The weekly adventures of gay couple Mitchell and Cameron and their baby on the popular television program Modern Family highlight a common contemporary media image of gay parenting: wealthy, urban, and White gay men raising an adopted child. An analysis of broadcast media by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (2007) found that this demographic dominates media images of the entire lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. Within scholarly research, Biblarz and Stacey (2010) observe that contemporary studies of parenting by same-sex couples have focused largely on lesbian couples who are raising adopted children or children that they conceived via artificial insemination or some form of reproductive technology.
– Greg*
*See Brett’s posting below, “For Same-Sex Couples, a Tale of Two Paths to Parenting” for a Huffington Post article by the same author on the same material–less science-y, but lacks the visuals.