Sexual Orientation and Family Development: Introduction

his special section focuses on articles that T challenge longstanding assumptions about the relationship between sexual orientation and gender as they develop within families. Because traditional gender roles are based on a heterosexual orientation, homosexuality disrupts not only expectations about the love object, but also expectations about gender itself. Such disruptions, no matter when they emerge in the development of an individual, inevitably influence all members of the family. Homosexuality disrupts theory and culture in different ways. The existence of healthy gay and lesbian individuals, and their capacity to create families with healthy children, necessitates a hndamental reexamination of our theories about development. As the papers in this section illustrate, we do not currently have theories that adequately explain nonpathological homosexual development and its impact on the individual and family. The time has come to revise the axioms of developmental theory.