Abstract
Peter McGraith was born in 1964 to a working class family in Lanarkshire, Scotland, three years before Ackerley’s death and the partial decriminalization of homosexual acts in England and Wales. That legal change was not extended to Scotland until 1981, by which time Peter had come out to his family and was about to move to Glasgow where he worked as a freelance designer, journalist and activist. This period saw a new stridency, visibility, and sense of urgency amongst many gay men, which together with broader social and cultural changes, made for very different intersections of queer and family life than Ives and Ackerley had experienced. I’ll return to these broader shifts and contexts in the final part of this book which focuses more squarely on the post-1970s period. Here I look at Peter’s experiences of sustaining dual identities of ‘gay man’ and ‘parent’ after tracking the battle lines which formed in the 1970s and 1980s over their apparent disjunction: ‘It seems’, said Professor James Walters in an interview in Family Coordinator in 1978, that the term “gay father” is a contradiction’.1 This apparent mismatch had of course been touted by late nineteenth century sexologists, but it was not the subject of broader debate until these post-liberationist years when gay fathers began to become more visible2 — initially in relation to formerly married men who had come out and thereafter in relation to surrogacy, adoption and co-parenting arrangements.
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Notes
Bruce Voeller and James Walters, ‘Gay Fathers’, The Family Coordinator 27, no. 2 (1978): 149–157.
Susanne Bösche, Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1983).
John Osborne, ‘The Diary of a Somebody’, Spectator (29 November 1986): 3. For further discussion of Osborne’s comments in relation to John Lahr’s editing of the Orton’s diaries see: Matt Cook, ‘Orton in the Archives’, History Workshop Journal 66 (2008): 163–180.
Ibid. See also David Bradley, ‘Homosexuality and Child Custody in English Law’, International Journal of Law Policy Family 1, no. 2 (1987): 155–205.
D. Rivers, ‘“In the Best Interests of the Child”: Lesbian and Gay Parenting Custody Cases, 1967–1985’, Journal of Social History 43, no. 4 (Summer 2010); Weeks, The World We Have Won, 185; Sarah Beresford, ‘“Get Over Your (Legal) Self”: A Brief History of Lesbians, Motherhood and Law’, Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law 30, no. 2 (June 2008): 95–106.
H. Reece, ‘Subverting the Stigmatisation Argument’, Journal of Law and Society 23, no. 4 (1996): 484–505
H. Reece, ‘The Paramountcy Principle Consensus or Construct?’, Current Legal Problems 49, no. 1 (1996): 267–304.
‘Outrage as Gays Adopt Girl’, Sun, 6 April 1992; on ongoing concern and debate about what constitutes family see especially: J. McCandless and S. Sheldon, ‘The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (2008) and the Tenacity of the Sexual Family Form’, The Modern Law Review 73, no. 2 (2010): 175.
See, for example: Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991)
Christopher Carrington, No Place Like Home: Relationships and Family Life Among Lesbians and Gay Men (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)
R. Goss and A.A.S. Strongheart, eds., Our Families, Our Values: Snapshots of Queer Kinship (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1997).
Daniel Monk, ‘Re G (Children) (Residence: Same-Sex Partner) — Commentary’, in Feminist Judgments: From Theory to Practice, ed. R. Hunter, C. McGlynn, and E. Rackley (Durham: Hart, 2010).
Stephen Hicks, ‘Lesbian and Gay Foster Care and Adoption: a Brief UK History’, Adoption & Fostering Journal 29, no. 3 (2005): 42–56.
Weeks, The World We Have Won, 65; see also: Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003)
Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2000).
Simon Duncan and Darren Smith, Individuation Versus the Geography of ‘New’ Families (London: South Bank University, June 2006), http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/ahs/downloads/families/familieswp19.pdf.
Weeks, The World We Have Won, 8; see also: Jane Lewis, The End of Marriage?: Individualism and Intimate Relations (Cheltenham: Elgar, 2001)
Fiona Williams, Rethinking Families (London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2004)
Carol Smart, ‘Changing Landscapes of Family Life: Rethinking Divorce’, Social Policy and Society 3, no. 4 (2004): 401–408.
Weeks, The World We Have Won, 64; Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, 1800–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), chap. 12 & 15.
Lisa Duggan, ‘The New Heteronormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neo-Liberalism’, in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
Bruce Bawer, A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (London: Poseidon Press, 1993).
On this point see; Penny Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (London: Pandora, 1995).
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© 2014 Matt Cook
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Cook, M. (2014). Epilogue. In: Queer Domesticities. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316073_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316073_7
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