Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Category: Culture

  • Reflections of a Gender Affirming Therapist

    Reflections of a Gender Affirming Therapist

    Almost twenty years ago, before I became a therapist, I watched a very close friend go through their transition process. They were not the first transgender person I’d ever known, but they were one of my closest friends, someone I had been assuming was a fellow gay man.

    I was startled by my own reaction to their coming out. Inwardly, I saw myself wanting to say all the things that I knew were unhelpful—doubt, disbelief, questioning. The exact kinds of things that I’d hated being said to me when I came out as gay in my teens. Blessedly I was able to keep a lid on most of it—though I’ve no doubt I telegraphed some of my process in accepting their reality.

    At the time, they were required to undergo years of therapy before they could get access to hormone replacement therapy, and then more before surgery. Once all that was finally done, there was a crisis that led to the realization that they had a separate co-occurring mental illness which needed treatment.

    I was horrified and angry. “How did you therapist miss this? You saw them for years!”

    My friend explained to me that they were so concerned about this therapist blocking their access to transition care that they’d learned to have a high level of discretion about what they revealed and concealed in therapy. So all of those struggles lay buried beneath the performance required to convince their therapist they were transgender enough to be supported in transition.

    How terrible, I thought. This gatekeeping around access to gender care created a compulsory and adversarial relationship between a person needing support and the therapist who should have been available for that support and wholeheartedly on the client’s side.

    This adversarial relationship, to my mind, negates any benefit from compulsory treatment. A therapist ideally has no agenda for the client other than supporting them in making the best choices for themselves, helping them to thoroughly explore their own thoughts, feelings, doubts, conflicts, concerns and desires to identify their own goals. When a therapist is made to be gatekeeper for access to something the client wants or needs, then it is much harder to establish trust and transparency in the relationship. A client’s protector parts are more likely to come out and block certain information, or “read” the therapist to try to say what they think the therapist wants or needs to hear.

    There are many assumptions made of mental health professionals that make no sense to me. Having been in this field as long as I have, I have direct experience of people with psychotic disorders or suicidal ideation who were able to mask long enough to convince their therapist or other mental health professional that they were doing okay. There are people who are fully capable of not showing you their struggles if they don’t trust you.

    Putting us as gatekeepers for access to gender care implies that we have some authority to discern whether a client is “really” transgender. But we have no secret tricks or tests. All we have is the relationship and the trust a client gives us to tell us their truth, and that trust is only there when a client feels like I’m on their side and not judging whether or not they deserve access to something.

    Making a therapist a gatekeeper, I’m saying, does the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. We get less reliable information. We aren’t always given access to a person’s ambivalence and questions.

    When I went to school to become a therapist, I decided I wanted to be a force to reduce that gatekeeping, but to do so ethically and in accordance to professional expectations. I have had a number of clients pursue transition under my care, and I’ve written dozens of secondary letters of support for gender affirming surgery for free.

    That secondary letter truly astounds me. Clients have already seen a psychologist to receive a thorough assessment of their gender history and co-occurring disorders, and then they’re expected to see another therapist to get a second opinion on whether they’re mentally competent to make choices for their healthcare.

    I have never experienced any process so condescending when pursuing my own healthcare. Women can go get their breasts enlarged without a psychological assessment. Men can start taking Viagra without being expected to see a therapist to talk about alternatives to medication, like exploring the idea that when we age we tend to lose erectile functioning and what if you tried accepting your body instead of taking a medication to change it? These choices are between them and their doctors.

    All that said, I’ve found the speed of transition has increased significantly since I started. The year of therapy before starting hormones is largely no longer required, people are accessing surgery and living as their gender sooner, and of course there has been a growing community of medical care treating transgender and gender-questioning youth. This has been wonderful for reducing the intensity and duration of the gates that mostly slow trans people down for the needs and concerns of insurance and healthcare providers.

    And at times I’ve felt my own hesitation when a trans client seems fixated on transition as a cure-all for their distress. It’s not that transition is wrong for them, but that we should all be skeptical of thinking our problems will be solved by one big change.

    Suicidal thining, for example, is a particular response to pain and distress that requires its own specific care and attention to work with, to build the emotional tolerance and skill to find other ways of dealing with this pain. Gender dysphoria is one kind of pain that may spur ideation, but resolving that does not necessarily mean one will never feel suicidal again. It’s good to know that and work with these issues in conjunction with the larger work of transition.

    Because I generally do not practice cutting off people with ideological differences from me, I am a person who talks a lot to folks across the spectrum—trans and nonbinary people, gender affirming colleagues, and friends and family who have concerns or antagonism toward transgender identity.

    One of the things I hear from concerned or antagonistic people is an increased concern about medical professionals rushing trans people through transition, or deciding for their clients that they are trans, or pressuring people whose gender confusion might com from another source.

    Given my own history I certainly understand that if you’ve never known a transgender person, it can take some time to adjust to the reality. The hard thing about coming out as any kind of queer is that usually the person coming out has had months to years of getting clarity about their identity, and the person they’re telling may have only seconds before they’re expected to make a response. Hurtful things get said, and sometimes regretted. I also recognize that the growth of transgender visibility compels us to re-examine a number of our cultural institutions around gender segregation and how we determine who belongs in what spaces, and that brings up fear and anger. And I can even understand feeling anxious about a child making a choice that could permanently alter their bodies in irreversible ways.

    What I do not understand is responding to these fears and anxieties with an attack on the medical procedure and the professionals who help folks make these choices. I’ve heard some folks wring their hands about unethical activist advocates or doctors “pushing” transition on children and adults who may not “actually be trans,” and so it’s safer to just ban transition care for children.

    If there are such providers who are pushing trans identity on their clients and patients, they certainly are practicing unethically and should be reported and investigated. That is what we do with unethical medical providers. We don’t put blanket bans on medical care.

    From the perspective of a mental health professional who has had to deal with the tedious and frustrating bureaucracy of helping a person get surgery, I have a hard time imagining a world where a person could be rushed through the process without being rich enough to pay out of pocket. I work in one of the most gender-affirming places in the United States and it’s still a slow, exasperating process.

    I do not personally work with children or anyone under the age of 18, so I cannot speak to the experience of providing gender care to such people. I think it scares non-trans people because they see that kids can be easily confused, easily duped, stupid, or get caught up in trends and peer pressure.

    I think of myself at the age of 13 realizing I was queer, and then all the adults who told me I didn’t know myself and should keep quiet about it because I could change my mind. And here I am almost thirty years later, and I can tell you now that I was completely correct about my identity and that the signs were there from a really young age. And my friend, whom I doubted, is still who they are.

    That’s only a certain amount of anecdotal evidence, and I have heard other anecdotal stories about people being pressured to transition by family, friends, and spiritual community, but I don’t have numbers showing this as an enormous social problem other than general fear.

