Please join us for a book talk with Lane Igoudin. This talk will include an interview with Craig Loftin, queer historian and the author of Letters to ONE, who has agreed to interview me to discuss my experience from the historical perspective. Curator Alexis Bard Johnson will provide a response following the talk before conversation opens to the audience.
Public adoption is a long and uncertain process with some of society’s most
vulnerable people at the heart of it. Every adult and child involved in the system has a unique story to tell. In his candid and poignant memoir, A Family, Maybe (Ooligan Press, February 2024), Lane Igoudin details his and his husband Jonathan’s fraught path through the Los Angeles County’s foster-to-adopt process. A Family, Maybe offers an unprecedented look into the adoption process as it affects the lives of everyone involved, from the children taken into the system, to the suffering birth parents, to the couples hoping desperately to start a family of their own.
In the fall of 2005, after years of preparation, planning, and waiting for a chance to raise a family, Jon and Lane were given the opportunity to foster an infant named Marianna. Lane and Jon fell in love with the child and decided they would give her the best life they could. Marianna’s mother, a teenager in foster care herself, had voluntarily placed her in foster care before going AWOL. With her birth mother absent and father unknown, Marianna
seemed to be on the fast-track to becoming adoptable.
The couple could not have predicted the return of the child’s mother, still in foster care, and the news that she was expecting, again. With the second child came the appearance of the baby’s birth father, a man 10 years older than the mother, which would complicate the kids’ cases and begin to pull Lane and Jon’s family apart.
A Family, Maybe documents the ensuing spiral, rife with legal challenges, emotional blows, and no less important, political strife. In the early 2000s, with gay marriage and adoption still illegal in most U.S. states, Lane and Jon’s family would join the first wave of out LGBTQ+ families fighting for respect and equality.
A Family, Maybe is a story of hope and heartbreak; of relatable first-time parenting highs and lows, but also with the pressure of knowing the family you’ve built could be ripped from you at any moment.
Lane Igoudin, Ph.D., is a Los Angeles-based writer, blogger, and proud Dad of two amazing kids who writes about adoptive parenting, fatherhood, LGBTQ families, as well as faith and spiritual growth. A graduate of CSU Long Beach and Stanford University, Lane teaches English and linguistics at Los Angeles City College and was a recent Andrew W. Mellon Fellow with the Humanities Division of UCLA.
Lane’s memoir A Family, Maybe, a journey from foster adoptions to fatherhood, is forthcoming with Ooligan Press in spring 2024. His other recent publications include a guide for prospective foster/adoptive parents on Adoption.com, posts distributed nationwide by Family Equality.org, book reviews written for Lambda Literary Review, Jewish News, and Applied Jewish Spirituality, and essays in Parabola (NY), The Forward (NY), Bay Windows (Boston), Citadel (LA), and Water Wheel (LA). In the last month, Lane has spoken about his book on WFLA-TV (NBC Ch. 8 News), “The Frank Truatt Morning Show: NY and NJ’s #1 Drive Time Show” broadcast on WTBQ AM/FM and WGHT AM/FM radio, and the popular parenting podcast The Impactful Parent.