Description:
The story of Jon and Michael Galluccio, a gay New Jersey couple, and their fight to adopt their HIV-positive infant foster son, Adam, would sound like the script for a stirring made-for-television movie if the protagonists weren't both men. Complete with controversy, opposition, failures, moments of grace, and an amazing subplot in which Jon seeks out his own birth mother, An American Family is a page-turner, simply and affectingly written. Jon and Michael's first meeting with 3-month-old Adam took place in a run-down nursery filled with "medically fragile" babies whose parents had abandoned them to the state at birth. The frail, drug-addicted Adam was lifted into Michael's arms. Although his file read "Foster Only," the head nurse looked over Jon and Michael and asked, "You're adopting him, right?" Adam would become one of the few, very lucky at-risk children to find a permanent, loving home, and in 1997 the Galluccios would make news as the first unmarried couple in New Jersey to legally adopt a child together. An American Family is inspiring reading for anyone with a child, or whose family doesn't outwardly resemble the Cleavers or the Van Dykes. --Regina Marler
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