在20世纪70年代，美国几个州的社会工作者将同性恋青少年和同性恋养父母安置在一起，采取了不连续的激进主义行为。
From left to right: Robert, Don Ward, and a young man described by Ward in the early 70s as the love of his life
In the 1960s, Don Ward was a child living in Seattle. Every December, his mother would hand him the Sears catalogue and ask him to pick out Christmas presents. By the time his parents filed for divorce, the directory had become a haven for their quarrels. Eventually, instead of looking at toys, he turned to the men's underwear area, for reasons he didn't quite understand and was interested in the human body. Soon, he began to notice his father's occasional tirades about homosexuals. "I think all gays should be lined up and shot," Ward remembers his father saying.
"It was a kind of lonely childhood," Ward told me. After the divorce, he only saw his parents in the same room twice. The first time was in court, where they fought for custody of Ward and his two brothers. (The mom on the ward won.) The second was at a youth service agency, and after one of his acquaintances revealed Ward's identity to his parents, they collectively sent him to Washington State because they could not tolerate a gay son. Ward was not yet 15 years old.
It was 1971, and Washington State didn't know what to do with an openly gay teenager. The Department of Social and Health Services tried to send Ward home to an all-male group run by Pentecostals dedicated to driving out the "gay demon" in him. Ward didn't get along well with his roommate. The government placed him in a devout couple who gave him a basement with only three walls; The parents say the lack of privacy helps control his homosexual behavior. Ward left the house six months later and got into a fight with his adoptive mother over chores. He was then placed next to a childless married couple who looked perfect and accepted his sexuality. Ward told me that after a few months, they started abusing him.
At Christmas, Ward would call his father. Every time Ward's father recognized his son's voice, he hung up the phone. Ward spoke to his mother from time to time and began visiting the Seattle Counseling Service, which was founded to "help young gay people solve their personal, medical, and social problems." There, Ward meets Randy, a volunteer counselor who hates gender traditions— Ward remembers that Randy paired red lipstick with combat boots. (To protect his identity, Randy is a pseudonym because he never confessed to his family.) Randy has a good friend named Robert, who is a more conservative gay man, in his 20s, and a pastor. Robert asked me not to reveal his last name, and he had good relations with many local church leaders until he came out in the spring of 1972. "This situation is enough to block the mouth of a maggot," a member of a church group told a local newspaper. Robert moved to the Metropolitan Community Church, a network of gay-friendly churches founded in 1968, where he became a prominent figure in Seattle's gay rights movement.
In May 1973, Ward, Robert, and 100 activists surrounded the Seattle police chief's home. The Seattle Police Department has been arresting homosexuals for months. "Homosexual disgust? You're right, that's right! One of the protest signs read. Wearing a bright pink buttoned shirt and 6-inch thick-soled heels, Ward hid at one point, gasped for breath, and applied some purple lipstick. When he looked up, he saw the news camera pointed at him. Ward told me, "There are 32 of my interludes on the evening news of the three main channels." "It was an unexpected appearance I made in a social setting," he said. He became the only openly gay student at his high school. After a string of death threats, he transferred after his junior year.
Later that year, his third foster family began abusing him. Whenever the family's situation deteriorated, his state-licensed social worker— a woman named Marion — helped Ward get back on. He told her about attending the protest with Robert, and she arranged to meet Robert in the cafeteria across the street from the hospital church. She asked Robert what he would think if the state of Washington approved him to be Ward's adoptive parent. It turns out that the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services has been quietly placing gay teens in gay families for several years. Many teens, like Ward, were kicked out of their homes by foster families one after another. Founded in 1970, the Seattle Youth Advocacy Group successfully placed about 15 queer teens with queer adoptive parents. Youth advocacy is privately run, but all of its internships are state-approved and paid for by government subsidies. The group advertises in gay newspapers. Some of them include a poem that reads, "Whether you're heterosexual or gay, / You just have to start, / An empty room, an honest heart."
