Parenthood is one of the most universal and highly valued experiences of American adults. However, lesbian and gay adults in the United States are much less likely than heterosexual adults to be parents. Our goal was to explore the reasons why this is the case. Using nationally representative data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), we studied parenting intentions, desires, a...

Elana Dykewomon's 1974 novel, Riverfinger Women, was among the first lesbian books with a "happy ending." Her seven books of fiction and poetry include the Lambda Award winner Beyond the Pale (now an audio and e-book) and Lambda nominee, Risk. She was an editor of the lesbian-feminist journal, Sinister Wisdom, for eight years. Her literary work foregrounds the lesbian heroic as integral to wome...

There is little understanding in Australia of the special issues faced by gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in end-of-life care and advance care planning. This exploratory study aimed to achieve an initial understanding of these issues to inform the development of a larger study involving gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender service users. Consultations were carried out with 19 se...

Assisted conception involving donor insemination challenges cultural idioms of parenthood and family; there is now a growing body of work exploring how women and couples negotiate becoming a family in this way. But sperm donation also raises questions on the more intimate levels of sex, sexuality and sexual bodies, and these have received little sustained attention in the literature. Lesbian co...

Gary Gates The weekly adventures of gay couple Mitchell and Cameron and their baby on the popular television program Modern Family highlight a common contemporary media image of gay parenting: wealthy, urban, and White gay men raising an adopted child. An analysis of broadcast media by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (2007) found that this demographic dominates media images of t...

Using data from 30 gay male, 45 lesbian, and 51 heterosexual couples who had recently adopted a child, the current study sought to (1) create and validate a measure that differentiated between perception of societal stigma about adoption and internalization of adoption stigma; (2) examine whether gender, sexual orientation, preferential adoption status, and transracial adoption status were asso...

In two studies, we examined the relationship between resistance to heteronormativity and political engagement among heterosexuals. In the first, we examined the relationship between awareness of heterosexual privilege, resistance to heteronormativity, and engagement in lesbian and gay rights activism among contemporary heterosexual college students. As expected, women scored higher than men on ...