cover image Reinventing the Family: The Emerging Story of Lesbian and Gay Parents

Reinventing the Family: The Emerging Story of Lesbian and Gay Parents

Laura Benkov. Crown Publishers, $22 (289pp) ISBN 978-0-517-58743-0

Gracefully written and lucidly argued, Benkov's study is the first sustained analysis of the emerging phenomenon of lesbian and gay parents and of the considerable obstacles they must surmount in reinventing the family. Benkov, a Boston psychologist, draws upon case studies that dramatize the ingrained antipathy of the larger society toward homosexuals that pervades the psychiatric community, courts and social service system. At the same time, her case studies refute the detrimental assumptions hampering wider acceptance of gay parenting: children raised by homosexuals do not have significantly greater problems growing up than do those reared by heterosexuals, nor are they any more likely to be gay--though, as Benkov asks, what would be wrong with that? Author tour. (Aug.)