Twenty-five stories about family structures that don’t fit the nuclear model—and more importantly, never did, even for families that insisted they did. The 1995 publication date matters. This was the 1990s, before marriage equality, before adoption law reforms, before representation in mainstream culture. Lesbian and gay parents were building lives without legal protection, without templates, mostly invisible.
The editors refused narrowness. Donor insemination. Coming out to your kids. Custody battles with homophobic courts. Godparents. Chosen family. Blended households that required constant negotiation. The stories don’t romanticize any of it. They show the work, the friction, the ways people actually lived.
And deliberately: Jewish families, Black families, working-class families. The anthology pushed back against the default narrative that treated queer experience as white and affluent by default. Queerness doesn’t homogenize poverty or Blackness or Jewishness away. The editors understood that.
Three decades later the collection functions as both historical document and argument. An argument that there were always multiple architectures for home. That the nuclear family was never the only way people organized themselves—and queer families weren’t inventing something entirely new so much as making visible what had always existed in the margins. Extended families. Chosen kin. Nontraditional arrangements that worked because people committed to making them work.
The real intervention was showing that this wasn’t a crisis requiring solutions. It was just how some families actually were, and had always been.
Details
| ISBN: 9780934678681 |
| Subtitle: Parenting And Children In The Lesbian And Gay Communities : A Collection Of Short Fiction |
| Genre: Parenting & Families; Anthology – Fiction |
| Subject(s): Children Of Gay Parents/ Fiction; Fiction / Anthologies (multiple Authors); Fiction / General; Gays/ Family Relationships/ Fiction; Lesbian Mothers/ Fiction |
| Publication Date: 1995-05-01 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: New Victoria Publishers |
| Language: English |
| Format: Hardcover |
| Pages: 212 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: This is an essential historical anthology of LGBTQ+ fiction (1995) focused on the ‘Gayby Boom’ and the diverse structures of queer families. |
| Book_ID: 105953 |