers in Connecticut, warned that women selecting female partners after years of abuse from men are likely to end up in abusive relationships with women if they haven't sought help.

"Either you have a healthy relationship or you don't," Dyton said. "There's a false belief that a woman is going to be different. Anyone can find a man or woman if they just want somebody to tell you nice things and to have sex with you. As for the quality of the relationship, some people haven't moved up a notch in terms of the women they've partnered with."

After her last prison sentence in 2001, Claudia Terrell-Smith, 37, moved her children to a larger apartment, divorced her abusive husband and began living with her first female partner.

The relationship was particularly difficult for the couple's teenage sons, who were convicted in 2003 on conspiracy charges after they attacked a mentally retarded man.

They survived a near breakup last year, after they argued over how Zavala was raising her teenage son, Marcus, and Zavala moved in briefly with another woman. During the separation, Zavala got involved in a domestic dispute with another family, and the woman's son, a 14-year-old, was fatally stabbed during an attack at a McDonald's.

Both women say it required a lot of therapy and drug treatment to get to a point where they no longer chased heroin, crack cocaine and prescription drugs, but they got sober together.

The home they have made together is immaculate, like a showplace in a furniture store. They are fastidious about the image they present to the outside world.

Before they invested in gold bands, which they now wear, Vary showed her commitment to Zavala by having her name tattooed on her neck. Months later Zavala did the same.

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