In this rich, often surprising portrait of the everyday world of lesbian and gay relationships, Christopher Carrington captures the experiences of creating and maintaining a home and a “chosen” family. Observing lesbians and gay men as they go about their daily routines, Carrington unveils the complex, frequently hidden, and sometimes artful ways that gay people make a family and home for themselves.

Based on a careful analysis of interviews and field evidence, No Place Like Home demonstrates how gay and lesbian couples attempt to strike a balance between work and family obligations, and how they must also struggle against forces undermining their relationships. Carrington skillfully addresses the conflicts that surround domestic tasks and shows how gay and lesbian couples sometimes hold unspoken or unrealistic expectations about household and family life. Carrington brings such expectations into the open, and in the process he challenges many stereotypes about gay and lesbian family life, from the myth of gay family affluence to the notion that such relationships are beacons of equality. He argues that family life really varies by class, gender, race, occupation, and neighborhood.

Finally, with one eye on the day-to-day domestic lives of diverse gay and lesbian households and the other eye on the public policy options now emerging to address lesbian and gay family life, Carrington makes the case for expanding domestic partnership policies instead of attaining legal marriage as the ideal solution for achieving happiness, equity, and longevity for lesbian and gay families.In this sociological study of “lesbigay” domestic partnership, Christopher Carrington explores the expanded views of family that inform the lives of the 50 established Bay Area couples included in his study. Drawing from in-depth interviews, as well as weeklong field observations of eight households, he develops arguments on housework, caregiving, division of labor, “kinship work” on outside friendships and biolegal families, and the tricky concepts of fairness and egalitarianism within partnerships. Although far from a random sample of American gay men and lesbians, his subjects range widely in age, ethnicity, class background, and income level, although only five households with children were included. Couples were interviewed separately, revealing amusing disparities in their accounts of domestic life. The jargon and sociological hairsplitting make for some unintentional humor, as in the chapter on “feeding work” (known to the rest of us as shopping and cooking): “Planning meals, learning about foodstuffs and techniques, considering the preferences and emotions of significant others, and overseeing nutritional strategies frame the essential yet invisible precursor work to the actual daily process of preparing a meal.” Let’s eat! Not the perkiest book on gay and lesbian life, No Place Like Home nevertheless covers unfamiliar territory with intelligence and insight. –Regina Marler

Rating: (out of 3 reviews)

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