In November, Bernice Manshel, the director of the Division of Youth and Family Services, received a call from a reporter at the Trenton Times. The reporter said that the department had secretly paired queer youth with queer foster parents for much of the past decade, and asked for comment. “I was very surprised,” Manshel told me. “I told him I’d have to give that some thought in terms of coöperating, because frankly I had to find out more about it.” Manshel called her deputy, and the two began investigating. Piece by piece, the story came to light. Since the early seventies, a loose network of New Jersey social workers had arranged for older gay and trans foster kids—usually aged thirteen to eighteen—to be placed in gay foster homes. Although various members of the department knew about this, they had kept it secret.
The Trenton Times broke the story on November 26th, under the headline “N.J. Officials Find Gay Foster Parents for Gay Teen-Agers.” A day later, two members of the state assembly’s Health and Welfare Committee called for a meeting. One member of the committee said that he was “shocked” by the story; another warned that such a program “could lead to a dangerous situation.” A month after the Trenton Times article was published, Manshel’s office circulated a policy document intended to downplay the placements to the state legislature. The document noted that securing care for gay foster kids had long been a “particularly sensitive problem” for the agency and that “on rare occasions” the division had placed “sexually experienced homosexual teenagers” with gay foster parents. Not all gay and trans kids were automatically placed in gay homes; it was done only “when such an adolescent is either not adjusting in his own family or had no family available.” In some cases, a gay foster parent had regularly worked with the state when “very difficult, hard-to-place” children were involved. The division indicated that in at least one instance, a gay foster parent had formally applied to adopt a gay foster child.
Richard T. O’Grady, who then served as a regional administrator for the Division of Youth and Family Services, had known about the placements for months before the Trenton Times got wind of them, having heard about them in his monthly meetings with social workers. I asked O’Grady whether he had feared losing his job over the foster-care program. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Of course.” He added, “If I felt that way about a lot of things, I would have never been in the business. You had to have guts.” He relayed the case of another social worker who, after seventeen years at the division, resigned rather than turn over a child’s confidential records to state troopers. “We felt good about trying to do the right thing,” he said.