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In 1970, gays and lesbians across the United States routinely lost custody of children—even those they had birthed—in custody disputes. By the end of the twentieth century, not only did gay people stand a good chance of keeping custody of their children, they also had won the right to parent other people’s children through foster care and adoption. This dissertation examines the role of foster care in the remaking of lesbian and gay family rights and U.S. family more broadly. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, foster care systems were tasked with solving two unanticipated family crises: a perceived rise in the number of “runaway” or “street” youth in the nation’s cities, and “boarder babies,” children exposed to HIV-AIDS thought to be languishing in hospitals. As these crises strained foster care systems, social workers turned to white, affluent gay men and lesbians as foster parents. These individual, day-to-day decisions about where to place a child added up to a revolutionary impact on U.S. family policy. For many white gay men and lesbians, foster care became a venue for the expansion of gay parenting rights. For the children’s predominantly Black birth families, however, the expansion of gay and lesbian parenthood was a revolution, turning back to old ideas about race and ability to deny these families access to their children. By the turn of the twenty-first century, gay foster parents put parenting rights at the forefront of the national policy agenda, transforming the meaning of family in the United States.