Available From UC Press

Mignon R. Moore brings to light the family life of a group that has been largely invisible—gay women of color—in a book that challenges long-standing ideas about racial identity, family formation, and motherhood. Drawing from interviews and surveys of one hundred black gay women in New York City, Invisible Families explores the ways that race and class have influenced how these women understand their sexual orientation, find partners, and form families. In particular, the study looks at the ways in which the past experiences of women who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s shape their thinking, and have structured their lives in communities that are not always accepting of their openly gay status. Overturning generalizations about lesbian families derived largely from research focused on white, middle-class feminists, Invisible Families reveals experiences within black American and Caribbean communities as it asks how people with multiple stigmatized identities imagine and construct an individual and collective sense of self.

Mignon R. Moore is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"Mignon Moore’s title says it all: Invisible Families. Scholarship on lesbian and gay issues has been slow to recognize the importance of children and family among those in same-sex relationships and has paid scant attention to racial minorities; nor have students of African American life given much attention to Black lesbians and gay men. We are left with the unfortunate impression, to paraphrase the authors of But Some of Us Are Brave, that all the lesbians and gays are White and all the Blacks are heterosexual. This book stands as a significant corrective to these multiple myopias, offering a nuanced account of the kinds of pressures Black women raising children with female partners encounter, and revealing the creativity and resilience they bring to the struggle." --Ellen Lewin, University of Iowa, author of Gay Fatherhood: Narratives of Family and Citizenship in America.

“Invisible Families shakes up longstanding theoretical conceptualizations of racial identity, family formation, and motherhood, contesting basic assumptions about black families. Tightly conceptualized and highly engaging.” – Kerry Ann Rockquemore, author of Raising Biracial Children