C. Todd White:
Drawing on over twenty years of child welfare experience and extensive interviews with 54 gay and lesbian young people who lived in out-of-home child welfare settings in three North American cities—Los Angles, New York, and Toronto—Gerald Mallon presents narratives of marginalized young people trying to find the “right fit.” Mallon permits the voices of these youths to guide the research, allowing them to tell their own stories and to suggest what is important in their own words. Their experiences help the reader to begin to understand the discrepancies between the myths and misinformation about gay and lesbian adolescents and their realities in the out-of-home child welfare systems in which they live.
The central theme of this work focuses on the multiple experiences of the gay/lesbian adolescent within the out-of-home-care setting win which they lived. What emerges from the weaving of themes and constructing of stories culled from extensive tap recorded interviews is a narrative of marginalized but resilient young people. Young people who struggling to find the “right fit” while living in environments that were, more often than not, hostile to them because of Western society's bias against people who claim they are other than heterosexually oriented. The narratives of ninety-six child welfare professionals, interviewed in all three cities, were also utilized to corroborate the stories of the young people.
Though gay/lesbian adolescents in child welfare settings are a topic about which different people have different opinions, these adolescents themselves have never been thoroughly studied. This book represents a first attempt to do so, to comprehensively examine and investigate the meaning and experiences of these young people.
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