An examination of gay couples before and just after they adopt children. While written in part for an academic audience, the book is nevertheless extremely accessible for lay readers. Gay dads (and prospective gay dads), as well as adoption providers, social workers, and lawyers, among others, will find much of value in it.
Dr. Abbie Goldberg, associate professor of psychology at Clark University in Massachusetts, and senior research fellow at the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, here gives us an examination of gay couples before and just after they adopt children. While written in part for an academic audience, the book is nevertheless extremely accessible for lay readers. Gay dads (and prospective gay dads), as well as adoption providers, social workers, and lawyers, among others, will find much of value in it.
Goldberg’s previous book, Lesbian and Gay Parents and Their Children, took a broader look at LGBT families, and remains the best one-volume overview of research on the topic. In Gay Dads, however, she looks more in depth at a smaller segment of our community.
Goldberg conducted a study of 70 adoptive gay dads (35 couples) from across the country, interviewing them when they were seeking to adopt as well as several months after they had adopted. Over 80 percent were White and well-educated (although over half had adopted transracially). This is just a slice of our full community—but Goldberg recognizes the need for further work on gay dads of color and working-class gay men.
She starts by looking at the decision-making process that led the men to choose parenthood in general and adoption in particular. After that, she explores how adoptive parenthood—private, public, domestic, and international—affected the men’s relationships to each other, their families, friends, and communities.
One major question she tries to answer is whether the men reinforced or resisted the “heteronormative” standard of two parents settling down with kids, often with the mother as a stay-at-home caregiver. Did they challenge the norm with new views of what makes a family, or with new approaches to dividing family and employment responsibilities? Did having non-biological children or bumping into legal obstacles because of their sexual orientation force them to confront these norms, regardless?
Goldberg found that variation among the men—and even within individuals—means we cannot simply split them into two groups. “Some men conformed to heteronormativity in some aspects of their lives and resisted it in others,” she writes. At the same time, even if they didn’t actively resist traditional ideas, “their very existence [as gay adoptive parents] poses a challenge to heteronormativity.”
Recognizing these men and their children as families and understanding how they navigate these issues, she concludes, “can help to transform societal understandings of family, gender, sexuality, race, and love,” and this can benefit both gay and straight couples alike.
