Kath Weston draws upon fieldwork and interviews conducted in the San Francisco Bay area to explore the ways in which gay men and lesbians are constructing their own notions of kinship by drawing on the symbolism of love, friendship and biology. Conventional views of family have depicted gays and lesbians as exiles from the realm of kinship. In recent decades, however, gay men and lesbians have increasingly portrayed themselves as people who seek not only to maintain ties with blood or adoptive relatives but also to establish families of their own.

Why LGBTQ adults don’t end troubled ties with parents and why (perhaps) they should Families We Keep is a surprising look at the life-long bonds between LGBTQ adults and their parents. Alongside the importance of “chosen families” in the queer community, Rin Reczek and Emma Bosley-Smith found that very few LGBTQ people choose to become estranged from their parents, even if those parent refuse to support their gender identity, sexuality, or both. Drawing on interviews with over seventy-five LGBTQ people and their parents, Reczek and Bosley-Smith explore the powerful ties that bind families together, for better or worse. They show us why many feel obliged to maintain even troubled—and sometimes outright toxic—relationships with their parents. They argue that this relationship persists because what we think of as the “natural” and inevitable connection between parents and adult children is actually created and sustained by the sociocultural power of compulsory kinship. After revealing what holds even the most troubled intergenerational ties together, Families We Keep gives us permission to break free of those family bonds that are not in our best interests. Reczek and Bosley-Smith challenge our deep-rooted conviction that family—and specifically, our relationships with our parents—should be maintained at any cost. Families We Keep shines a light on the shifting importance of family in America, and how LGBTQ people navigate its complexities as adults.

As Our Families, Our Values turns upside-down the widely accepted notion that only heterosexual people are entitled to get married, have sex, and rear children, you gain insight into personal struggles and affirmations that testify to the spirituality, procreativity, and wholesomeness of the diverse relationships of the Lavender community. You will also learn about various ongoing efforts to give religious pride to the various configurations of gay relationships, families, and values and the disruption of popular interpretations of the Scriptures that have been used to justify the oppression of sexual minorities. This book will both inform you and delight you as it reminds you that same-sex unions bring much cause for celebration and that religion and homosexuality are not mutually exclusive.

This study brings together two areas of investigation: relationships of gay and lesbian individuals with their biological families, and lesbian and gay relationships in the context of research on alternative forms of family.

This comprehensive reader brings a social science perspective to an area hitherto dominated by the humanities. Through it, students will be able to follow the story of how sociology has come to engage with gay and lesbian issues from the 1950s to the present, from the earliest research on the underground worlds of gay men to the emergence of queer theory in the 1990s. Bringing together classic readings and the best work of younger scholars from all parts of the English-speaking world, this reader will be an invaluable resource for courses at undergraduate and graduate level in all areas of the sociology of sexuality and gender. Separate sections cover: * theoretical foundations * identity and community making * institutions and social change * challenges for the future. Each section begins with an introduction giving readers a brief guide to the readings in that section, contextualises them and relates them to one another and the book ends with an afterword by Ken Plummer summing up the present state of play and looking forward to the future.

The Material Family is a bold new reading of the family, focusing on “new” or “post-nuclear,” “flexible” family forms such as gay family, divorce-extended family, and transnational family. Reading across a range of texts from high theory to literature and popular films, the book crosses disciplinary boundaries to offer a highly innovative and dynamic approach to changes in gender and other family relations. Unlike most books in the fields of cultural and family studies, The Material Family provides an historical and materialist argument connecting the changes within family to underlying shifts in material, labor relations in global capitalism. The “post-nuclear” family is not only an affective space, Torrant argues, but one whose affects are themselves fundamentally shaped by class. The Material Family is a must-read for anyone who wants to venture beyond the surfaces of family life to the deeper-lying relations that have made the family and its new forms among the most important spaces of social life. Its readers will include not only students and researchers in the fields of education, cultural theory and cultural studies, women’s studies, sociology, and anthropology, but also general readers interested in understanding contemporary families and their struggles.

The public furor over issues of same sex marriages, gay rights, pornography, and single-parent families has erupted with a passion not seen since the 1960s. This book gathers seventeen eminent philosophers and legal scholars who offer commentary on sexuality (including sexual behavior, sexual orientation, and the role of pornography in shaping sexuality), on the family (including both same-sex and single-parent families), and on the proper role of law in these areas. The essayists are all fiercely independent thinkers and offer the reader a range of bold and thought-provoking proposals. Susan Moller Okin argues, for instance, that gender ought to be done away with--that differences in biological sex ought to have "no more social relevance than one's eye color or the length of one's toes"--and she urges that we look to same-sex couples as a model for households and families in a gender-free society. And Cass Sunstein suggests that the Supreme Court case Loving vs. Virginia (which overthrew the ban on interracial marriages in Virginia) might be a precedent for overturning laws that bar same-sex marriage: just as Loving overturned miscegenation laws because they were at the service of white supremacy, Sunstein shows, the laws against same-sex marriages and homosexuality are at the service of male supremacy, and might also be overturned. Of vital importance to anyone interested in sexuality, homosexuality, gender, feminism, and the family. Sex, Preference, and the Family both clarifies the current debate and points the way toward a less divisive future.