Patricia Cooks was born on January 20, 1944, in Houston, Texas, to Marie Louise (née Anderson) and Ernest Nathaniel Cooks. Marie Louise worked as a domestic worker and Ernest retreaded tires. She was the youngest of four daughters. The family lived first in the Third Ward and then moved to the Sunnyside neighborhood when Parker was four years old.\n', '

She left home at 17 and moved to Los Angeles, California, to attend college. She earned an undergraduate degree at Los Angeles City College and a graduate degree at San Francisco State College. She married playwright Ed Bullins in 1962. Parker and Bullins separated after four years. She later said that her ex-husband was physically violent and that she was "scared to death". She married Robert F. Parker, writer and publisher, but decided that the "idea of marriage... wasn\'t working" for her. She began to identify as a lesbian in the late 1960s, and, in a 1975 interview with Anita Cornwell stated: "after my first relationship with a woman, I knew where I was going."\n', '

Parker worked from 1978 to 1988 as the executive director of the Oakland Feminist Women\'s Health Center. Parker was involved in the Black Panther Movement, in 1979 she toured with the "Varied Voices of Black Women", a group of poets and musicians that included Linda Tillery, Mary Watkins & Gwen Avery. She founded the Black Women\'s Revolutionary Council in 1980, and she also contributed to the formation of the Women\'s Press Collective, as well as being involved in wide-ranging activism in gay and lesbian organizing.\n', '

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