Although few people realized this at the time, other states also began pairing queer children with queer adoptive parents. A year before Marion licensed Robert, a gay social worker in Chicago named David Sindette conducted a similar experiment. Later, at a conference, Sindt said he had approved three gay foster families, including a man and a woman, who were married. The couple adopted a child, which, according to Sindt, was "almost intolerable in a traditional foster home because he often had transvestites and some emotional problems." The couple told him, "We've raised enough heterosexual children." ”
Around the same time, the monroe county social service department in western New York contacted the editor of the empty closet. It was a hand-ordered newsletter published by the gay liberation front's local branch. The Gay Liberation Front is a decentralized activist organization formed after the Stonewall riots. The ad explained that someone needed to adopt a 15-year-old transgender girl — whom the ad called "transvestite" — named Vera. The advertisement said, "I think the best place to settle in is in gay families." Vera was sent in and out of several foster families who were less supportive of her. "People can't accept the fact that she's a transgender child," Karen Hagberg, a graduate student at the University of Rochester at the time and a contributor to "The Empty Closet," told me. Haggberg lives with her partner, Kate Duroux, and a group of gay friends in an old Victorian house. She and Dulu decide to take Vera in. "It seems impossible to say it because what they do is so groundbreaking," Haggberg told me. She and Duoux received official adoptive parent licenses and subsidies for food, clothing and medical expenses provided by the county. The forms they fill out assume that they are married couples; Hagberg and Durux must assign gender roles. (At one point, Haggberg crossed out "husband" and "wife" and wrote "lover.") At the time, New York State still passed a sodomy law that criminalized homosexuality.
In the fall of 1973, with the help of the National Gay Task Force, a newly formed gay rights group in Manhattan, New York began placing gay children with gay parents. The group's head of community services, who has begun receiving panic calls from agencies representing gay runaways, has founded Coördinating with foster care agencies in Delaware and Connecticut. More than a year after other working group members and officials in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., a twenty-six-year-old gay social worker named Michael Weltmann ran away from home on behalf of a lesbian couple seeking to be an adoptive parent for a gay boy. Wiltman later explained to the Philadelphia Gay News that the boy "wanted to live with her, and our office agreed." In the years that followed, Wiltman registered two other gay adoptive parents: a man who met a gay teenager while working at a psychiatric hospital, and a woman who had raised other adopted children for the department before becoming gay.
It is almost impossible to determine the number of these locations in this era. At least 35 shows were held in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. There are at least 3 in Illinois and at least 16 in Washington. I've found references elsewhere in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. The story of these placements is not nationally coördination and has never been told in its entirety. Some of the reports appeared in a handful of newspapers; In his 2013 book Radical Relations, scholar Daniel Winunwe Rivers briefly noted that in Illinois and New Jersey, there are "tacit projects" that pair gay youth with gay couples. This book tells the history of gay families. Social workers are working to address the absolute number of children in the foster care system; Gay and transgender children, often rejected by potential adoptive parents, are particularly difficult to place. Finding gay adoptive parents seems like a natural solution. But these social workers, in some inadvertent ways, are creating something radical: queer families backed by the government in an era of severe discrimination. "My social worker risked losing his job to help me," Ward told me. "I care a lot about that woman." I tried to find the social worker Marion, but I couldn't find her. It's likely that she died a few years after she made a huge difference in Ward's life. People like her helped write an important chapter in the story of gay families and their national recognition.
Robert took better care of Ward than ward's previous adoptive parents, but that time didn't get easier. Ward told me that Robert was "not prepared or prepared to be a parent." "Robert left for days at a time to attend meetings and interviews; He forbade Ward from bringing his partner home and didn't allow him to drink. Although Ward is 17 years old, he is rarely allowed to stay home without supervision. But Robert was on Ward's side most of the time. Ward had been wearing makeup while he was in school — mostly eye shadow — and Robert received a call from an administrator threatening to give a suspended sentence if Ward did not change his dress. The administrator said, "This has caused chaos in our school." Robert replied, "Listen, you're either going to give it all up or I'm going to make a mess at your school because I'm going to take 20 drag queens out on patrol outside." The school never called again.
Ward's other parent was Robert's friend Randy. "We used to joke that he was Don's mother and I was Don's father," Robert told me. Ward said: "Randy didn't actually live with us, but it was possible to live together as well. When Randy doesn't work at an counseling center or volunteer, he makes it his mission to introduce Ward to the gay scene in Seattle. Ward calls him "Randy Mom," and together they participate in events like the "gay skateboarding" that the University of Washington hosts weekly. Randy also supports Ward's love of theater. In his senior year, Ward played Ebenezer in "A Christmas Carol" and a role in the spring musical "No, No, Nanette." When a spring show came to an end, another student pushed Ward. "Someone was at the backstage door, and I think they came looking for you," the student said. Ward walked out and saw a bearded man, dressed in a 1920s evening dress, wearing a mesh turban, painted with bright red lipstick: lustful. Ward teleportation.