    There are kids who might have gender dysphoria for a while and decide they are cisgender, which is an incredibly small 2.5% based on current evidence, kids who have gender dysphoria at 6 that resolves around 10-13 to cisgender identity. (With that age gap, do these kids even get any medical interventions?)

    I have friends and peers who transitioned and later transitioned back to their original gender identity, and the reasons for this are complex and aren’t always because they weren’t “really” trans. In some cases, the social pressure and antagonism proved greater than the benefits of transition. In some cases, the medical side effects of transition were untenable. In some cases, their gender experience just changed again.

    When we’re talking specifically about adults, I question the concern about these cases. Adults are allowed to make all kinds of decisions about their bodies and lives that are inalterable and life-changing, and part of life is learning to live and adapt to the unforeseen consequences of these decisions. I’m not sure how medical transition is such a concerning event warranting this level of gatekeeping compared to other choices like enlisting in the military, getting a tattoo, having babies, getting married, all of which have unforeseen life-altering consequences.

    It is very American to insist on individual liberty for the things that make sense to us and to not want individual liberty for other people’s choices when we do not understand or agree with them.

    The backlash against trans people is only the tip of the spear of the right-wing pushback against all the gains queer people have made in my lifetime, and it’s bad enough, and I expect it will worsen before it gets better.

    But when it changes again, there will still be gender-variant people.

  • A Dream of Power and Freedom from Control

    A Dream of Power and Freedom from Control

    Recently I had a powerful dream. In it, I was sleeping next to a person who started touching me in unwanted ways, and I turned toward him and told him very clearly and directly that it was unacceptable, not consensual, and that if he continued he was knowingly violating my boundaries.

    The person left in a huff, and my dream avatar got angry, thinking this person thought of himself as the victim. I followed him out the door, determined to confront him and force him to see how he was really the asshole.

    Suddenly dream-me had a moment of clarity: it didn’t matter if he felt like the victim. All that mattered was that I was safe and the person was gone. What meaning he made of the situation was none of my business, and pursuing it would only get me more hurt.

    I woke with pride that my dream-self was able to speak for himself and set a forceful, if dramatic, boundary. Prior dreams showed me in similar situations feeling frozen and small, unable to resist. Or I would attempt to speak and find my mouth unable to push the words into the air, or the sound would be drowned in noise. This speaks to my personal story around feeling invisible and unheard, struggling to assert myself, and this new iteration feels like a marker of growth.

    Most intriguing was the clarity at the end of the dream, catching myself in the desire to condemn one who would never accept he was wrong. In my life, it’s taken me a long time to see how much I get hurt when that tendency takes over. I’ve gotten into all kinds of weird manipulative indirect interactions in the hopes I could persuade or trick someone into admitting they’re wrong and the asshole, and often it’s ended up making me the asshole.

    What the dream offers me is the notion that setting a clear, unambiguous boundary—a strong no without concern for another’s feelings—frees me from both sides of that toxic victimhood. When I could only endure harm quietly, that rage and vengefulness would inevitably follow. Instead of breaking off connections with harmful people, I would stay entangled with them while trying to make them see my hurt, and end up more hurt.

    When our lives are such that we feel unable to protect ourselves from harm, rage and powerlessness is inevitable, and we may become crusaders. Unable to heal our own buried feelings of powerlessness and trauma, we may become crusaders against others causing similar harm. These are efforts of exerting control over self and others, trying to control the conditions of life to prevent further harm from happening.

    For me, power and control are two ends of a spectrum. Power is the embodied knowing that I can influence my inner and outer worlds toward my safety and meeting my needs and desires. That when I know what I need, I can get it. That when I need something to stop, or to start, I can make it happen.

    The efforts to exert control over another, and the acceptance of another’s control, both require the giving away of power. Controller and the controlled are hooked to each other, like the two Piscean fish, unable to swim without pulling the other along.

    We may imagine that the control of abusers, dominators, and authoritarians gives them freedom, but in practice they are unable to tolerate dissent or the normal conflicts of adult relationships and engage in compulsive moves to reassert control. Similarly, we tend to imagine the passive controlled victim who utterly surrenders, but in practice even the most assaulted person has all manner of ways in which rebellion, resistance, undermining, and sabotage emerge. Humans are creatures who can never be fully tamed, even unto themselves.

    In my dream, the creepy sleeper attempted to exert control by touching my dream-self’s body in unwelcome and unpermitted ways, and my dream-self sought control over the narrative by chasing him down to persuade him of his wrongness. Saying no, and letting go of control over the story, brings us to our personal power and freedom.

    Even if we get hurt while expressing our power, that experience is profoundly different from being harmed and powerless, which is one of the conditions that gives rise to post-traumatic stress.

    Being hurt while knowing we stood for ourselves and did not participate in our own victimization offers a psychic protection. Instead of shame, we might feel gratitude and pride in ourselves. The dignity we have not allowed to be taken is a balm against the humiliation of loss. Liberation is greater than the smallness of bullies and the resentment of the righteous.

  • For Nice Guys Seeking Love and Lust

    For Nice Guys Seeking Love and Lust

    While scrolling through Facebook I came across what appears to be a Reddit post retweeted by AskAubry about a male university student who felt spurned by the female lab partner he’d wanted to befriend and love. The post has since been deleted, and its author has likely received enough Internet fame, so I won’t share the text here. But reading it did make me think about Nice Guys and incels.

    My understanding is that an “incel” is a person who identifies as “involuntarily celibate,” who wants love and sex but is unable to find a willing partner. Straight men who come to identify as incels and participate in incel-spaces seem to support each other in their bitterness and resentment of women as a while, expressing a sense of being unfairly denied the love and intimacy they deserve.

    Nice Guys are not necessarily incels, though many of them seem to end up there. They’ve been around for decades. Nice Guys think of themselves as, well, nice. Good men who love and care about women, who want to nurture and protect them, and want to love and be loved. But Nice Guys tend to approach their desire for partnership indirectly, through first befriending women and becoming emotionally close with them, all the while hoping these women will come to see them as valuable romantic partners.

    (There are Nice Guys who are queer, and likely many who aren’t guys at all, but the dynamic tends to be parallel. If you feel like a Nice Guy who isn’t a straight man, you could see what in this post still works for you, or check out my other writings on queer relationships and loneliness.)

    If you’re a Nice Guy, you may think of yourself as different and better than “horny” guys who openly pursue sex and romance, but you they feel aggrieved is that the woman you desire ends up with the horny guy and has no interest in you as anything but a friend. Nice Guys and incels used to call this getting “friendzoned”—maybe they still do, I assume that must be a dated reference by now—officially taken out of the “zone” of potential romance and never considered again.

