Acknowledgements
Thank you to Patricia Leavy, John Bennett, Jolanda Karada, Paul Chambers, Robert van Gameren, and everyone else at Brill | Sense for your faith in us, your willingness to support creativity, and your invaluable guidance. We would also like to especially thank Shalen Lowell for your considerable assistance and support.
Brandy Simula: I owe the warmest of thanks to my co-editors, J. E. Sumerau and Andrea Miller, who shared my excitement over the earliest, inchoate idea for the volume. Their collegiality and dedication to the project made the process of bringing this volume from inception to print a thoroughly enjoyable one. I am enormously grateful to my partner, M, who has supported all of my interests and projects over the past two decades, including this one, and whose partnership continues to help me flourish both personally and professionally. Molly & Lucy have been my constant and steadfast companions throughout the process of developing and bringing the book to fruition, and I could not have had better. The love and support of my family of choice and their willingness to think and live together toward expanding the light of our own rainbows has sustained me in more ways than they can know.
J. E. Sumerau: As always, I cannot overstate how much gratitude I owe to Xan Nowakowski and Lain Mathers for this and all my other books. I also owe deep gratitude to my co-editors in this project who came up with the idea in the first place and walked with me every step of the way. I also am always thankful for my own chosen family and the ways they each bring something fantastic to my life even when they don’t quite realize they are doing so. Thanks especially to Eve, Nik, M, Eric, Brittany, Kate, Bran, and Shay for all you do that helps me think, create, and exist in this world. I also wish to thank all the contributors to this volume, and to my own development as a scholar, novelist, and teacher over the past decade. Special thanks in these regards to Irene Padavic, Doug Schrock, Koji Ueno, Dawne Moon, Katie Acosta, Kristen Schilt, Rebecca Plante, Allen Scarboro, John Reynolds, Orit Avishai, Patricia Leavy, and Kim Davies for better mentorship than I could have ever hoped to find as I made my want into the academy. Finally, as always, thank you especially to all the other LGBTQIA people who have allowed me to learn about their lives, tell their stories in scholarship and novels, and grow from their life lessons.
Andrea Miller: This work was inspired during the last day of the 2017 American Sociological Association when I turned to one of the co-editors of this volume, Brandy Simula and asked her “where were the books by scholars doing work on alt sexualities?” Mere days after that conversation Brandy told me I had to meet her friend J Sumerau who was doing vital work on Bi+ identities and alt family relationships. In quick succession this book came to fruition.
Based on this conversation I have had the pleasure of working with my co-editors and the authors in this volume.
As a life-long bisexualities scholar this is the kind of book I have wanted to have to teach to the newer generation of undergraduate sociology students. Thank you to my long time mentor Betsy Lucal, and my partners in crime, Charlie, Theo and Levi. These folks, along with my students have continued to encourage me to reach outside the rainbow.