An American Family
by Jon & Michael Galluccio with David Groff
Ho-hum, you think, just another gay-men-wanna-be-dads book, two years after Jesse Green's lyrical account of moving in with a man who'd already adopted, and after Dan Savage's more testy account of sharing fatherhood with his partner. But it happens that An American Family, the story of Jon and Michael Galluccio (written with clear-eyed grace by veteran editor and essayist David Groff) is quite a different take on the daddy tale, and a wholesome, inspirational companion to Green's The Velveteen Father and Savage's The Kid.
The child taken in by two determined New Jersey foster parents is Adam, born prematurely, addicted to alcohol and cocaine and infected with HIV. After nursing him back from the brink of death, the two men, devout churchgoers and close to Michael's grandchild-desperate Italian-American family, try to adopt the baby.
Their battle with state law to adopt the "special needs" child is the core of the book, and is sure to serve as a rallying cry for other gay women and men trying to bring children into their lives. But the adoption's impact on their own lives (Jon, himself adopted, is moved to search for his own birth mother), and how they deal with the hostility both of "family-value" Christians and of their own gay community, softens the political polemic with a sentimental edge which, thank goodness, steers clear of treacle.
-- Richard Labonté
Featured on PlanetOut.com March 26, 2001
After 21 years of bookselling with A Different Light Bookstore in San Francisco, West Hollywood, and New York, Richard Labonté is taking a year off to read books and write about them. He edits the Best Gay Erotica series for Cleis Press and contributes a column on gay books to Contentville.com. He also writes reviews for Q San Francisco and the Lambda Book Report. Richard divides his time between San Francisco and a farm in rural Ontario.