Lookg to bee an LGBT foster re parent or to adopt gay youth? You n change a child’s life by choosg this adoptn path. Learn more here.
Contents:
HOW YOU CAN BEE GAY FOSTER PARENTS OR ADOPTIVE PARENTS
* fostering gay parents *
for Foster ParentsThis factsheet was wrten for foster parents to help them learn about LGBTQ (lbian, gay, bisexual, transgenr, and qutng) youth the child welfare system, the unique risks they face, and the important role that foster parents n play rcg those risks. In the fall of 1973, New York began placg queer children wh queer parents wh the aid of the Natnal Gay Task Force, a new gay-rights anizatn based Manhattan.
The group’s head of muny servic, who had begun receivg panicked lls om agenci reprentg gay naways, started ördatg wh foster-re agenci Delaware and Connecticut. A ltle more than a year later, a twenty-six-year-old gay social worker named Michael Weltmann took up the e on behalf of a lbian uple who were seekg to serve as foster parents for a gay boy who had n away om home.
GAY PARENTS TO BE
The boy “wanted to live wh her, and our office approved , ” Weltmann later explaed to the Philalphia Gay News. In the followg years, Weltmann registered two other queer foster parents: a man who had beiend a gay teen-ager while workg at a psychiatric hospal and a woman who had raised other foster kids for the partment before g out as lbian.
Parts of emerged a handful of newspapers; “Radil Relatns, ” a history of the queer fay by the scholar Daniel Wunwe Rivers, published 2013, briefly not the existence of “tac programs” to match gay youth wh gay upl Illois and New Jersey. Social workers were wrtlg wh the sheer number of kids the foster system; gay and trans kids, who were often rejected by prospective foster parents, were pecially difficult to place. Fdg gay foster parents jt seemed like a natural solutn.