Haggberg told me that Karen Haggberg and Kate Tru are also struggling to be good parents. Like Robert, When she wasn't working, Haggberg often took part in protests and demonstrations. Tru has a son to take care of. Both women are cisgender and have only a basic understanding of what transgender means. But they are open to Vera's identity. She "opened my eyes and gave me a glimpse of the whole gay community," Haggberg said. Vera's friends came and wandered around the old Victorian house. Haggberg recalls coming home one day to find Vera hosting a tea party in the living room. "She's happy with these peers," Haggberg said.
In early 1974, the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services proposed a policy to ban adoptive parents who had "serious problems with their sexual orientation." The Action Alliance, an organization dedicated to obtaining state-funded childcare and justice for "poor, minority and working women," mobilized a response. That spring, 500 people attended a public feedback conference in Olympia, and most of those who spoke out that day opposed the policy. Mary Morrison, the head of the coalition, called the new rules "an assault on gays and women." A small number of gay activists, including Ward and Robert, also spoke. They were booed and booed when a couple announced their support for banning gay adoptive parents, insisting that "there is no room for gay and homosexual foster care programs" or "their dirty and sinful lifestyles." A few months later, the state announced it would remove the phrase "there are serious problems with their gender identity" from the proposal.
This change is considered unusual. Until then, rejecting gay adoptive parents was an implicit policy — there was no formal rule — because it simply assumed that homosexuals could not be suitable parents. In a 1974 paper, gay psychotherapist Michael Shernoff attributed the blank policy around gay adoptive parents to a lack of imagination.
Five years later, in June 1979, The New York Times reported on an openly gay pastor from Catskill, New York, named John Kuiper, who had adopted a 13-year-old boy. Kuiper, like Robert, is affiliated with the Metropolitan Community Church. After several psychological evaluations and reports from a social worker, the family court judge approved the adoption. "The pastor offered a wonderful family and the boy loved his adoptive father and wanted to be with him. In our world, who knows? The judge said. Historian Daniel Rivers described Kuiper as "the first homosexual in the United States to publicly adopt a child."
That fall, a graduate student completed a social work internship in Wiltman's office, and an assistant supervisor confided in her that he occasionally licensed gay adoptive parents. The inspector did not know that the student's wife was a reporter for the Trenton newspaper. "She came home and said to her husband, 'What I'm going to tell you is a very interesting story,'" Anne Burns, who was in charge of the new Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services press at the time, told me. "She told him about it and he said, 'It's not just an interesting story, it's news.'" ”
In November, Bernice Manshel, director of youth and family services, received a call from a reporter for the trenton times. For much of the past decade, police departments have secretly paired gay youth with gay adoptive parents and asked for comment, the reporter said. "I was very surprised," Mansher told me. "I told him I had to think about the situation with coöperating because, frankly, I had to learn more about it. Mansher called her deputy, and the two began to investigate. Little by little, things are coming out to the world. Since the early 1970s, social workers in New Jersey have built a loose network of older gay and transgender adopted children — usually 13 to 18 — in gay adoptive families. Although many people in the department knew about it, they kept it a secret.
On Nov. 26, the Trenton newspaper headlined "New Jersey officials look for gay adoptive parents for gay teens." A day later, two members of the State Legislature's Health and Welfare Committee convened a meeting. A member of the committee said he was "shocked" by the matter; Another warned that such a plan "could lead to dangerous situations." A month after the Trenton article was published, Mansher's office distributed a policy document to the state legislature in an attempt to downplay the importance of resettlement. Ensuring the care of gay foster children has long been a "particularly sensitive issue" for the agency, and that "in rare cases" the agency places "gay adolescents with sexual experiences" with gay adoptive parents, the document noted. Not all gay and transgender children are automatically placed in gay families; This is only done when "such adolescents cannot adapt to their own families or do not have a family." In some cases, when it comes to children who are "very difficult and difficult to place," a gay adoptive parent often works with the state government. The department noted that in at least one case, a gay adoptive parent has formally applied to adopt a gay adopted son.
Richard T. O'Grady, who was a regional director in the Division of Youth and Family Services at the time, had known about the placements for months before the Trenton times heard about the resettlements, which he had heard about in monthly meetings with social workers. I asked O'Grady if he was worried about losing his job because of a foster care program. "Oh, of course," he said. "Absolutely. He added, "If I felt that way about a lot of things, I would never be in the industry." "You have to have courage. He relayed the case of another social worker who, after 17 years in the department, would rather resign than give a confidential record of a child to the state police. "We feel good about trying to do the right thing," he said.
