Radical relations: A history of lesbian and gay parents and their children in the United States, 1945–2003

Radical Relations: A History of Lesbian and Gay Parents and Their Children in the United States, 1945 to 2003 charts the changing experiences of lesbian and gay parents in the United States from the Second World War to the present and chronicles their struggle for recognition in American society. It argues that by forging new kinds of family and childrearing relations, gay and lesbian parents successfully challenged legal and cultural frameworks that defined the family as heterosexual and paved the way for the contemporary focus on family and domestic rights in lesbian and gay political movements.

Based on archival research in New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, complemented by over a hundred interviews, Radical Relations traces five decades of gay and lesbian family history. The first chapter looks at the pressure on lesbians and gay men in the pre liberation era to marry and have children, the double lives many lesbian and gay parents lived, and the constant threat of estrangement from their children faced by those who left their marriages. Chapter Two shows that this period of intense fear and repression nonetheless held the promise of changes to come. It looks at lesbian mothers raising children in butch/femme and bohemian communities and at the roots of lesbian and gay parental activism in the homophile groups of the era.

Chapter Three examines the court battles that erupted in the gay and lesbian liberation era as lesbian mothers and gay fathers left previous heterosexual relationships and faced difficult custody battles. Chapters Four and Five look at lesbian mother activist groups and gay father groups of the 1970s, and chapter six explores the experiences of lesbian mothers and their children growing up in lesbian feminist communities of the 1970s and 1980s.

Chapter Seven looks at the expansion of lesbian and gay parental relationships in the 1980s and 1990s facilitated by insemination, adoption and surrogacy and the vibrant growth in LGBT family rights groups. It shows how lesbian and gay parenting came to be a central focus of the modern LGBT civil rights movement by the 1990s.