Normal queers: Straight parents respond to their children's "coming out"

This article explores how normative understandings of gender, family, and s exuality provide the foundation for stigma, an avenue out of deviance, and the means by which stigma is perpetuated. Using participant-observation and interview data from a support group for families of lesbian women and gay men, I examine the destigmatizing identity work with which straight parents responded to their children's lesbian and gay identities. The parents' rel iance on conventional understandings of gender, sexuality, and parenting in voked and affirmed heteronormative conceptions of normalcy. This redrawing - and not fundamentally challenging - of the lines defining sexual normalcy left intact systemic logics supporting heterosexist sexual hierarchies.