    As a Nice Guy, you might be idealistic, hoping for that romantic movement of gradually being rewarded for your loyalty and devotion and being the one to rescue or heal your beloved from her disappointments and tormentors. Though this path can lead to dark places, there is a genuine sweetness here. The problem is, this approach tends to fail, and your idealism curdles into bitterness and cynicism.

    My genuine hope is that all of us who want it gets to experience authentic love and joyful, consensual sex. It’s a real sorrow that what Nice Guys do to pursue those desires ends up getting in their way. You might have come to your idealism honestly, listening to the women in your life complain about being hurt and used by men, and thought you were doing something different. You might feel ashamed of your own desires for sex and love because you worry they’re the same as those horny men you learned to dislike. That makes it even more confusing and frustrating when the women you like keep going back to the men who hurt them and not seeing you.

    The reason the Nice Guy strategy fails tends to come down to underlying shame about yourself, your passivity, and your inability to tolerate another person’s boundaries. The loneliness you’re trying to cure through romantic connection becomes your greatest hindrance. Loneliness is true suffering, it is incredibly painful, and makes us more sensitive to rejection from the people with whom we want to connect.

    The Nice Guy strategy tries to avoid experiencing rejection by not being up front about what you want—love, or sex—and instead settle for friendship with the thought that you’re playing the long game and will eventually be seen by your beloved without having to take any risk. But when the game becomes too painful, or you finally make it clear what you want, you’ve created the conditions for a really painful rejection that would have been much gentler if it had happened before you got so invested.

    Men who have not experienced the kind of emotionally intimate friendships that women enjoy tend to get confused when they first encounter it. It feels so special and rare in comparison to the kinds of connecting that younger men do, that it’s easy to sexualize it or confuse it for romantic intimacy. So Nice Guys may feel betrayed when you finally accept that this person only wants friendship from you. The woman you befriended, who didn’t realize there was this other agenda all along, also feels betrayed. It’s not good!

    Men need emotional intimacy, companionship, friendships, and nonsexual touch as much as we need sex and romantic love. When you feel ashamed about any of these desires, you may pursue them with desperation, with resentment, or in these indirect ways that are tantamount to digging a love pit and hoping someone falls in.

    None of which is sexy. What is sexy is confidence. Confidence suggests a person who has strength and resilience, who can respect another person’s needs and boundaries, a person who won’t be easily broken or overwhelmed, a person who has direction. Confidence is willing to put his agenda forward and experience rejections and setbacks because those clear the board for a good partnership. When you’re lonely, confidence may feel impossible to achieve.

    For all my lonely clients, I strongly encourage taking a break from searching for love and romantic partnership for a while and instead investing in cultivating friendship and community. We tend to burden romantic love with too many of our needs for acceptance, validation, belonging, connection, and meaning, which is especially heavy for the early stages of meeting and dating.

    Having a community of friends, having a strong and supportive family relationship, all of these can meet many of your needs and teach you important lessons about the give and take of relationships without being so explosive. It can blunt the sharp edges of loneliness and help you find confidence and cultivate your interests. Some of those men that you think yourself better than may end up being great teachers and mentors.

    End those relationships with women where you’re secretly pining for them—either take a break or come clean. It’s not good for you. Eventually you’ll find love, but you won’t see good partnership if you’re staring at these unfulfilling friends.

    Take six months and focus on friendship and working on your anxieties and shame. Get a journal or a therapist. If you can exercise, do that. Get into your body. Practice flirting in a mirror. It’s probably weirder when you’re flirting with yourself, but watching yourself is a great way to reduce shame and get more comfortable expressing your sexual and romantic desires.

    After several months, try taking risks with women you find attractive. Don’t immediately rush to asking them out or propositioning them, and don’t send them dick pics when they haven’t asked for them. Try a month of just smiling and saying hello, and if that goes well, asking a few questions about their lives. Make that the goal—once this week, I’ll smile and talk to a woman I find attractive. The goal isn’t to get their phone number or find your soulmate, just to start building your tolerance for taking risks.

    Whether they flirt with you or reject you, it’s all part of your strength-building practice. You can practice being with the excitement of success, and you can practice tolerating the pain of rejection without lashing out and blaming her or yourself.

    As you get successes, you can try taking bigger risks. What’s most important is that you are able to hear and work to take care of your own needs. Confidence comes when we can see ourselves being resilient, able to keep going and looking for a person who can really connect with us rather than settling for unfulfilling relationships or loneliness. When your needs know that you care about them and take them seriously, they become easier to bear and to care for. It starts to become clearer when you can take a risk and when you need to protect yourself. And then you really get better at being able to do that for friends and romantic or sexual partners in your life, and accepting only those who will offer that in return.

    If you’re a straight man who has read this far, here are a few additional thoughts:

    • Be wary when you’ve created a fantasy relationship about a woman you barely know. Keep in mind you’ve invented an idealized partner and do not know the actual person. It’s not horrible to do this, but it’s a big problem to forget to get to know the real person.
    • Avoid approaching potential friends and partners with a showing-off, dominant attitude. That is what men do with each other when we feel insecure, anxious about being attacked, and want to establish a place in the social hierarchy. It’s a defense against rejection that it gets in the way of real belonging and intimacy. Pay attention to when you do this, and try being curious about the other person instead.
    • Observe how you behave toward women and ask yourself, “If I were talking to a man I respected, would I behave the same way?” Really sit with that question. It can lead you to unexpected places.

    The paradox of being a grown up is that I need other people to help me meet my needs, but no one else is obligated to do so. I must be responsible for my needs, which means I keep going until I find a relationship where we can meet each other’s needs with pleasure and enthusiasm.

  • Becoming Dissonant

    Becoming Dissonant

    When we talk about “the ego” we are talking about a function of our psyche that serves, on a personal level, the function of managing cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance occurs when we perceive multiple contradictory or inconsistent pieces of information, which can range from benign to overwhelming. If, for example, someone you really trusted and admired came out with a red balloon and made a big deal of saying it’s a blue balloon, you would experience dissonance—my perception tells me the balloon is blue, but this person I completely trust is so confident, it doesn’t make sense.

    On the level of the self, we experience dissonance all the time when we try to cling to one belief about ourself and manage all the contradictions of it. We think of ourselves as strong and confident but we have moments where we want to lay in bed for a day and be sad. We think of ourselves as health-conscious and find ourselves eating a huge bag of processed chips. The ego attempts to resolve this dissonance into a coherent, manageable story.

    We excel at creating simple stories about ourselves and the world as a form of energy conservation. If you spent every moment of your day parsing through every dissonance and inconsistency, you would get little done. You might be paralyzed by indecision or confusion, especially if your awareness of these contradictions was not grounded in acceptance.

