Book description
Many Americans hold fast to the notion that gay men and women, more
often than not, have been ostracized from disapproving families.
Not in This Family challenges this myth and shows how kinship
ties have been an animating force in gay culture, politics, and
consciousness throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.
Historian Heather Murray gives voice to gays and their parents
through an extensive use of introspective writings, particularly
personal correspondence and diaries, as well as through published
memoirs, fiction, poetry, song lyrics, movies, and visual and print
media. Starting in the late 1940s and 1950s, Not in This Family
covers the entire postwar period, including the gay liberation and
lesbian feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the establishment
of PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), and
the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Ending her story with an
examination of contemporary coming-out rituals, Murray shows how the
personal that was once private became political and, finally, public.
In exploring the intimate, reciprocal relationship of gay
children and their parents, Not in This Family also chronicles
larger cultural shifts in privacy, discretion and public revelation,
and the very purpose of family relations. Murray shows that private
bedrooms and consumer culture, social movements and psychological
fashions, all had a part to play in transforming the modern family.
"Not in This Family is wonderfully fresh and
innovative. Murray manages to train her eye on children and parents
both, and is especially adept at examining their exchanges, longings
for understanding, and mutual frustrations. This generational angle
also allows Murray to perceive larger transformations in norms of
privacy, disclosure, and intimacy. Most impressive is her ability to
show how new kinds of relationships between parents and children
emerged as cultural politics shifted: from the 'gay banishment' motif
of the early postwar period, to the liberationist confrontations of
the 1970s, to the 'ritualized' parental empathy of the 1980s, to the
coming-out narrative of the 1990s. On top of all that, the book is
lucidly written and a pleasure to read."-Sarah Igo, author of
The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a
Mass Public
Heather Murray teaches history at the University of Ottawa.
