What Is Gay-Affirmative Therapy?

And Why It Is Needed Now More Than Ever For Us All--Part I

Most of you know me as a therapist and founder of the nation's first LGBT Specialization in Clinical Psychology at Antioch University and Colors LGBTQ Youth Counseling Center in 2011. But before psychology, there was street activism, journalism, book publishing, and performance art. Due to the vacuum of knowledge in LGBTQ psychology and the failure of our political commentaries to address the unconscious side of social and political life, I'm getting my act together to get some manuscripts published and become once again a full-time author and journalist. Your support thus far as free subscribers has been immensely encouraging. Now, I invite you to consider becoming a paid subscriber. For just $5 per month or $30 per year, your generosity would be vital in supporting my mission to bridge the gap between academia, therapy, and the broader community – advocating for "psychology for the people."

Speaking of which, now for an introduction to Gay Affirmative Therapy in Five Parts!

I'm starting with gay-affirmative therapy because the work done in this field of study since the 1970s has paved the way for a broader domain of knowledge that has finally extended to the transgender care community. The American Psychological Association just yesterday (February 28) announced a historic policy resolution opposing bans against gender-affirming care for transgender youth. The resolution goes past previous policies supporting the rights of transgender individuals to "directly supporting gender-affirming care as medically necessary and opposing misinformation that emerges in legislative hearings [namely that being transgender is caused by autism or trauma]," writes our own substack's, Erin Reed. Read more here.

Now for some back story, context, and history related to how psychology, the youngest of all sciences, but undoubtedly the most important, is finally catching up with the people. 

The gay male client seemingly has everything, at least according to his Instagram followers. Happy pictures with the children, the parents, the husband, and friends at the beach or fine dining in an accepting black extended family. The "public self" presentation is so reliable and consistent that no one would call it "false."

But there is a problem related to feeling. And the feeling will always betray the "false self," a monumental concept advanced by psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott as a living structure to ward off contamination by the "true self," which is inconvenient. But due to the war between the "false self" and the "true self," the resisted feeling becomes a symptom. And then a problem at home.

In this case, my new client and his husband get into patterns of ignoring each other, which hurts each of them deeply. They don't know they can talk about feelings they don't realize they have. They have suppressed jealousy due to the open relationship; this leaks out in a fight about who's making dinner or picking up the kids. Sex has often stopped. Sex outside the marriage has often not. And yet, they DO love each other. After a rupture, the make-up sex gets suffused with the passion of their first eyelock ten years ago. The song-and-response of "I love you honey" brings them to exquisite orgasm. They are made whole again.

To manage the times in the emotional desert, each man feels compelled to live out until the ugly fight breaks the damned up emotional wells of truth and love; my client relies on Ambien for sleep and Adderall for focus. He's done therapy before. He knows talking with an expert helps to ward off the decline into a depression that veers into a hearing to end it all. The numbing mechanism that manages psychological life now hurts more than it helps. The greater the assimilation into the heterosexual life, the greater the hidden numbing. Numbing, like all substance abuse, becomes the person's personal hell. There is no A.A. program for numbing. 

He comes to see me because his intuition tells him to see a gay-affirming therapist. He has learned about some basic concepts from my YouTube videos. These militate against a flat explanation for what we today call "gay." His previous therapist, a person of color like himself, who rescued him from a lifetime of significant depression, took his being gay for granted. She thought it wise to speak to him about his married life just as she would speak of her heterosexual union. The door slamming, the petty disputes, the cold pecks on the cheek, the lush make-up sex, the overdue vacations—are they not universal? His extended family came to love his gay family. Given how important family was to my client, the therapist felt it was healing not to exaggerate his difference from his mom and dad. Gay people are not so different from heterosexual folk except for what they do in bed, right? She normalized, not all bad, but not exactly what the American Psychological Association's groundbreaking 2000 guidelines to honor how differently we come into being and making family might deem sufficiently ethical. 

As a result, he had not given much thought to the fact that his symptoms were not just related to job and spousal dissatisfaction but that the cloying distress had roots in more profound injuries connected to the assaults to his being a unique and sensitive gay child. He might joke about what it was like to be raised in the bosom of the Deep South's Evangelicalism and even "perform" the pastor's fire and brimstone for his posse of friends enjoying drinks before the football game. As a result, he had never been invited to think overly much about what it meant to be the kind of person who took the Red Pill. He had braved the retaliation when he came out. He had broken free from his family's faith to claim loyalty to his True Gay Self. He had felt gay before. But now what? He had reached the pinnacle of gay life. He got the ring. He got the baby. He got love from his once-rejecting father.

