Connell - Schools out : gay and lesbian teachers in the classroom

I am so grateful to the teachers, administrators, and advocates who opened their hearts, their homes, and their classrooms to me. Their willingness to examine and reveal their experiences and deepest held beliefs made this book possible. I was also incredibly fortunate to have Christine Williams as a mentor from the original stirrings of this project to the final edits; her endless energy, attention, and care for this project were vital to this books production.

At the University of Texas, Javier Auyero, Ben Carrington, Dana Cloud, Sinikka Elliot, Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez, Sharmila Rudrappa, Deb Umberson, Michael Young, and Wei-Hsin Yu provided crucial feedback and support. My senior colleagues at Boston University, including Nancy Ammerman, Emily Barman, Julian Go, Nazli Kibria, and Laurel Smith-Doerr, were helpful for navigating the process of translating my dissertation research into a book project. Especially important at BU were my colleagues in the Junior Faculty Working GroupNicole Aschoff, Ruha Benjamin, Japonica Brown-Saracino, Ashley Mears, and Sigrun Olafsdottiralong with our colleagues from Harvard, Tufts, and NortheasternBart Bonikowski, Ryan Cetner, and Liza Weinstein. The BU Gender and Sexualities Studies group also pushed me to incorporate theoretical insights from across disciplines, and I am thankful for their inspiration. Thanks also to the members of BUs Turtulia, a cross-disciplinary junior faculty working group, for giving feedback on an early draft of chapter 4. I am grateful to my ambitious and brilliant students in the Fall 2013 Sexualities Seminar, whose incisiveand often tough!critiques of sociology pushed me to make this book better. Thank you to all of my students over the years, who helped me clarify my contribution and provided additional insight.

The research for this book was generously supported by a number of fellowships and awards, including the Martin P. Levine Memorial Dissertation Scholarship from the American Sociological Associations Section on Sexualities, the UT Austin Womens and Gender Studies Dissertation Award, and the Stanford Lyman Memorial Scholarship from the Mid-South Sociological Association. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to attend the National Sexuality Resource Centers Summer Institute in 2008. There, I spent three weeks working with and learning from sexualities scholars from across the country and across disciplines. In particular, Jessica Fields provided discerning and insightful feedback on my fellowship applications during that time that helped me secure the above awards.

I would also like to thank Naomi Schneider and Christopher Lura for their editorial guidance throughout the book revision process. Thank you to Jessica Fields, Jennifer Pierce, and Christine Williams for reading and providing substantive feedback on the entire manuscripttheir comments improved the book beyond measure. The detailed and brilliant editorial suggestions of Rebecca Steinetz were priceless. Portions of chapter 4 of this book appear in the journal Sexuality Research and Social Policy (vol. 9, no. 2: 16977). I thank the editor and anonymous reviewers of SRSP for their critique. An abbreviated version of this books argument appears in the chapter Reconsidering the Workplace Closet: The Experiences of Gay and Lesbian Teachers, in Sexual Orientation at Work: Contemporary Issues and Perceptions, edited by Fiona Colgan and Nick Rumens, who were also helpful in their feedback.

Thank you to Elizabeth Marcellino-Boisvert and the group for supporting me through the emotional highs and lows of writing this book. Thanks also to Emily Belanger for the encouragement and enthusiasm over many an appetizer. Thank you to the Fuel America coffee shop and staff for allowing me to write much of this book while lingering over coffee and sandwiches! Stacy Wagner and Stephanie Kinnear, Lisa Storer, Courtney Cogburn, Caitlin Vanderbilt, and the Queertastiks family, especially Joanna and Toshia (and Ziv!) Caravita, Erika Nuez, and Sonya Sowerby, I thank for their friendship, support, and much-needed moments of levity throughout the process! Stacy and Steph, thanks especially for hosting me for a month during my research trip to California and for always being supportiveand emphatically cheesyover the past decade. Sarah Murray, Corinne Reczek, Megan Reid, and Angela StroudI could not have written this without your guidance and support. Corinne, Megan, and Angela were my graduate school comrades, my first writing group, and will always be my sociological home base. Corinne and Sarah worked alongside me in the Cambridge Public Library almost every day for an entire summer and put in still more hours processing the experience with me most evenings. Megan kept me grounded, encouraged, and taken care of throughout the entire experience. Finally, thanks to my family and especially, my sister Emily, who inspired this project and inspires me every day to be a better teacher, scholar, educator, activist, and all-around person.