It is, as they say, no accident that one of the best-organized, best-funded, and most active gay rights groups is PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). Family – a vexed site for most – is even more vexed when sexual lives seem at odds with familial inclusion and love. For so many sexual minorities, home has been both the proverbial haven in a heartless world and, perhaps more often, a site of the most painful rejection and isolation. Unlike other minorities, of course, most gays are born into the very house of difference, finding those “like themselves” only outside the parameters of family or – more recently – creating “families of choice” that creatively upend the narrow strictures of nuclear-family life and provide sustenance and pleasure in a still discriminatory world.

Heather Murray, in her ambitious new book Not in This Family, attempts to simultaneously capture generational angst, historical shifts, and political transformations that construct the lives of gays and their (heterosexual) parents. Using a wide range of archives and sources – from diaries and personal letters to popular and gay journalism and an array of cultural forms – Murray demonstrates that the simple stories of rejecting families and expelled youth (or what she refers to as “gay banishment”) belie a more complicated history of familial interactions in which the desire to be known, to be “accepted,” to be embraced within that idealized rubric never let up. Her historical narrative takes us first through the postwar period where the desire to reconstitute home after the horrors of war – combined with active and structural homophobia – produced a strategy largely based on “discretion” where keeping one's place in the family trumped self-disclosure. But, indeed, as Murray argues, self-disclosure as the dominant trope of gay identity and the necessary component of a (gay) life well lived was a much later phenomenon, emerging in some senses with the liberationist movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s but only coming into full force at the end of the century, when liberationist (and political) gay pride gets morphed into the internalized and personalized coming-out story.

While certainly a readable narrative with some wonderful and quirky sources, Not in This Family suffers from both a lack of focus and a robust underlying theoretical rubric. Perhaps it is the result of so many wide-ranging locations but I would have liked a little adjudication here. For example, how did the changing discourses of family life come into contestation with a growing gay movement that demanded not only recognition but rights? How did the critiques of the nuclear family from both leftists and feminists get pushed aside by a gay movement increasingly focussed on “tolerance” and “acceptance”? Throughout the book, instead of a coherent and theoretically informed analysis, the author relies on poorly supported and rather thin vectors of commonality that are often interesting but need substantiation and a more complex analytic to make them meaningful. So, for example, writing about the 1970s, she finds “an intriguing synchronicity … between the kinds of conceptual art flourishing in the art world and the intentionality and rationality that gays, especially lesbians, ascribed to intimate relationships” (89). This could be an interesting road to take but the author throws it out there – unadorned and undeveloped – so that the reader is unclear how significant this particular trope might be in her overall analysis. Indeed, the book is laden with such idiosyncratic asides and, conversely, curiously empty when it comes to new and innovative insights concerning the relationship between gays and their families of origin. Further, there are some striking absences. Aside from the chapter on lesbian feminism, which does reckon with the particularity of the mother–daughter relationship, this book is astoundingly mute on the question of gender. I think, primarily, this is a result of the seeming absence of a rigorous theoretical framework and the overabundance of underdeveloped “niblets” of historical arcana, but it seems particularly egregious – in a book about gays and family – to not centrally reckon with how (changing) ideologies of gendered identities structured both family life and conceptions of the public/private divide. There are some (well-worn at this point) notes about the rise of pop psychological canards concerning smothering mothers sissifying their sons (e.g. Phillip Wylie et al.) but little in the way of a sustained engagement with the difference gender makes in the kinds of interaction available to gays and their parents. In the chapter on the AIDS crisis this absence is even more curious, as it is by now common knowledge that maternal caretaking combined with the commitment by lesbians to the AIDS struggle spoke volumes about gendered ideologies of care, family, and community. And this chapter, like others, contains interesting notes but adds little to what we already know: that it both “humanized” gay men to their parents through the universality of suffering and caretaking and presented new challenges in the often sudden confrontation with a heretofore hidden identity. The discussion on the development of PFLAG and earlier parents' activist organizations similarly is intriguing but underdeveloped – it is unclear where the author stands on some of the critical issues raised through parental activism (e.g. issues around the politics of “tolerance” and “acceptance,” the debates around immutability, the relationship of parents' groups to non-family-based gay rights struggles, etc.). These and other critical questions remain largely unaddressed in this intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying book.