ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief legal and social background, summarizing historical and developments in gay rights, as they relate specifically to family and family law. It discusses the analytical section of the chapter with a discussion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) parents' and advocates' views of law - in general and in the custody context - and its relationship to social change and the family. The chapter explores of the differences between LGBT families' visions of themselves and how they are defined and portrayed in law. It deals with a synthesis of the analytical issues, arguing that the variations in LGBT parents' legal consciousness, rights-based aspirations, and life circumstances revealed reflect a need for nuanced constitutive analyses of gay family rights, and a return to the feminist jurisprudence concept of the "dilemma of difference".
