Gay Fathers on the Margins: Race, Class, Marital Status, and Pathway to Parenthood

Abstract

Objective To investigate stratification within gay fatherhood communities. Background As laws and attitudes have become friendlier to queer families in recent decades, gay fathers have experienced increased visibility in and through both media and scholarship. However, this visibility has been distributed unevenly along normative patterns of marital status, race, class, and kinship. Method Participant observation of gay fathers groups was conducted in California, Texas, and Utah over a period of 61 months. Using theoretical sampling of group members, 56 gay fathers also participated in semistructured interviews. Themes were identified and refined through a 3‐stage iterative coding process, consistent with a grounded theory approach. Results Findings suggest that single gay fathers, gay fathers of color, and gay fathers who had children in heterosexual contexts occupy marginalized statuses within the gay fatherhood community. Gay fathers develop distinct mechanisms of resilience to respond to the challenges associated with their marginalization. Conclusion The experiences of gay fathers on the margins highlight the negative consequences of gay fatherhood discourses that reproduce family normativity. The resources available through gay parenting groups simultaneously played a role in gay fathers' well‐being, resilience, and marginalization. Implications Efforts to expand opportunities for gay families should consider coalitions with other marginalized family forms. Gay parents who had children in heterosexual unions should be specifically targeted through gay parenting outreach.

Queering Methodologies to Understand Queer Families

“…Unlike other cultural groups, queer people are defined by individual identities, and the study of queer people historically has been based in the medical and developmental sciences (Richardson & Seidman, ). We observe that family relationships are understood intergenerationally, yet the identity of queer families is often traced to individuals or couples whose personal identities become the basis for a family's queerness (e.g., families may be queer because children come out as LGBTQ [Grafsky, Hickey, Ngyuen, & Wall, ; Jhucin, 2018]; families may be queer because adult relationships that define them comprise those who are LGBTQ [Carroll, ; Farr, Ravvina, & Grotevant, ; Prendergast & MacPhee, ; Rupple et al, 2018]). Thus, our focus has remained on LGBT‐identified people as children or parents raising children, foci that, in the context of the study of families, is itself heteronormative.…”

“…This is compensatory work that highlights inequalities inherent in the lived experience of queer families (for parallels in queer pedagogy, see also Few‐Demo et al, ). Comparatively, research for queer families is concerned with empowerment (Goldberg & Allen, ; Thompson ): situating queer family experiences in broader social context (Oswald, Routon, McGuire, & Holman, ); attending to diversities among queer families according to race, ethnicity, and class, among others (Carroll, ); and challenging conventional assumptions and conceptualizations of queer families. Queering methods for queer families also implores responsibility from scholars to “effectively disseminate our research findings to policymakers and other persons in positions of power” (Goldberg, , pp.…”

“…Scholars have begun to study complexities among queer families and the ways that they are doing gender, sexuality, and family (Oswald et al, 2009). Notable examples include studies of gay fathers (Carroll, 2018;Goldberg, 2012), second-generation queers (Kuvalanka, 2013;Kuvalanka & Goldberg, 2009), parents of transgender or gender-creative children (Johnson & Benson, 2014;Kuvalanka et al, 2018;Kuvalanka, Weiner, & Mahan, 2014), children of parents who are transgender (Dierckx, Mortelmans, Motmans, & T'Sjoen, 2017), and the recent introduction of transfamily theory (McGuire, Kuvalanka, Catalpa, & Toomey, 2016). Queering traditional approaches to research allows prevailing notions of "the family" to be deconstructed and illuminates diversity among queer and all families (Allen & Demo, 1995).…”

White Supremacy and the Web of Family Science: Implications of the Missing Spider

“…In these cases, the term is used to describe a structuring element and social narrative of society and research (Acosta, ; Goldberg, Allen, Black, Frost, & Manley, ; Hagerman, ; Marks, ; Purcell, Oldham, Weiser, & Sharp, ; Rockquemore & Laszloffy, ; Sharp & Weaver, ; Spencer, Mallory, Toews, Stith, & Wood, ). In four articles, White supremacy receives a more nuanced introduction as an organizing theme that has created deleterious effects for the identities and daily lives of racially diverse families (Carroll, ; Karpman, Ruppel & Torres, ; Landor & Barr, ; Willetts, ). These articles, along with many others, contribute to the foundational body of critical scholarship that acknowledges White supremacy as the precursor to the legacy of racism—and other harmful contexts—in the United States.…”

Pathways to Fatherhood: Psychological Well-Being Among Israeli Gay Fathers Through Surrogacy, Gay Fathers Through Previous Heterosexual Relationships, and Heterosexual Fathers

“…In contrast gay fatherhood through surrogacy is associated with contemporary planned gay-fathers families, and is achieved through the use of progressive fertility technologies involving donated eggs, in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy with at least some liberal state policies allowing gay men access to these procedures (e.g., Carone et al, 2018a,b). Extremely scarce are studies that directly compare between different pathways to gay fatherhood (e.g., Carroll, 2018), probably because of difficulties inherent in achieving sufficient sample size for each group to allow quantitative comparisons (Roy et al, 2015). Thus, many studies that focus on gay fatherhood tend to combine different paths under one group of "gay fathers" or to concentrate on a single parenthood path (e.g., Shenkman and Shmotkin, 2016;Carone et al, 2017a,b).…”