In Solidarity: Friendship, Family, and Activism Beyond Gay and Straight (Innovative Ethnographies) - Softcover

Lisa Tillmann’s In Solidary: Friendship, Family, and Activism Beyond Gay and Straight is an impassioned, poetic, and beautifully compelling call to be an ally in the struggle for racial, class, national, religious, ableist, gender and queer equality. A valuable resource for teachers, students, and activists in Communication, LGBTQ+ , Gender, and Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies, In Solidarity embodies the personal, relational, and political commitment to social justice that it seeks to inspire in us all.

-Stacy Holman Jones, Communication Studies, California State University, Northridge

Tillmann's excellent book explains qualitative methods such as autoethnography, interviewing, and participant observation, by offering compelling examples of each. It provides cutting edge forays into poetry, friendship as method, and collaborative and activist scholarship. Tillman makes qualitative research come alive because she invites you into her life as well as into the world of scholarship.

-Lynn H. Turner, Communication Studies, Marquette University

Dr. Tillmann is a vulnerable, transparent, and relationally-mindful ethnographer who takes as her focus the personal, familial, and cultural injustices that many LGBQ persons encounter in everyday life. An important text for courses on interpersonal communication, social activism, queer studies, and critical qualitative research.

-Tony E. Adams, author of Narrating the Closet: An Autoethnography of Same-Sex Attraction

Story, poetry, video, performance scripts, and prose are lovingly composed by a front line LGBTQ+ activist, scholar, teacher, filmmaker, writer, and friend. Interpretive and critical, creative and aesthetic, personal and collaborative, passionate and vulnerable, sensitizing and mobilizing, this text will break hearts and break open minds―of teachers and students, those who identify as LGBTQ+ and their (potential) allies―and then empower readers to put hearts back together and use understanding and empathy to DO something in solidarity.

-Carolyn Ellis, Communication, University of South Florida

In this panoramic and intimate book, Lisa Tillmann invites readers into the lives of actual families, friends, and romantic partners living the personal and political challenges of relationships spanning sexual orientations. Lisa is a narrator, poet, character and fellow traveler, a vulnerable target of others’ responses, a partner, friend, diligent questioner, and always a reflective guide. This engaging text vividly demonstrates how creative scholarly work can inspire and model genuine dialogue.

-William K. Rawlins, Stocker Professor of Communication Studies, Ohio University

Lisa Tillmann shows what it means to be both a compassionate researcher and a cultural critic, and to maintain an unwavering commitment to the struggle for social justice for LGBT people over the course of two decades. Weaving a tapestry of poetry, politics, and performative writing, Tillmann gives researchers and students a rare glimpse into how our ethnographic projects change the people we study. Refusing to shy away from interviewing people who hold opposing beliefs, Tillmann uses friendship as method to reveal the sham, humiliation, resistance, and secrecy endured by members of the families she studied, both those who have come out and those to whom they came out. In the process, she produces a therapeutic and healing text, one that gives us hope and optimism that the future will indeed be better than the past. I highly recommend In Solidarity for courses on family communication, activist research, social justice and cultural/critical studies.

-Arthur Bochner, Communication, University of South Florida

In Solidarity: Friendship, Family, and Activism Beyond Gay and Straight shows what being an ally (in this case to LGBTQ+ persons and communities) requires, means, and does. Through prose, poetry, performance text, and film, the work takes readers inside relationships across sexual orientation and serves as an exemplar of activist scholarship. In Solidarity makes a unique and compelling contribution to courses on LGBTQ+ studies, sexualities, gender, identity, relationships, or the family.