The author details his successful efforts to adopt a Vietnamese boy as a single gay man and gives advice to other prospective gay adopters. He discusses the psychological barriers to the decision, summarizes the steps of the adoption process, explores the financial costs, and looks at the current legal climate for gay adoption. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
Inspiring portraits of gay men and their families from all across America. An evolution has quietly been occurring in the world of parenting. Recent surveys reveal that millions of children have found loving homes either by being born to, or adopted by, gay men. This book is a celebration of these remarkable new families. Gay Dads includes twenty-five personal accounts from men describing their unique journeys to fatherhood and the struggles and successes they have experienced as they raise their children. This is the first book to provide such an expansive exploration of this extraordinary new family unit. With beautiful black-and-white photographs of each of the families, Gay Dads is a moving tribute to familial love.
Men are often thought to have less interest in parenting than women, and gay men are generally assumed to prefer pleasure over responsibility. The toxic combination of these two stereotypical views has led to a lack of serious attention being paid to the experiences of gay fathers. But the truth is that more and more gay men are setting out to become parents and succeeding—and Gay Fatherhood aims to tell their stories. Ellen Lewin takes as her focus people who undertake the difficult process of becoming fathers as gay men, rather than having become fathers while married to women. These men face unique challenges in their quest for fatherhood, negotiating specific bureaucratic and financial conditions as they pursue adoption or surrogacy and juggling questions about their future child’s race, age, sex, and health. Gay Fatherhood chronicles the lives of these men, exploring how they cope with political attacks from both the "family values" right and the "radical queer" left—while also shedding light on the evolving meanings of family in twenty-first-century America.
Dads is a journey into gay fatherhood in the United States. More than 40 families are portrayed by the Belgian photographer Bart Heynen. A very diverse group of dads who have one thing in common; they are gay and they have children. Ever since 2015, when same-sex marriage became legal in all states, we witness a baby boom in the gay community. From New York City to Utah all these fathers are at the very beginning of a new era for gay men. Dads sheds a light on the daily lives of these families.
When gay couples become parents, they face a host of questions and issues that their straight counterparts may never have to consider. How important is it for each partner to have a biological tie to their child? How will they become parents: will they pursue surrogacy, or will they adopt? Will both partners legally be able to adopt their child? Will they have to hide their relationship to speed up the adoption process? Will one partner be the primary breadwinner? And how will their lives change, now that the presence of a child has made their relationship visible to the rest of the world? In Gay Dads: Transitions to Adoptive Fatherhood, Abbie E. Goldberg examines the ways in which gay fathers approach and negotiate parenthood when they adopt. Drawing on empirical data from her in-depth interviews with 70 gay men, Goldberg analyzes how gay dads interact with competing ideals of fatherhood and masculinity, alternately pioneering and accommodating heteronormative “parenthood culture.” The first study of gay men's transitions to fatherhood, this work will appeal to a wide range of readers, from those in the social sciences to social work to legal studies, as well as to gay-adoptive parent families themselves.
While the topic of gay marriage and families continues to be popular in the media, few scholarly works focus on gay men with children. Based on ten years of fieldwork among gay families living in the rural, suburban, and urban area of the eastern United States, Gay Fathers, Their Children, and the Making of Kinship presents a beautifully written and meticulously argued ethnography of gay men and the families they have formed. In a culture that places a premium on biology as the founding event of paternity, Aaron Goodfellow poses the question: Can the signing of legal contracts and the public performances of care replace biological birth as the singular event marking the creation of fathers? Beginning with a comprehensive review of the relevant literature in this field, four chapters—each presenting a particular picture of paternity—explore a range of issues, such as interracial adoption, surrogacy, the importance of physical resemblance in familial relationships, single parenthood, delinquency, and the ways in which the state may come to define the norms of health. The author deftly illustrates how fatherhood for gay men draws on established biological, theological, and legal images of the family often thought oppressive to the emergence of queer forms of social life. Chosen with care and described with great sensitivity, each carefully researched case examines gay fatherhood through life narratives. Painstakingly theorized, Gay Fathers, Their Children, and the Making of Kinship contends that gay families are one of the most important areas to which social scientists might turn in order to understand how law, popular culture, and biology are simultaneously made manifest and interrogated in everyday life. By focusing specifically on gay fathers, Goodfellow produces an anthropological account of how paternity, sexuality, and masculinity are leveraged in relations of care between gay fathers and their children.
