ABSTRACT
If you were part of a gay or lesbian stepfamily in the 1980s and wanted to locate information on families like your own, you had one of two choices. First, you could comb through the heterosexual stepfamily literature and discover that there were indeed similarities between the challenges and strengths heterosexual stepfamily members faced and those you experienced. Second, you could review the scant material on families in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) research and nd little, if any, evidence about dierent family structures. If you or your family sought counseling, you would no doubt face a similar situation-neither the training nor the materials for therapists provided them with a sucient background to understand and treat LGBT families, especially the ways in which stepfamily status and same-sex gender composition create unique issues. Worse, most comparisons between stepfamilies and nuclear families, and certainly almost all references to same-sex families, were based on decit comparison models, to the detriment of all same-sex and nonnuclear families (Crosbie-Burnett & Helmbrecht, 1993; Pasley, Ihinger-Tallman, & Lofquist, 1994). Heterosexist assumptions generally went unchallenged. Sexual orientation was assumed to be the problem, and therapists failed to consider the impact of homophobia on LGBT families (Baptiste, 1987; Crosbie-Burnett & Helmbrecht, 1993).
