Gay Dads: Transitions to Adoptive Fatherhood by Abbie E. Goldberg

Annette 
                      Ruth Appell

doi:10.1080/10926755.2012.746626

Appell, Annette Ruth

2013-01-01 00:00:00

Adoption Quarterly, 16:81–83, 2013 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1092-6755 print / 1544-452X online DOI: 10.1080/10926755.2012.746626 BOOK REVIEW Abbie E. Goldberg. Gay Dads: Transitions to Adoptive Fatherhood.New York, NY: New York University Press, 2012, 235 pp., US $22.00 (paperback), ISBN: 9780814732243. Gay Dads is an original, engaging, and informative qualitative study of gay male couple adoptions. Part of a larger investigation of the transition to adoptive parenthood of lesbian, gay, and heterosexual couples, this book examines the pre-adoption decision making and experiences of gay male couples, the social and legal channels they encountered and navigated to become parents, the roles each man assumed within the family, and the responses of their extended families and communities to the adoptions. Goldberg analyzes these adoptions through the theoretical framework of heteronormativity, positing that both gay and adoptive families deviate from the normative family comprising one mother, one father, and their biological offspring. Throughout the book, Goldberg draws parallels between adoption and being gay, thus queering adoption even as the study illustrates how conventional these gay fathers are in hewing toward the traditional family by falling into one of two fairly binary but porous roles as breadwinner or caregiver. The

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