    Our tendencies toward stereotyping and making big, grandiose declarations are efforts to reduce dissonance and avoid confronting these inconsistencies. If I’m supposed to live in the greatest country in the world but everyone around me is struggling to survive, that is dissonance. If I think of myself as a strong ally but the people to whom I’m allied are calling me out, that is dissonance.

    Our ego tendency to make a workable story to smooth out this dissonance serves us in a number of ways, but that service is also deceit. Imagine a dream in which you’re sitting at dinner with a walrus, and the walrus is your girlfriend that you’re breaking up with and is making a big scene in the restaurant. You might have a thought like, “Wait, I don’t date walruses.” And then that thought is followed by, “Oh, that’s why we’re breaking up.” Such moments in dreaming give us a window into how the ego works to smooth over dissonance. Instead of leaning into the realization that something is not right in this moment, and realizing you’re dreaming, we are lured into a deeper dream by a very plausible-seeming explanation that confirms and extends the story.

    In waking life, this can happen so quickly that we don’t even catch what’s happened. On the other hand, life will occasionally hand us a situation in which the dissonance is irreconcilable, and our sense of coherence becomes fractured into multiple competing narratives.

    On a broader cultural level, I believe we are witnessing this unfolding in the polarization and fights over disinformation and who controls the story continues. We talk about it as right versus left, which is itself an attempt to reduce dissonance by making simple dichotomies, and it is also a reflection of the weakening of a cultural ego. Those former arbiters of culture—a shared religion, a shared valuation of certain sources of news, even trust in the government—seem to be struggling to find a unifying story to smooth out inconsistencies.

    Perhaps it relates to the United States’s Pluto return, in which the wandering star Pluto has returned to the position it inhabited when the United States emerged as its own national entity. In Western modern astrology, Pluto draws out what has been psychologically repressed, particularly those uncivil energies of the will to power at the expense of harmony.

    My sense is that Pluto’s movements demand a confrontation of dissonance and recognition that old ego stories no longer serve, but have become too restrictive, too much at odds with these buried drives, and those stories need to be shed so that we can grow large enough to encompass our multitudes and find a new story.

    Or there might just be death.

    I no longer entertain the fantasy that I have some useful insight into navigating hard political realities, but as a person riding this out with everyone else, I find myself sitting with troubling questions about whether Truth exists or whether there are simply multiple competing narratives, and whomever has the most power in any situation is the one whose narrative is considered reality.

    While there seems to be a kernel of truth to that in terms of ongoing social unrest, my sense on a psychological level is that Truth exists and cannot be reduced to a story that smooths out dissonance. Truth encompasses all the contradictions and inconsistencies, it must because all of those conflicts exist and are real and no iteration of Truth can be valid if it rejects anything that is real.

    On the inner level, we need to give the ego a break sometimes and allow ourselves to attend to our inconsistencies. We can let each part of us express its world, its reality, its values, and attempt to see the validity of each without needing them to agree with each other. The expression of this multiplicity and differentiation actually leads to peace—rather than picking a side and forcing everyone else to shut up, all of our inconsistencies become more like planets that find harmonious orbits around the sun of our Self, and can express their nature in relationship with each other.

    Whether that is possible on a collective or national level is too big of a question for me for this moment. I can guarantee it will not be possible if we cannot practice this being with ourself. If we cannot tolerate our own dissonance, then we will really struggle to accept the dissonance and multiplicity of thousands of people and hundreds of years of history.

  • Self-Care is Important, and It’s Not Enough, and You Don’t Need to Apologize for That

    This past month, I was involved in two conversations in my spiritual communities around our offerings of work and the practice of Self-care. In both conversations, in slightly different ways, I noticed an attitude of recognizing the value of our practices while simultaneously apologizing, slightly, for them.

    By which I mean, adding caveats about Self-care not being a replacement for advocating for systemic change, or dismissing suggestions like “take a bath” as belittling of the struggles people experience in this world.

    How I understand and experience this impulse is having been a therapist and spiritual practitioner for several years, having lived through the rise of Self-Care Discourse and the inevitable backlash to it.

    What often irks me about backlashes is the tendency to overcorrect, to dismiss what was important and useful about the movement in the effort to address what is inadequate and harmful about it.

    The backlash to Self-care originates, as is often the case, in its over-popularization and watering down. Important practices become touted as cure-alls, and any threat they posed to the political or economic order quickly becomes neutralized once absorbed into it.

    So the transformative practices of simply sitting and doing nothing but breathing and observing one’s self, or of taking a break from hustling and consumption to relax in a warm bath, feed back into the atomizing culture of making each individual responsible for their own stress and the management of it.

    A Black woman relaxing in a bubble bath.
    Don’t you dare tell this woman this bath is silly.

    I get it. I worked at a place that offered us complementary yoga sessions and back massages once a month or so, and that was absolutely lovely, but it was not enough to make up for the horribly run meetings, the unreasonable workload, and the the covert manipulations and politics. We would be pulled into meetings where we might be asked to provide recommendations of how to improve our work conditions, spend a great deal of time and care crafting those recommendations, and then sit through another meeting where our leader spent five minutes explaining why the majority of those recommendations would not be considered.

    When Self-care is offered in these contexts, it comes across as both panacea and dismissal to problems that we aren’t causing and we can’t control. What I wanted was for my voice to be considered and to have control over my work conditions. No free ten-minute back massage can compensate exploitation.

    In the backlash, I have seen calls for more collective, community care. Which is a beautiful vision, and one that I endorse. Knowing there are people out there who will have your back, who can be there for you and you for them, is deeply relieving of stress and buoying of the spirit.

    Yet so many of us have no such community, have never experienced that kind of connection, or wouldn’t know where to begin to invest the effort and trust-building required. So many of our communities are ephemeral—they’re primarily remote, or they depend on shared employment, shared values and interests, or shared neighborhoods, all of which may change quickly and unexpectedly. When we invest in a community and find it dissolving or giving nothing back, that is deeply demoralizing.

    Lonely people need something to hold onto while they’re doing the work of building community or advocating for change. Taking a bath, going to therapy, taking a walk, meditating or praying, spraying a bottle of charged aromatic water—none of these things are enough to transform oppressive and exploitative circumstances.

    Yet those of us who know the importance of these practices need not apologize for that. These acts are not meant to transform the world. They are meant to create enough space and calm for our Selves to be seen and tended. They are meant to help us remember who we really are beyond this moment and this struggle, and to bring that essence into the work in front of us.

    Our work is not to disconnect, but to connect with greater depth and presence over time. Self-care helps us to face the world with an inspired imagination; an open, courageous heart; and the power of our wills.

  • Feelings are gross.

