To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care by Cris Beam; Houghton Mifflin, $26
Lit crits have always said to write about what you know. If this is the case, then Cris Beam is the queer writer trustworthy of both critiquing and humanizing the lumbering, regressive system known as American foster care. Beam, who left her own neglectful mother at 14, has long considered the effects of this loss on her own psyche. It has had an impact on what she has written and life choices she has made. When she was a young teacher in New York City, she responded to a student's crisis by bringing the youth home to live with her and her (now ex-) partner. What seemed like a simple solution �" lesbian teacher helps trans teen avoid a group home, stabilize in a loving family, and finish school �" became an issue for the state. Beam wasn't licensed as a foster parent, and soon found herself immersed in a regulatory system, all to save a child. Beam and her ex went on to adopt the teen, who is now herself a successful adult, But while that story had a happy ending, most kids, whether heterosexual or LGBT-identified, don't have that kind of luck.
Beam is known to LGBT readers as the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning Transparent: Love, Family and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers and the novel I am J, about a young transboy's coming of age in New York. Although a trans youth inspired Beam's own journey into parenthood, To the End of June casts a much wider lens on a complex issue.
The U.S. spends close to $20 billion a year on foster care, mostly to manage removal of children from neglectful or abusive homes, and pays to house them elsewhere until they "age out" or are adopted. Teenagers do not usually fare well in this system. Half of all teens in foster care end up in group homes or locked facilities, most end up unemployed as adults, and 30% percent of all the young men end up incarcerated by age 19. One statistic states that almost half of all the homeless adults in the U.S. were former foster children. While many children do get adopted if removed from their families as babies or while young, once that child begins to grow up, odds are that they will never have or know the secure attachment and acceptance of a permanent family.
Beam spent five years researching To the End of June, spending time in the lives of six foster families and among a total of 22 foster children, mainly in New York. This type of long-term reporting yields results. Beam is able to tackle big topics like the evolution of the care system, financial incentives for states to keep kids in care, the effects of the media and political winds of change on foster policies, the intersections between race and poverty and child removal, how social worker retention influences family outcomes, how academics and front-line workers disagree on policy, the inherent conflict between birth parents and those who raise their children, intergenerational cycles of abuse and neglect, the need for more "therapeutic" care for traumatized children, and how thinking creatively, while not always system-supported, may save kids' lives.
Beam also explores current changes in national foster-care policy such as the new "waiver" model that allows states to provide more preventative family support (family therapy, housing, substance treatment for parents) before necessitating removal of children from their homes. By focusing on family services and prevention, the rates of removal, and thus the numbers of kids in care, are already going down.
While all this is necessary education for readers, the story shines most brightly when Beam focuses on the struggles and triumphs of a few specific families. Featured in most detail are Bruce and Allyson Green, a Brooklyn couple who foster several teenagers. LGBT parents are highlighted prominently, including Shawn and Marty, a gay male couple, and a single older lesbian named Mary. Although Mary's original intent was to open a group home for young lesbians, social service agencies apparently could not locate any lesbian teens for her. So Mary ended up taking in a sibling group and a bevy of young adults, most of whom had already "aged out" of care, but still craved an adult mentor and a stable place to call home.
Foster care in the US is definitely a broken system. Given that the lives of many children hang in the balance each day, this system is deserving of and must be improved. Beam's intimate immersion into this system, as both a parent and an author, has brought great empathy and insight into a world many people never contemplate. Beam's book will likely help change hearts and minds, and hopefully, social policy.
Yet its impact will be no mere coincidence, especially when you consider the recent publication of Andrew Solomon's award-winning Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity , an in-depth cultural analysis of parenting informed by his own identity as a gay father. This newly developing but already influential literary wave, led by LGBT writers who have become parents, will continue to produce analytic works of great cultural and social impact. These books, and the changes they bring, will profoundly improve the way all Americans, gay and straight, choose to parent their children. Cris Beam's To the End of June will be remembered as an early and critical voice in this movement.