AMITY PIERCE BUXTON, Ph.D

Amity Pierce Buxton, Ph.D. is the founder of Straight Spouse Network. and author of The Other Side of the Closet: The Coming-Out Crisis for Straight Spouses and Families.

She served as Director and then Executive Director of SSN from 1991 until 2007, as the nonprofit developed its capacity to provide support and information that empower straight spouses of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans partners and mixed-orientation and trans/nontrans couples to lessen their pain, cope with coming-out issues constructively, and reconstruct their lives. SSN's mission is reaching out, healing, and building bridges of understanding between spouses, within families, and with the larger community. She is currently a nonvoting member of its Board of Directors.

Amity is a member of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Bisexuality and the Journal of GLBT Family Studies and serves on the Board of Directors of the Catholic Association for Lesbian and Gay Ministry (CALGM) and the Emeritus Board of the Family Equality Council (FEC), She does collaborative work, including workshops and writing, with both organizations as well as with The Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Human Rights Campaign (HRC),Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere (COLAGE), Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC), and American Psychological Association (APA).

Amity continues to conduct research and publish articles and book chapters on the impact of a partner's coming out on his or her straight spouse and children and also on the diverse aspects of mixed-orientation and trans/nontrans marriages and their intersection with contextual factors, such as race, ethnicity, culture of origin, and socio-economic status.

She continues to publish articles on various aspects of the mixed-orientation relationship phenomenon for journals and edited books.

Her previous work was as a pioneer of teachers' centers and school staff development programs to help teachers develop curriculum and teaching methods that enable all students, preschool through high school, to reach their potential, particularly in urban, multiethnic public schools.