    “Ugh,” I said. “I’m having feelings about that. Feelings are gross!”

    “Aren’t you a therapist?” My therapist asks, gently trying to coax me to shut the fuck up and sit with my feelings, as a good therapist does.

    “Yes! And I’m a good therapist because I know feelings are gross!”

    This disgust response was not one I’d ever felt so viscerally before this past year, but it’s one I recognize from my younger life. Something in me had learned to see my needs and vulnerabilities as shameful, disordered, and needing to be controlled and hidden as much as possible. When I was confronted with the necessity of caring for my feelings, it was often done with as much distance as I could muster, as though I was a disgusted caregiver trying to hold their breath as they rush through changing a baby’s diaper.

    What seemed surprising to me was this resurgence, as I’d spent a number of years feeling enthusiastic about connecting with and caring for my feelings, embracing my needs, being vulnerable and sensitive and letting my sweetness emerge.

    Letting down my intellectualizing, dismissive protectors was a tremendous risk and a scary effort, and I am so grateful I did and got to learn how joyful it is to be soft and loving. And I also got emotionally hurt, and many of my ideals about life and connection proved to have illusions attached to them, and COVID happened, and I retreated back into cynical defeat and detachment.

    Which was okay, for a time, but I knew I didn’t want to live there either. There has to be a path between cynicism and naive vulnerability, and I am condemned to continue to seek it, though the seeking at times means having to find one of those edges if only to know I’ve gone too far in one direction.

    Though you may not relate to my disgust response, I know there are many parts of us who similarly feel unhappy with having needs, vulnerabilities, and tender feelings. We tend to associate these with animals and children, those needy creatures, and identify ourselves with the wearied adults trying to get them to calm down so we can get a moment’s rest. Those parts of us feel embarrassed or exhausted by the needs they cannot quite accept or understand.

    The beauty of our animal nature.

    This style of distancing may be very intellectual, or cynical, or darkly humored, but there’s a tricky style that looks very much like a person who knows all the right things to do and say. They have a robust spiritual practice, or they read Oprah and Brené Brown religiously, and they can tell you with a smile and full eye contact how important vulnerability is to connection. All the while hiding their grossest feelings.

    Brené Brown is actually quite a good role model for this problem, as her public persona has been consistently, brutally honest with her own journey around acceptance and shame. She does not allow herself or us to deify her as some shame-free enlightened person for whom vulnerability is easy.

    Vulnerability is never easy. Even when we expand our “comfort zones” there is always more territory of discomfort to own or explore, and old pains and vulnerabilities that creep back in when we’re busy having other adventures.

    Recently I’ve been listening to spiritual teachers, coaches, and even some therapists who seem to promise that if you work hard enough you’ll reach a state where you are fully healed and un-triggerable. Wouldn’t that be so wonderful?

    Yet I think such aspirations are not only unrealistic but that they become a hindrance to healing and growth in time. We reach a point where we’re feeling the same old disgust and impatience with ourselves, but now it’s dressed up in more refined spiritual or psychological language that boils down to “I don’t want to deal with this!”

    This mindset of healing is quite aggressive—that our needs and wounds must be uprooted, or transformed, or eradicated to reach a particular desirable state of consciousness. When we merge with this perspective, we tend to be uncharitable, condescending, and inhospitable to those parts of us that are younger, shyer, more tender, more unruly. We cannot meet our needs on their own terms, and so we cannot work with them.

    What I am working on is helping my disgusted fixing parts to instead see all of myself as a garden where many things grow, and all these things contribute to the vitality of my ecosystem, and some things may be interfering with the growth of others. Nothing that grows here is a problem to solve, or broken, but it’s a creature that requires my curiosity to learn about and understand so that I can help it to thrive and help the larger garden to thrive.

    Even my disgusted fixer part is a wonderful caretaker who can manage the higher level functions of the garden with expertise, and needs time to sit and relax and enjoy the sun for a while. Nothing helps him to relax better than being confronted by these needy creatures that remind me I’m not a machine, not an angel, not a disembodied spirit—I’m an animal that needs feeding and rest, fun and play, meaningful work and spacious emptiness.

    There is nothing to be ashamed of when we can dwell in the entirety of our gardens.

  • Forgiving Trespasses

    Forgiving Trespasses

    Recently I’ve had cause to reflect on The Lord’s Prayer. As a former Catholic, I prayed it often, and recently I was struck by the phrase “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespassed against us.”

    Younger me took this injunction to God as a goad to my sense of deep shame. I’d better forgive everyone quickly so that God forgives me for all my sin!

    Having stepped away from that practice and returning to the text, the word “trespass” intrigues me. I do not know the original text, or what word was used here, or what it might have meant. But in the English language “trespass” has multiple meanings of crossing moral lines, causing injury, and encroaching on property that does not belong to us.

    In contemporary popular psychology, this fits neatly with the harm as a crossing or violation of boundaries. Most violations of boundaries engender a harm: to break into someone’s house, to assault them without consent, to take up personal or emotional space and deny them the agency to set their own limits.

    As an aside, though I am using “harm” generically here, I think it is deeply important that we make the effort to be specific in our naming of harms. Simply saying that a person has done harm is not workable. Workability may not be your goal, but if accountability is at all possible, it is worth being as clear as possible what the harms have been.

    In reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, I connected to a quoted passage from Hanif Abdurraqib’s column at Pacific Standard, “Why Do We Expect Victims of Racism to Forgive?” There is so much that is worthy in this column, but for the purposes of this post I want to call out the following:

    Of course, to deny forgiveness is not the same as to wish someone ill. Rather, it is denying a perpetrator the opportunity to feel absolved for their misdeeds. Forgiveness is, in part, an internal process, something that each of us arrives at on our own time and through our own means. To express that forgiveness out loud can certainly be healing, but it’s also an exercise that works for the benefit of the perpetrator. There is no honest healing in absolving someone who has done you harm if you don’t feel they deserve absolution from you.

    – Hanif Abdurraqibg

    If trespass is a metaphor for harm, then there is little merit in forgiving a trespasser who remains in your territory without your consent. Such forgiveness tends to be more from the self-preserving impulse of people pleasing, or “fawning,” to survive by trying to align one’s self with the will of the one who harms you.

    When the harmer pressures the harmed into forgiveness or reconciliation, that’s often a sign that they still do not respect the harmed one, or understand the harm done. Reconciliation without genuine accountability from the harmer tends to set one up for being harmed again.

    When the trespass is corrected—everyone is back within their own appropriate boundaries, and respecting each other’s—then the harmed person can have the space to work through their feelings and determine whether forgiveness or reconciliation is worthwhile.