Of course, he had yet to be given the key to the library of arts and sciences that beckons to humanity derived from same-sex love and desire. But he's too confused to know that the key exists and is his for the taking and asking. That confusion can be a portal, the one about which Judy Garland sang. But who has the metal to become Dorothy's friend?

I think to myself, holy shit, we gay people have been cut off from our history, both our developmental past also our ancient chronology. That's really so unfair, considering that our history could be older than Jewish or Chinese history and considering that our history is so giving and not just to us.

The first recorded piece of writing, "The Epic of Gilgamesh," dating from c. 2100 BC, tells the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu as lovers on a spiritual quest. Bret Hinsch's "Passions of the Cut Sleeve" evokes the male homosexual tradition in China from the Bronze Age. Homeric Greece bestows upon us the heroic romance between Achilles and Patroclus. Ancient Israel delights in the love between Jonathan and David and that of Ruth and Esther. The Harlem Renaissance has given us Langston Hughes and Richard Bruce Nugent. Shakespeare's homosexual sonnets written to "The Dark Youth" never cease to amaze. Plato defines same-sex love as possessing its own heavenly muse in the Symposium. Will Roscoe's "Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love" provides a dose of scholarship. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a 17th-century nun, the acclaimed writer of the Latin American colonial period and the Hispanic Baroque, was also a staunch advocate for women's rights and a woman-loving woman.

If you take away a people's history, you take away their soul. Soul here refers to deepening experience into a feeling of connection, purpose, and historical continuity. 

I no longer intend to blame the parents for this historical erasure. The goal is not to alienate clients from their families but perhaps to develop enough psychological maturity to recruit them into a gay-affirming stance. Nonetheless, it remains tragic that the family as a system suffers from society's centuries-long erasure of queer wisdom. This holds them back, too. They need heavenly love, too. This eradication of historical continuity may not be anyone's fault but is a psychological fact holding us all back. It must be addressed someway, somehow. New forms of internal gay parenting can take place. History can be recovered, both personal and collective. The vertigo can be faced and integrated.

In a classic paper from 1997 that I would like to share with you, "Assaults to the Self: The Trauma of Being Gay," written by Alan Blum and Van Pfetzing, it's hard to emphasize what growing up in a vacuum does to a person. In my Talmud of gay-affirmative literature, this piece contains so many gems that I'd almost like to read the whole thing on a podcast (warning!).

"Unlike being black or Jewish," Blum and Pfetzing write, "the gay man as a child is both typically alone with his "differentness," as well as often unclear, confused, conflicted, horrified by "it." 

They say that "unlike the black child whose parents are typically also black or the Jewish child with Jewish parents and relatives, the proto-gay child typically not only does not have gay parents but doesn't even know what "gay" is except as a very nebulous and very negative thing." 

And then, to address the black child who might be adopted by white parents, they write, "Even the black child adopted by white parents has the potential empathy and help from his parents in identifying and valuing his "blackness"; the proto-gay child almost never has this. It (i.e., his "gayness") either remains unobvious to the outside world and is then "managed" internally alone with varying degrees of consciousness and unconsciousness."

The client will have to experience some of the trauma that has been split off to heal. This is the work of gay-affirmative healing, to go back in time and collect the feelings that have been shoved away. I am reminded of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. That twister she steps into gives her a ride for her money but does spirit her "somewhere over the rainbow."

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Wow, there is so much more I want to share with you. I have yet to discuss the history of gay-affirmative therapy. But I promise to follow up on this by the end of the week with Part II. 

Meanwhile, I invite you to learn more in my free talk with Dr. Enrique Lopez on Wednesday, March 6 from 12:30 to Noon: "How LGBTQ-Affirmative Therapy Can Save Lives--Relevance for the Latino Community.” Click here to RSVP for the Zoom link or to attend in person at Antioch University and receive lunch.

In April, I am stepping out of the academy, back to the grassroots to offer writing and reading classes Saturday mornings from 10:30 a.m. to Noon for $22 per class. To learn more about “Writing and Reading to Explore Our Gay Humanity,” check out the website, www.askdrdougphd.com.