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

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12300
• Published date: 01 February 2018
• Author: Megan Carroll
• Date: 01 February 2018

M C University of Southern California

Gay Fathers on the Margins: Race, Class, Marital

Status, and Pathway to Parenthood

Objective: To investigate stratication 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 scholar-

ship. 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 theoret-

ical sampling of group members, 56 gay fathers

also participated in semistructured interviews.

Themes were identied and rened 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 mecha-

nisms of resilience to respond to the challenges

associated with their marginalization.

Conclusion: The experiences of gay fathers

on the margins highlight the negative con-

sequences of gay fatherhood discourses that

reproduce family normativity. The resources

available through gay parenting groups

Department of Sociology,University of Southern California,

851 Downey Way HSH 314, Los Angeles, CA 90089-1059

(megan.carroll@usc.edu).

Key Words: Family diversity, fathers, LGBT issues, LGBT

relationships, race and ethnicity (minority issues), single–

parent families.

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 specically targeted through gay parenting

outreach.

More than 20% of gay male couples currently are

raising children in the United States (Williams

Institute, 2016), and an expanding body of liter-

ature has documented the challenges gay fathers

experience. Becoming parents through adoption

or surrogacy can be emotionally,nancially, and

logistically arduous (Gamson, 2015; Goldberg,

2012; Lewin, 2009), and heteronormativity can

shape gay fathers’ interactions in public spaces

(Vinjamuri, 2015). Researchers also have docu-

mented gay fathers’ ght for relationship recog-

nition (Dana, 2011; Prendergast & MacPhee,

2018; Ocobock, 2013) and their interactions

with social institutions, such as their children’s

schools and health care providers (Goldberg,

2012; Mallon, 2004). These studies have con-

tributed to the increased visibility of gay fathers,

which extends to mainstream representations in

movies and television showslike Modern Family

and The New Normal.

At the same time visibility of gay fathers

is expanding, scholarly and public discourses

about gay fatherhood oftentimes assume their

families resemble the standard North American

family ideal (i.e., SNAF; Bernstein & Reimann,

2001; Smith, 1993). Gay fathers are most

commonly depicted as White, middle-class,

104 Family Relations 67 (February 2018): 104–117

DOI:10.1111/fare.12300