Hooper Schultz on Marie-Amélie George’s *Family Matters: Queer Households and the Half-Century Struggle for Legal Recognition*

The landscape for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LBGT) rights has changed dramatically in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the early 1960s, LGBT individuals were criminalized and maligned across the United States as mentally-ill habitual criminals. By 2015, the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Obergefell guaranteed LGB people the right to state-sanctioned marriage. From the surface, that change could be seen as the result of a nationally-focused activism directed towards sweeping change, through winning the right to marriage in federal court. In her new monograph Family Matters, Marie-Amélie George argues this sea-change was in fact incremental and local, the product of years of everyday activism and the efforts of individuals and families seeking to protect their children and solidify their affective ties through legal recognitions of various types. George’s book convincingly recounts many of these successes —and failed strategies — showing that the fight for same-sex marriage was the product of years of activism that changed the American public’s attitudes towards gay and lesbian relationships before it changed the rule of law. George argues that this seemingly miraculous change was the result of a three-pronged strategy for change: state and local law, appeals to conventional lifeways, and the actions of less assuming public figures — teachers, police officers, and social workers rather than judges, legislators, and lawyers. Activists changed the definition of “family” in American minds to include queer people. Ultimately, George argues, they did so by appealing to ideas of “traditional” marriage and conventional family life rather than through the radical critiques of capitalism, family, and American society espoused by the gay liberation activists of the 1970s.

George’s first chapter delineates the various obstacles and assumptions that lay in the path of the queer rights movement in 1960 — showing how much uphill battling the work to secure any legal rights would take — and outlines activists’ early efforts to fight discrimination in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapters two and four move through the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s, tracing the efforts of gay parents to protect and keep their children through custody battles, second-parent adoption, and same-sex birth certificate inclusion. These efforts not only solidified the rights of parentage for queer adults, George argues, but also convinced a growing segment of the American mainstream of lesbian and gay parents’ ability to parent healthy and happy children. The third chapter breaks the focus on parents to show that gay, lesbian, and bisexual activists also focused on a different facet of family life, domestic partnership benefits.

Chapters five and six turn from queer heads of household to look at the other members of their families — the parents and children of LGB people. The LGBT rights movement galvanized around high-profile and horrific violence against gays and lesbians in the later parts of the twentieth century and employed them to show the negative outcomes of anti-LGBT rhetoric and appeal to the hearts and minds of American fathers and mothers. The parents of queer Americans responded to the overlapping AIDS and suicide epidemics with pleas to understand their children as members of ‘conventional’ American families deserving of sympathy and support. George closes her arguments in the final chapter, bringing the text back to its opening claims that marriage equality was the ultimate — and natural — result of the scaffolding that all other inclusive “family life” activism provided. She asserts that the small changes made to American ideas of families — now inclusive of queer people and same-sex households — set the stage for the Supreme Court’s monumental ruling.

George builds her case through an impressively wide-ranging effort using newspapers, ordinances, court cases, and other sources from small and medium archives across the country, as well as oral histories with activists and their families. This breadth also shows the geographic diversity of the movement. Throughout, she crafts an argument that places same-sex marriage on a wider continuum of liberal activism around expanding the definition of the American family. In doing so, she asserts that she is attempting to displace the progressive, triumphalist narrative that ignores radical gay liberationist critiques of the  family and names same-sex marriage as the conclusion of the queer-rights movement. George contends that in their pragmatic and sometimes assimilationist strategies and actions, activists left behind those who did not fit a socially conventional family model, including many Black, brown, and trans members of the LGBT community. Although George does name this problem, she is less successful in meaningfully showing how, as she claims, the gay and lesbian rights activists she studies promoted the rights of all members of the LGBTQ+ community through their emphasis on how gay and lesbian households conformed to convention. Ultimately, this extensively-researched book does present the fight for marriage equality as one part of a longer history of the fight for inclusion of queer families — though one that primarily benefitted white, middle-class lesbians and gays who could, and were willing to, conform.