    Forgiveness is never owed, but the person harmed may one day find it to their benefit to forgive, if only to let go of the pain and anger, which can be their own hooks that keep us bound to the harmful person. Whether through vengeance, pleading, pleasing, or desperation, our efforts to repeatedly have our hurt recognized, validated, and understood by a person who repeatedly demonstrates their inability to do any of those things becomes a form of self-harm.

    When I think of forgiveness, I think of accepting the person as exactly who they are, accepting myself for the ways I participated, and finding the right boundaries I need to have peace within myself and between myself and the one who hurt me.

    Reconciliation is not required for forgiveness. You may decide reconciliation is the right move, or you may never welcome that person into your life again. Whatever brings you to peace and security is right.

    And now I feel I can offer that forgiveness and want the same in return—for those hurts I cause to be forgiven in a way that allows space and distance needed for the hurt person to be at peace, and to make amends and take accountability as needed.

    If the person who caused harm is struggling with not being able to control whether forgiveness and reconciliation will happen, the best practice would be to continue to work on themself and explore how their behavior contributed to these circumstances, and to respect the boundaries of the person they hurt. Eventually they may prove themselves to have become a safe and honorable person, but if all you can do is never cause that harm again, that would be a beautiful rose growing from the pile of manure of what happened between you.

  • You Don’t Have to Be Miserable Because There is Suffering

    You Don’t Have to Be Miserable Because There is Suffering

    A few years I was on the phone with a close friend and talking about things that were going really well for me, and I found myself prefacing it with, “I know I’m privileged—”

    And my friend, who in the cube matrix of privilege might be said to have “less” than me, said very soberly. “You don’t have to do that.”

    After reflecting on it for a moment, I said, “I feel like I say that reflexively. Like it’s a superstition. A spell against cancellation.”

    Writing that, it reminds me of various wards against the evil eye. In my understanding of the evil eye in Italian cultures, it’s an almost instinctive curse one might draw from envious people if you do too much bragging and showing off. Among the practices of protection against the evil eye, one is to disown any responsibility for one’s fortune and lay it in the hands of your God. So the people who thank God or Jesus for their Oscar or football victory are engaging in a long tradition of protection against the envy and resentment of others.

    “Owning one’s privilege” is not the same as thanking God—the feeling behind it is much more of repentance and shame than gratitude, for one. But it feels related to a parallel formulation I keep hearing myself and other people say—”The world is on fire, but I’m doing okay.”

    When we say this, it’s often with a mixture of embarrassment, confusion, or perhaps guilt. How can I be okay when the world is on fire?

    Not to be cute, but I think this question and confusion itself is an expression of living with a measure of privilege. Many of us have been lucky enough to grow up in periods of relative stability and abundance, though we may not have understood it at the time. We didn’t have the context.

    Whatever your life is when you’re growing up is your “normal.” You literally know nothing else other than your conditions, unless you are educated through family lore or school to put your experience in a larger context. So perhaps your great grandparents lived through the Depression, or came to the United States as refugees with little more than the clothes they wore, but by the time you came around your parents were able to afford a house where you had your own room and always had enough to eat.

    Perhaps you hear stories about hardship, war, unrest, deprivation, but it’s hard to connect those realities to your experience. Some of us have families that share the stories of hardship and survival and help us to keep in living memory the awareness that things could get worse. In times of peace and abundance, those families may get spurned as being too stuck in the past. But for many of us, those memories have become deeply relevant again.

    Yet whenever there is unrest, poverty, war, droughts, pandemic, life continues. We have children. We work. We find time to dream or celebrate. We age and die. There are many among us who die early, or who suffer horrors, who may or may not survive to continue life.

    It’s a sorrow for those of our families who didn’t pass along the stories of struggle and sorrow along with the joys. Without those roots, we get frozen in a strange guilt-anxiety as we imagine all the horrors to come and uncertain if it’s okay to enjoy or celebrate the moment.

    But this moment is all we have. That’s a trite saying, said so many times, but it’s trite because it’s true and we have to keep reminding ourselves. Some horrors are happening and will happen regardless of whether we sit here and worry about it or feel upset.

    Blocking out those horrors entirely doesn’t serve, because there is merit in standing against them and fighting. But fighting is a part of being alive; we’re not alive only to fight.

    Suffering, too, is a part of living, and our joy can contribute to others’ suffering. When that happens, it’s important to discern how we are responsible and what we are willing to do to alleviate or remediate the harm. Yet living in suffering, self-denial, and self-deprivation is not necessarily a balm to others’ suffering.

    What do we do when we say, “The world is on fire”? We imagine a world tiny enough that it can be engulfed by a totalizing event, yet we distance ourselves from it, as though we and our lives are not of the world.

    If our lives are okay, then the entire world is not on fire. Or, even if there is fire, there are places of safety and respite, joy and generation within it.

    Whenever I find myself caught in a totalizing vision of catastrophe—and there are so many opportunities to do that—I acknowledge and honor that a part of me cares deeply, a part of me wants to not cause harm, and wants everyone to be okay. How awful for those tender parts of me that this can never be guaranteed.

    Then I feel my feet on the ground, look at my immediate environment, align my mind to what is occurring to me in the moment. Then I find what is within my power to do, to bring more kindness, more agency, more ease into the world. I offer gratitude for those blessings and privileges I do have, and I grieve the suffering that my blessings or privileges may contribute toward, and then I look at what I can do about it.

  • For Queer Men and Others Seeking Love and Lust

    For Queer Men and Others Seeking Love and Lust

    In my practice, I work with many men and nonbinary folk with longings for partnership and sexual fulfillment. Being both a therapist and a human being, I have both subjective opinions and informed perspectives on the joys and struggles of this journey, and I wanted to share common observations and advice that come up in these discussions.

    In the ongoing pendulum swing of the culture wars, the energy seems to be turning against gender and sexual minorities and the culture of sexual openness and consent we’ve cultivated for decades—and here I include those straight, kinky, and polyamorous people who are part of that culture.

    Some of the rising critiques have merit and are worthy of consideration, as every movement includes people and positions that overreach and cause harm. Yet it would grieve us to lose what wisdom, beauty, and joy we’ve made in this culture, so that is another motivation to document what I’ve learned both living and being a therapist in these communities.

    I address this to queer men and enbies because that is the culture in which I am most immersed, but I believe at heart there are similarities in the experience of seeking connection that cross identity categories. So if you find something in here that resonates with you, claim it! If it doesn’t, brush it aside!

    Below are mini-essays that offer strategies for enjoying love and sex with responsibility, maturity, and respect for yourself and your partners. The following links will take you directly to each section:

    Seeking Lust, Seeking Love

    In my early twenties, when I was freshly out, I was one of the guys who “hated the gay scene” and imagined I was the rare soul who wanted true romance and connection amidst a group of shallow and hedonistic, vapid people. Unfortunately, this attitude made me haughty and judgmental of a lot of decent, authentic people who had a different relationship with their sexuality and gender than was comfortable for me.

