Historical Gay Adoption Debate: The Lost History of Gay Adult Adoption

Whether you’re aware of it or not the historical gay adoption debate has been raging for years as LGBT advocates and individuals attempted to secure legal rights to property, family, security and most importantly; one another. In 1977, 27-year-old Walter Naegle was planning to go to San Francisco. He was living in New York City, which he found awful, when, while waiting for a light to change in Times Square, he saw an unusually handsome reason to stay: Bayard Rustin.

Rustin, who once said, “I believe in social dislocation and creative trouble,” organized the antisegregation Journey of Reconciliation protest, a sort of early Freedom Ride, in 1947. He was in charge of logistics for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and he worked to integrate New York City schools. “I’m not much dazzled by celebrity,” Naegle said recently, “but I had known who he was since I was in high school.”

Naegle and Rustin were attracted to each other immediately — they kissed for the first time that day — and became a couple thereafter. During their 10 years together, marriage was not discussed; it simply wasn’t imaginable. (The term “gay marriage”’— where ‘gay’ doesn’t mean ‘lighthearted’— would not appear in this paper until 1989.) Had Rustin lived long enough, however — he died in 1987 — he would have definitely been game. “Oh, yes,” Naegle said, “he was much older than I was, and his generation of people were into that kind of thing.”

Gay Adoption Debate: Shrewd Legal Play – “The adoption proved a shrewd decision!”, Naegle, as next of kin, had visiting privileges when Rustin was hospitalized.

In 1982, when Rustin wanted to ensure that Naegle — who, at 37 years his junior, would surely outlive him — would inherit his estate, he availed himself of the least-bad option: adoption. There had been an article in The Advocate about a couple in the Midwest who unsuccessfully tried to adopt each other in order to forge a legal bond. “Maybe we should try that,” Rustin said he suggested.

Naegle recalled the adoption process: First, his biological mother had to legally disown him. Then a social worker was dispatched to the Rustin-Naegle home in Manhattan to determine if it was fit for a child. “She was apprised of the situation and knew exactly what was happening,” Naegle told me. “Her concern, of course, was that he wasn’t some dotty old man that I was trying to take advantage of, and that I wasn’t some naive young kid that was being preyed upon by an older man.”

The adoption proved a shrewd decision. Naegle, as next of kin, had visiting privileges when Rustin was hospitalized for a perforated appendix and peritonitis and was eventually executor of the will. Despite the oddness of the arrangement, it was, all things considered, legally seamless.

Now that marriage equality is an American right, the gay adoption debate seems a little silly to be including partner adoptions, which are hard to fathom, an artifact of an earlier societal paradigm that, in a remarkably short period of time, has come to seem inconceivable. “People today really have a hard time remembering, let alone feeling, what it was like to be an outlaw — to be truly strangers to the law — shoved out of every legal system, and then persecuted,” said Evan Wolfson, founder of Freedom to Marry, an organization that, for more than a decade, has played a large role in the passage of same-sex marriage legislation. It is easy to forget that an American state would not decriminalize sodomy until 1961; that as late as 1966, gays and lesbians could not legally buy a drink in a New York City bar; that even after the Stonewall riots, in 1969, the American Psychiatric Association considered homosexuality a mental illness. As recently as 2000, civil unions were still not widely available and domestic partnerships didn’t offer federal protections.

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by Elon Green, October 19, 2015