Book Review: Coming Out of the Closet: Exploring LGBT Issues in Strategic Communication with Theory and Research, edited by Natalie T. J. Tindall and Richard D. Waters:

Coming Out of the Closet: Exploring LGBT Issues in Strategic Communication with Theory and Research. Natalie T. J. Tindall and Richard D. Waters, eds. New York: Lang, 2013. 280 pp. $38.95 pbk.Natalie Tindall, a recognized champion for diversity in public relations (both in scholarship and professional outreach), and Richard Waters, one of the most prolific public relations scholars in recent years, have joined forces to produce a must-read book about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) strategic communication. This work will especially attract advertising and public relations scholars and practitioners who take an interest in LGBT research regarding advocacy, advertising, employee relations, and organization-customer relationships.In the public relations literature, this book is an oasis in a desert of LGBT scholarship. We now have a go-to guide for foundational LGBT PR scholarship, much like Lauri Grunig, Elizabeth Toth, and Linda Hon's Women in Public Relations was to feminist PR scholarship a little more than a decade ago. The twenty-nine-page bibliography alone is a valuable resource for LGBT scholars.Two primary reasons for the paucity of LGBT research in public relations include the difficulty of recruiting a substantial number of LGBT participants and discrimination by reviewers. Regarding recruitment, this book offers innovative ideas for finding LGBT participants. It also calls out a professional public relations organization for its refusal to add a sexual orientation question to a membership survey (the organization expressed that the question did not matter), and the book criticizes another professional public relations organization for its statement that there are not enough LGBT employees to be recognized as an important stakeholder group.In lockstep with the professional marginalization of LGBT employees is the marginalization of LGBT research. Tindall and Waters offer a cathartic narrative of their journey to publish in this area in the introduction and epilogue. A follow-up journal article with some of their book contributors would be most welcome-one that has the kind of scintillating detail and scathing critique as the mother of all reviewer critiques, "Disciplining the Feminine," by Carole Blair, Julie Brown, and Leslie Baxter in Quarterly Journal of Speech. In this climate of hostile reviews and explicit lack of interest by some communications journal editors in the entire category of LGBT research, Tindall and Waters (and publisher Peter Lang) should be applauded for creating their own place to house this important area of scholarship.My only quibble with Waters' discussion of discrimination in the academy is his solution of encouraging quantitative research, given the academy's preference for this method. Scholars' most pressing questions, not the academy's method preference, should shape the future of LGBT communications research. As long as we have enterprising editors such as Tindall and Waters, we will have an outlet for quality LGBT communications scholarship. Collaboration is the answer. So much of the LGBT communications territory is in the exploratory stage, which calls for qualitative research. As Ciszek reminds readers in her chapter, we need to remember the "T" in LGBT. Empirical studies focusing on transgender populations in strategic communications research are as common as the unicorn.The book has three parts. The first part is succinct, with the first two chapters focusing on the personal workplace experiences of LGBT communications professionals and the last chapter criticizing gender scholarship about the workplace experiences of public relations professionals. Part 2 explores professionals' general approaches to reaching the LGBT community, and part 3 primarily focuses on individual communications campaigns that target LGBT consumers. Parts 2 and 3 each have six chapters and a good mix of advertising and public relations content.One of many strengths of this book is that it lives up to its intention of serving as a "conversation starter. …