    Essentially, I was deeply insecure, terrified of being excluded from a community I’d just joined, uncertain of my place in it, and hiding behind self-righteous superiority rather than risking authenticity. Not every queer man goes through this phase of coming out and joining the community, but it’s quite recognizable when it happens.

    So many queer men say they truly want a connected, monogamous relationship, and are utterly uninterested in open relationships or the promiscuous gay culture—yet so many of these same folks have sex with guys they barely know, and sometimes guys in open relationships. What I’m saying is, their behavior does not seem to align with their stated values.

    Being in an open relationship is not mandatory—more on that later—but what I’m pointing toward is that sex and romance are not simple desires that yield to moralistic declarations and rigid rules. When we feel loneliness and shame, being sexually desired may feel like a balm, an ego boost, even if acting on it only leaves us with more loneliness and shame later. When seeking sex or love is primarily motivated by escape—wanting to be rescued from loneliness and shame—we’re going to have a hard time being authentic and making meaningful and enduring connections.

    When looking for connection, you might be looking for sex that’s just about play, fun, ego gratification, or exploration; or you might be looking for sex that’s about connection, intimacy, building closeness and partnership. In practice, of course, we aren’t always clear what desires are driving us, and they may overlap or blur together or disguise themselves as each other. But, whenever possible, it makes things much easier in the long run to be clear with yourself about your motivations when you’re pursuing sex or romance.

    When you meet a guy, I encourage you to approach it with openness and curiosity about where the connection will lead, without burdening it with intense expectations. You may be meeting your partner for the next several decades, or a person you’ll never want to see again, or a potential new friend, or a person with whom you’ll have a pretty good relationship that helps you grow but eventually ends. Needing to know right away which it will be puts too much pressure on a relationship that you are actually creating together with your choices.

    Stay Centered in Self-Respect

    No matter what connection you’re forming, and with whom, come to the person with respect for them and yourself. One way I know I’m in a place of mutual respect is from the feeling in my body and heart when in relationship with the other person.

    When I am centered, grounded, and in self-respect, I can feel myself standing completely supported by my feet and heels. My shoulders are back and down, so my heart is open. My core is engaged but not tight or tense, so that my spine lifts upward. Even sitting, I feel myself sitting back on butt with core engaged and posture lifting up, supported by the seat.

    Mature, supportive, connected relationships foster a mutual experience of this centeredness and groundedness for all involved. From this posture, we can reach out to connect with each other, or let go of the connection and remain in balance. We can move toward or away from each other as needed.

    Sometimes, however, a relationship might elicit a feeling of leaning too far forward, reaching toward the other, arms collapsing around the heart and belly and losing one’s center of gravity in the extension. We may be reaching out to comfort or be comforted, to please, to control, to hold—regardless, we feel we have to reach before they move completely away from us.

    In these relationships, you may experience a sense that the other person is frequently stepping back, withdrawing slightly, perhaps occasionally moving toward you in flirtation or connection, perhaps inviting you to follow, but never quite staying still and showing they want to be connected to you. Often these folks are gorgeous, ego-validating, alive in some way that you deeply desire, but more often than not you feel the sense that you have to keep pursuing to keep them in your life. Perhaps you have one magical date, and then they don’t respond to texts for days, if at all; or they keep changing plans or dropping them; or they keep complaining about the ways you’re not doing enough for them.

    When we reach out too far, we compromise the ability of our shoulders to support us—when our shoulders are down and back, our arms can pull the other toward us and us toward the other simultaneously. Unsupported, we can get ourself in a position where we fall on our face when they’re not there to catch us.

    Should you find yourself reaching out too much, what helps is either to drop your arms or take a step forward. Dropping your arms is about letting go of the overreach and pursuit and allowing them to come to you. Pay attention to what feels like pursuit —texting with no response, flirting with no flirt back, buying expensive things but never feeling considered, showing up for dates and getting stood up again—and instead match your effort to the energy they’re giving you. So if he says, for the fiftieth time, he’d like to grab coffee without offering any concrete plan, just say, “Great, let me know what works for you.”

    Stepping toward in this situation means, to me, risking vulnerability and honesty about what’s going on here. When reaching but not moving our legs, we’re usually trying to protect ourselves from rejection or disappointment by not being direct about what we want and what we’re doing. If you state, clearly, what you want, or what you’re noticing, it’s a vulnerable confrontation that can finally invite clarity to the situation.

    Neither of these strategies guarantees that you’ll get the person you’re pursuing. It’s not impossible, but the goal is not to win, the goal is to find a partner who can give back what you’re giving out.

    The other posture is that of leaning backward, closing our arms over our bodies to protect the heart, turning our faces away while staying rooted in position. Relationships that elicit this tend to be with people who seem to be coming in way too close, way too quickly, wanting way too much. These folks attach faster than you do, and seem more comfortable expressing their needs and wants and their big feelings when they aren’t getting what they want. They also seem to run away with the same intensity that they run toward you, which makes honesty feel too risky.

    In this posture, our body tries to indicate its presence and connection by staying in place, but create space for ourselves to think and respond by leaning away and back. This is actually quite a confusing posture, with mixed signals, even if internally you feel like your disgust and frustration must be apparent.

    This, too, threatens to overreach into a collapse backwards, and all efforts to accommodate and avoid conflict may come to nothing when we fall on our asses and they simply watch us fall, or walk away.

    When you find yourself leaning back too far, you could try either pushing back or stepping back. Pushing back is not a shove, though your early efforts might feel like one. (Keep in mind I mean this metaphorically. Don’t shove your partner.) Instead, it’s keeping that upright, centered, grounded posture and putting your hands firmly but softly against your partner, letting your arms and shoulders establish the space you need to stay connected while centered.

    Pushing back is giving feedback, communicating both your desire to be with your partner and what space you need to be your best self with them. In practice it’s about being authentic and honest about your needs and feelings. If you’re feeling tired and overwhelmed and your partner wants to stay over for the fifth night in a row—leaning back would be to let him stay over but quietly and sullenly withdraw the entire time. Pushing back would be to tell him that you’re exhausted and need time for yourself to recharge so you can be present with him.

    Stepping back in this situation is fairly intuitive. Let the person know you’re stepping back and for how long. Give yourself the space you need to look at what’s been going on and whether this connection feels right for you. If you want to continue the connection, reset expectations so that you can both know how close you need to be to keep your posture.

    Again, neither of these moves guarantee the relationship will stay intact, but they will either improve the connection or provide the clarity you both need to make good choices for yourselves.

