Here’s a fascinating piece of LGBTQ parenting history that I wanted to share again for LGBTQ History Month: Did you know that in the 1970s, some social workers were quietly placing queer youth with queer foster parents, in defiance of state laws?
Quiet Acts of Radicalism
In “The Untold Story of Queer Foster Families” a 2021 piece in the New Yorker, Michael Waters looked back to the 1970s to show how social workers in several states matched queer youth in need of homes with queer adults willing to foster them. They were “were creating something radical: state-supported queer families in an era of intense discrimination.” Some of these were solo efforts; others were done with the help of the National Gay Task Force (now the National LGBTQ Task Force), but all were done “without national coordination,” asserted Waters.
When New York became the first state to enact a policy of nondiscrimination toward LGB adoptive parents in 1982, he said, “It was a breakthrough made possible by the quiet acts of radicalism performed by social workers in the previous decade. Social-services agencies had acknowledged for the first time that queer people could serve as parents; this ultimately encouraged the agencies to write new, inclusive policies regarding queer families.”
Some of this story has been told before, in academic papers and books, but it’s a part of our history that many of us queer parents don’t know, or don’t know in full. Another important piece, too, was the movement in the early 1970s to help lesbian mothers involved in custody battles with former husbands. This was also roughly the same time that two-woman couples and single women increasingly began to start their families together through pregnancy, a movement that led to the “gayby boom” of the 1980s and beyond.
WNYC’s The Takeaway also did a follow-up piece (with both audio and a text transcript), speaking with Waters, LGBTQ historian Marie-Amélie George, and Karen Hagberg, an activist and foster parent. One of the most interesting points from that interview was George’s observation that the common (and unfounded) fear that gay and lesbian parents would “make” their kids gay or lesbian was irrelevant here since the kids in question were already gay or lesbian. The “harm” (for those who saw it that way) was already done. Therefore, although placing queer youth with queer parents may have been seen as radical, she said, “The real shift and radical move was when gay and lesbian parents started fostering young children who didn’t self-identify in any particular way. At that point, a lot of social science research had come out showing that parental sexual orientation had no impact on children’s future sexual orientation, so social workers were much more comfortable with that.”
Looking Into the Future
Waters’s article also mentioned the then-pending 2021 U.S. Supreme Court to determine whether taxpayer-funded foster care and adoption agencies—and possibly any provider of government-contracted services—could cite religious beliefs as a reason to discriminate against LGBTQ people and others. That case, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, was decided a few months after the article came out, and found in favor of a faith-based foster care agency that refused to contract with same-sex parents. It was a narrow loss that one LGBTQ legal expert still called “a huge victory” since it was not the sweeping decision in favor of religious exemptions in child services that it could have been. At the current moment in 2026, though, as the Supreme Court considers a case to determine whether religious preschools can take public money but still discriminate against LGBTQ children and those with LGBTQ parents, the whole issue of religious exemptions seems unfortunately open for renewed debate.
Yet the history of out LGBTQ parents goes back to just after World War II, and there are decades of proof (and dozens of studies) that show our children are doing just as well as anyone else’s (and even better on some metrics). Same-sex couples are also seven times as likely as different-sex ones to be raising an adopted or foster child, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute.
In 2026, however, 16 states still permit state-licensed child welfare agencies to cite religious beliefs as a reason to discriminate against LGBTQ children and families, according to the Movement Advancement Project. At the same time, queer youth are overrepresented in foster care, and only 30 states protect against discrimination in foster care on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity; another four have protections for sexual orientation alone.
The creation of queer foster families was radical in the 1970s and remained radical in 2021 when he wrote, Waters said, and I don’t think that’s changed, even as that radicality lives in partnership with many families’ mundane, everyday lives. Those two strands have always intertwined in the lives of LGBTQ families, I feel. May we all find ways to continue the radicalism, quiet or loud, that will help us attain even more inclusion and equality in the future.