We Don’t Exactly Get the Welcome Wagon by Gerald P. Mallon

Drawing on over twenty years of child welfare experience and extensive interviews conducted with 54 gay and lesbian young people who lived in out-of-home care child welfare settings in three North American cites -- Los Angeles, New York, and Toronto, Gerald Mallon presents narratives of marginalized young people struggling to find the 'right fit'.Mallon permits the voices of these young people to guide the research, allowing them to tell their own stories and to suggest what is meaningful in their own words. Their experiences help the reader to begin to understand the discrepancies between the myths and misinformation about 'gay and lesbian adolescents' and their realities in the out-of-home child welfare systems in which they live.The book, which represents the first attempt to comprehensively examine and investigate this topic, makes solid recommendations to child welfare practitioners and policy-makers about how they can provide competent practice for gay and lesbian adolescents in their care and offers a methods chapter which can be useful in classroom instruction.