Judith Leitch

To date, relatively little attention has been paid to the integration of married same-sex couples into their new families, perhaps because of how recent legal recognition of same-sex marriages is. While countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada were among the first to legalize same-sex marriage (2001, 2003, and 2005 respectively), recognition in the US at the federal level did not come until ten years later. However, two years after the US legalization of same-sex marriage, a poll of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) adults found that 10.2%, or 1.1 million adults, described themselves as married (Jones, 2017; Romero, 2017). As such, in-law relationships are an increasingly common experience for LGBT people and thus deserve scholarly attention. This chapter builds on preliminary research by presenting eight cases of gay men and lesbians (three of which are new since our 2019 publication [Greif, Leitch, & Woolley, 2019]) who describe their in-law relationships and their effects on their own marital relationship.