If you are thinking of becoming a gay dad ─ or if you are already a gay dad ─ this book is for you! Are you ready to have kids? More and more gay men are turning to adoption and surrogacy to start their own families. An estimated two million American LBGTQ people would like to adopt and an estimated 65,000 adopted children are living with a gay parent. In 2016, The Chicago Tribune reported that 10 to 20 percent of donor eggs went to gay men expanding their families via surrogacy, and in many places the numbers were up 50 percent from the previous five years. Gay parenting: Having a kid is like coming out all over again, on a daily basis, especial if you have an infant. Was coming out stressful for you? It’s about to get more intense and you will have a child watching your every move and listening to your every word. If you stutter or pause, they may pick up on your discomfort and could start to feel like something is wrong about their family unit. The Ultimate Guide For Gay Dads is jam packed with parenting tips and advice to help you build confidence and become the awesome gay dad you were meant to be! How Is This Parenting Guide Different From Others? Unlike other parenting books that have whole chapters focusing on things specifically related to mothers (such as how to get the perfect latch when breastfeeding), this parenting book replaces those sections with things relevant to gay dads. It covers topics like how to find LGBT friendly pediatricians, how to find LGBT friendly schools, how to childproof your home with style, how to answer awkward and prying questions about your family from strangers, examples for what two-dad families can do on Mother’s Day, and much more. The book also includes parenting tips and advice from pediatricians, school educators, lawyers, and other same-sex parents. Top LGBT parenting expert: Bestselling author Eric Rosswood covers every aspect of fatherhood for gay men in this essential guide to growing your family in the post-DOMA era. He is a major influencer on social media with over 100,000 followers on Twitter alone, as well as thousands on other platforms. Exploring LGBTQ issues: Rosswood is an in-demand authority and commentator on LGBTQ issues, including civil rights, parenting, marriage and politics. The author has been featured in major media including The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, CBS News, The Huffington Post, Elite Daily, Yahoo! News, AOL News, NY Daily News, IB Times, and regional LGBTQ press.
A leading expert on the family, Judith Stacey is known for her provocative research on mainstream issues. Finding herself impatient with increasingly calcified positions taken in the interminable wars over same-sex marriage, divorce, fatherlessness, marital fidelity, and the like, she struck out to profile unfamiliar cultures of contemporary love, marriage, and family values from around the world. Built on bracing original research that spans gay men’s intimacies and parenting in this country to plural and non-marital forms of family in South Africa and China,Unhitcheddecouples the taken for granted relationships between love, marriage, and parenthood. Countering the one-size-fits-all vision of family values, Stacey offers readers a lively, in-person introduction to these less familiar varieties of intimacy and family and to the social, political, and economic conditions that buttress and batter them. Through compelling stories of real families navigating inescapable personal and political trade-offs between desire and domesticity, the book undermines popular convictions about family, gender, and sexuality held on the left, right, and center. Taking on prejudices of both conservatives and feminists, Unhitched poses a powerful empirical challenge to the belief that the nuclear family--whether straight or gay--is the single, best way to meet our needs for intimacy and care. Stacey calls on citizens and policy-makers to make their peace with the fact that family diversity is here to stay.
Explores a group caught betwen the homosexual and heterosexualworlds This greatly expanded edition of Gay Fathers contains a wealth ofnew real-life stories and up-to-date information that celebratesthe power of gay fatherhood. Inspiring, definitive, scientificallyresearched, and experientially based, this thoroughly updatedvolume offers the most current data and concrete suggestions fordealing with the myriad and complex issues of gay parenting. GayFathers is the definitive resource for the more than one milliongay fathers and their families and loved ones living in the UnitedStates and Canada.
Chosen by Town & Country as one of the most anticipated books of the year | Named "An LGBTQ Book That'll Change the Literary Landscape in 2020" by O: The Oprah Magazine In this poignant and urgent love letter to his son, award-winning Broadway, TV and film producer Richie Jackson reflects on his experiences as a gay man in America and the progress and setbacks of the LGBTQ community over the last 50 years. “My son is kind, responsible, and hardworking. He is ready for college. He is not ready to be a gay man living in America." When Jackson's son born through surrogacy came out to him at age 15, the successful producer, now in his 50s, was compelled to reflect on his experiences and share his wisdom on life for LGBTQ Americans over the past half-century. Gay Like Me is a celebration of gay identity and parenting, and a powerful warning for his son, other gay men and the world. Jackson looks back at his own journey as a gay man coming of age through decades of political and cultural turmoil. Jackson's son lives in a seemingly more liberated America, and Jackson beautifully lays out how far we’ve come since Stonewall -- the increased visibility of gay people in society, the legal right to marry, and the existence of a drug to prevent HIV. But bigotry is on the rise, ignited by a president who has declared war on the gay community and fanned the flames of homophobia. A newly constituted Supreme Court with a conservative tilt is poised to overturn equality laws and set the clock back decades. Being gay is a gift, Jackson writes, but with their gains in jeopardy, the gay community must not be complacent. As Ta-Nehisi Coates awakened us to the continued pervasiveness of racism in America in Between the World and Me, Jackson’s rallying cry in Gay Like Me is an eye-opening indictment to straight-lash in America. This book is an intimate, personal exploration of our uncertain times and most troubling questions and profound concerns about issues as fundamental as dignity, equality, and justice. Gay Like Me is a blueprint for our time that bridges the knowledge gap of what it’s like to be gay in America. This is a cultural manifesto that will stand the test of time. Angry, proud, fierce, tender, it is a powerful letter of love from a father to a son that holds lasting insight for us all.
