Psychotherapy
For Gay Men
"To be 'gay," I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual but to try and define and develop a way of life."
- Michel Foucault
As a gay man, I’ve spent much of my life thinking about what it means to build a life on a foundation of authenticity. I’ve come to deeply value living openly and honestly, seeking out new experiences and relationships, and remaining curious about who I am and the world around me. I don’t think most gay men are given a cultural script that give us much room to discover how we authentically want to live. We grow up surrounded by assumptions about what development, relationships, sexuality, family, masculinity, and a meaningful life are supposed to look like. We are inundated with these expectations and narratives long before we are even aware that other possibilities exist, much less have the opportunity to decide if we actually want what we’re being given.
Coming to understand that can be liberating, but living solely in rejection of those expectations doesn’t automatically tell us how we want to live either. We can organize our lives around conformity, but we can also organize them around rebellion. Both are important aspects of our development as gay men, but neither necessarily answers the more difficult and interesting question: What kind of life do I actually want to live?
Gay men can face particular questions about sex and intimacy, monogamy and non-monogamy, friendship and chosen family, masculinity and our relationships with other men, our bodies and aging, belonging within gay communities, shame, loneliness, achievement, and the complicated relationship between independence and intimacy. There are also pleasures and possibilities in gay life that deserve attention: sexuality, friendship, freedom, creativity, community, and the opportunity to construct relationships and ways of living that exist outside of the conventional straight story of who we “should” be.
None of these experiences are universal, and being gay doesn’t mean therapy needs to be about being gay. You might come to therapy because you’re anxious or depressed, struggling in a relationship, feeling burned out, questioning your career, or realizing that the life you’ve built no longer feels quite right. But being gay may still be part of the lens through which you learned to understand yourself, other people, and what a life is supposed to be.
As a gay psychologist, I bring my own lived experience and understanding of gay male culture into the room, but I don’t assume that my experience is yours. I’m much more interested in understanding the particular life you have lived: what you’ve learned about yourself, what you’ve adapted to, what you’ve come to desire or fear, what still constrains you, and what possibilities you may not yet have considered.
For me, psychotherapy is ultimately not about teaching gay men some “correct” way to live. It is about developing enough awareness of ourselves and the forces that have shaped us that we can live with greater freedom and intention by looking at ourselves with radical honesty. The goal is not to become the person you were "supposed" to be or were told to be. It is to understand yourself well enough to find the freedom and power to choose who you want to become.