By 1982, New York was the first state to implement a non-discriminatory adoption policy for gay parents. It's a breakthrough brought about by the unsung activism of social workers over the past decade. For the first time, social service agencies have recognized that homosexuals can act as parents; This ultimately encouraged these institutions to develop new, inclusive policies for gay families. Marie-amélie George, an assistant professor of law at Wake Forest University who considered adoption services in a 2016 paper, told me, "Children of gay parents have become a fighting cry, and it does start with adoptive parents." "This is the first time that gays and lesbians have openly started a family."
Shortly before Ward was 18, Robert went to California to serve at the Metropolitan Community Church in Los Angeles, where Ward was busy finding a place to live. The two lost contact. Ward later moved to Texas and began writing thrillers under another name, but he never stopped talking to Randy. In 1991, Randy drove to Olympia, Washington, to Ward's wedding. When Ward first saw Randy, he ran over and hugged him. Ward said, "I always greet Randy with a hug." "Randy is my family."
Randy died of cancer in August 2019. Later, Robert and Ward each recalled when they came together about fifty years ago. Robert now runs a libertarian think tank and distances himself from his years of radicalism. But he said he had always felt that something special happened when Marion agreed to let him be an adoptive parent. Ward told me that after many years of living with Robert, he had a brief period of reconciliation with his father. Although his father never accepted that the ward was gay, later in the era, the two began to talk again, and ward began to understand that his father's anger stemmed from his own difficulties in childhood, when he had to work instead of going to school, by his stepfather, an alcoholic. Ward said: "I have never wavered in the feeling of unfairness in life. But, after these conversations, he said, "I don't hate my father for that anymore." His father started attending some of Ward's musicals. Ward recalled that around 1987, his father drove across the state to see him star in Oliver! 》(oliver!) As Ward looked into the audience, his father in the powder-blue coat smiled at him.
Later, Ward contracted lung disease and had trouble breathing. On our phone, he would sometimes stop and catch his breath. According to his sister, in December 2020, he was rushed to the emergency room after developing symptoms of covid-19 and died shortly after.
Vera only lived with Haggberg and Durux for six months, until she was 16 years old, when she could legally live independently. The old Victorian house was in disarray, but Vera found her own space inside. Hagberg said: "I think she would have regarded that foster experience as her best." Shortly after Vera moved out, one of her friends in Rochester, John Duval, was accused of murdering a businessman from Philadelphia. Vera disputed a key piece of evidence from prosecution, a confession Duval gave while in police custody. At the trial, she testified that she had heard that the police had beaten Dival. Regardless, the jury convicted Duval. Haagberg last received a letter from Vera a few years later, when Vera wrote her a letter from a New York prison. But in January 2000, when Duval was approved for another trial, Vera appeared in front of the media. She again told the court that it was the police who forced Dival to confess guilt. Prosecutors tried to use her identity to discredit her, asking if she was dressed as a woman at the police station that night. Vera replied, "I dress up as a woman every day because I'm a woman. Duval was acquitted. Four years later, Vera died in Florida.
In a way, building foster homes like Ward or Haggberg is radical even by today's standards. Even now, only 25 states maintain laws or policies that explicitly prohibit adoption and foster care agencies from discriminating against parents based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and there are still some agencies — including some that receive government funding — that refuse to house children with gay parents. (Five other states maintain protections for sexual behavior rather than gender identity.) Barack Obama had barred institutions that did so from receiving federal funding toward the end of his term, but Donald Trump rolled back that policy just before his term ended in January. Meanwhile, Catholic Social Services sued Philadelphia after the city announced it would no longer introduce children to the agency because it refused to license homosexuals as adoptive parents. The lawsuit went to the Supreme Court and heard the case last November. Catholic social services argue that it is a victim of religious discrimination. Currey Cook, a senior legal counsel for foster care cases at Lambda Legal, told me that giving public money to an organization that refuses to work with gay adoptive parents "condones discrimination." He noted that gay children are more than twice as likely as other children to end up in foster care. What's more, LGBT groups are seven times more likely to act as adoptive parents or adoptive parents than heterosexual groups. "To say LGBTs are second-class citizens, to say they are not suitable parents, is harmful to all children, including LGBT teens," Cook said. The Supreme Court is expected to rule later this year.