Coming Out of the Closet: Opening Agencies to Gay and Lesbian Adoptive Parents Scott D. Ryan, Sue Pearlmutter, and Victor Groza Cay men and lesbians often encounter barriers when they pursue adoption. Adoption workers are expected to make decisions regarding child placement using the best interest standard. However, this decision-making model does not adequately consider intrapersonal, interpersonal, and organizational factors that affect the use of the standard. This article examines the best interest standard and makes practice recommendations to increase the accessibility of adoptions for gay and lesbian applicants. Key words: adoption; child welfare organizations; gay men and lesbians; parents E mpirical and clinical knowledge of adoption policy and practice has increased greatly in recent years. However, a crisis remains in this arena, as many more children are available for adoption than there are families to adopt them. As a result of the 1997 enactment of the Adoption and Safe Families Act (P.L. 105-89), which re- quires more expedient termination of birth parent rights than had previously existed, the number of children available for adoption continues to grow. The Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Re- porting System (AFCARS), established as part of the act, estimated that as of September 30, 2001, 126,000 children were waiting to be adopted. These were children for whom the public child welfare agency had a goal of adoption, for whom parental rights had been terminated, or both. During the fiscal year ending September 30, 2001, AFCARS reported that an estimated 46,668 chil- dren were adopted through the public child wel- fare system (AFCARS, 2002). Defining Suitable Adoptive Families Child welfare agencies most often seek adoptive families from among traditional heterosexual two-parent or single-parent families. In doing this, they follow state adoption statutes, many dating to the mid-1900s that favor those families (Appell, 2001; HoUinger, 1999), even though a great deal of evidence exists that family constella- tions have changed significantly in the past three decades. Fields and Casper (cited in the U.S. Cen- sus Bureau, 2001) reported that the traditional two-parent nuclear family (that is, married house- holds with one or more children under the age of 18) constituted 24 percent of all U.S. households in 2000—down from 40 percent in 1970. Al- though the total number of households in the United States is estimated to increase 15.5 percent from 1995 to 2010, the number of traditional families is projected to decline 6.4 percent from 24.6 million to 23.1 million. Such families would then constitute only 20.1 percent of total house- holds (U.S. Census Bureau, 1996). Creater flexibility in the conceptualization and interpretation of the word "family" (Ricketts & Achtenberg, 1989) would benefit children await- ing adoptive families. The effect of excluding nontraditional placement resources through an overly narrow definition of family is that some children will languish longer in foster care with- out permanence. Brooks and colleagues (1999) have discussed recent federal legislation intended to increase the pool of multiethnic foster and CCC Code: 0037-8046/04 $3.00 O 2004 National Association of Social Workers, Inc. 85