    Apps

    Hookup and dating apps are no better or worse than other kinds of technology. They serve a purpose. When engaging with them, keep in mind:

    1. They are designed to bring profit and ongoing income to the company that created it. They are incentivized to draw and keep your attention for as long as they can. They are not incentivized to help you find your own true love or, as the guys say, “a reason to delete this app.”
    2. There is a piece of guidance around not going to the grocery store when you’re hungry, because you’ll end up buying food you don’t really want or need and not prioritize the food you wanted and needed. Think of being on an app while horny in the same way.
    3. You may be using apps and the pursuit of sex or romance as a way of covering over other needs—for friendship, for rest, for play, for adventure, for emotional solace, for self-esteem. Pay attention to when and how you use it, and look for other ways to meet those needs.
    4. When talking to a guy on an app, imagine that you were at a party having the same conversation. Would you keep having this conversation?
    5. Try not to let your entire schedule get stalled while waiting for a guy to tell you if he’s interested and available. You don’t know what is going on over on his side, and you’ll feel worse about yourself if you blew off plans and nothing happens.
    6. Sometimes it’s better, and kinder, to directly tell the person you’re not interested. Often the honesty is appreciated. When it’s not, you can block them. Some guys will accept your honesty and then keep hitting on you. You can block them too.

    If You Can’t Find Your Match, Become Him

    Often we want or expect things from our partners that we actually want to cultivate in ourselves. We may feel shame or inadequacy about our sexuality and want the other person to give us permission to feel sexy, desired, and alive. We may want them to offer the structure and discipline we lack, or to have an athletic body, or dress a certain way.

    If you want what you don’t have, consider cultivating those qualities in yourself instead. Invest in your own physical, emotional, and social fitness in the ways that are right for you and grow those capacities that are underdeveloped.

    One of my friends taught me that if you want to be a guy who looks hot and confident in fetish wear, practice wearing it around the house and doing things so that you start to feel comfortable in it. That wisdom offers many applications. Rather than waiting for someone to give you the permission or validation to wear a speedo or a jock strap or whatever, practice being in it and then risk wearing one in public. After the initial feelings of anxiety and vulnerability, often it ends up feeling normal and almost like a non-event. Most gay men are more preoccupied with the condition of their own abs than whether someone else has them.

    Similarly, if you want to get more comfortable expressing yourself sexually, practice it while watching yourself in the mirror or taking video of yourself. This practice dissolves shame and awkwardness and may help you learn how to turn yourself on. Don’t underestimate the value of this. This isn’t simple narcissism. Being confidently turned on is a real turn on for others.

    Often I counsel guys who have empty lives and feel frustrated that they can’t find a partner. They’re in limbo, imagining that romance will give them permission to finally start living. If you feel empty and lonely in your life, take time to explore your interests, find friends, join a group or a sports team, get involved with your community. Build your life and focus on your goals instead of making partnership your primary focus.

    When love comes, then, it will be a compliment to a life you already love, and you’ll be grow the relationship with authenticity and deliberation rather than rushing into something that seems okay because you’re lonely.

    And if love doesn’t come, you still have a life you love.

    Look for Potential, Not a Project

    When you start connecting with a potential long-term partner, pay less attention to whether you’re immediately certain about them, and more to how the connection grows and deepens with more acquaintance. If you’re sold on the guy early on, great! But it’s normal to not be a hundred percent sure, but to enjoy spending time with them enough to want to keep doing it.

    It’s not wise to expect an immediate soul connection and mutual understanding without communication in conflict. Nor is it wise to front load your first dates with an introduction to your trauma history and all your problems. Let the relationship build in trust and intimacy through the dance of taking a risk, seeing if it pays off, and working with it if it doesn’t.

    Relationships that continue to grow, deepen, become more interesting, and remain enjoyable show the potential you want, even if they’re not completely perfect. But if your potential partner is in a place in life that’s very different from yours, and seems to require all of your energy and effort to develop, that may not be sustainable long term.

    If your partner is unwilling to allow you to have your own life, alienates you from your friends and family, demands you constantly accede to their wishes and preferences, physically assaults you, threatens self-harm when confronted on problems, pressures you into sex you don’t like, steals your belongings for drug money, or constantly belittles you and makes you feel bad about yourself and your wants and needs—these are abusive dynamic that won’t get better with your energy and investment.

    There is a common belief that abusers tend to be the more powerful partner in the relationship, which does happen, but it is also quite common for the abusive partner to have a more unstable life and depend upon the partner they’re abusing for emotional and financial support.

    The message I want to give, over and over, is that you deserve to be in a relationship of mutual connection, investment, and support. If you’re not in one, you deserve the chance to find one.

    Health and Safety

    The following are unpleasant considerations. You don’t have to live in fear, but reasonable precautions and a safety strategy go a long way to make life easier. That said, no safety strategy is a hundred percent effective, so if you find yourself scammed, hurt, or infected with an illness—don’t beat yourself up. But do reflect on what you learned from the situation that could help you refine your safety strategy.

    Keep informed about the trends of infections in your community, and mindful that queer men go all over the world to connect with each other, so we have quite a large community. If you want to have sex with a lot of people, get whatever preventative care you can, like vaccines and PReP.

    Whatever sex you want to have, whatever precautions you want to take—get in the habit of communicating these up front. Do not assume that you are on the same page without communication. Do not assume that, even when you’ve communicated, your partner will respect your boundaries, unless they show their trustworthiness. If your boundaries are not respected, end the situation and get out if you can.

    If you get diagnosed with an illness, inform your recent partners as quickly as possible. It is never a pleasant conversation but it is the responsible one to take care of your community. Try to avoid getting bogged down in blame or figuring out who gave it to whom, unless you are in a monogamous relationship and you’ve been faithful. Otherwise, getting sick is a risk you take when having sex, so it doesn’t serve to get caught up in blame.

    If you’re meeting a stranger for sex, avoid bringing anything that you don’t want to disappear. Try to meet in a neutral public space beforehand, or make sure someone knows where you’re going and when to check in on you.

    Do not accept a drink from a stranger that you didn’t watch being poured or opened. Avoid leaving your drinks unattended at a party or a bar. Occasionally unethical people will drug your drink in an attempt to take advantage of you. This is never okay.

    Trust building is ongoing and begins in the first seconds of contact, and trust is about revealing yourself, seeing if the person responds well, and then seeing if they reveal themself in kind. When a person reveals too much too quickly, or fails to reveal anything about themself while demanding more of you, those are concerning signs about their ability to respect you.

    People who claim to have no boundaries, or who insist their partners cannot have boundaries, are a danger. Everyone has limits and boundaries. It’s okay to not be sure what your boundaries are and explore them, but you need an atmosphere where it’s safe to communicate about these things and check in with each other.

    People who will only interact with you in a “role” are similarly worth caution—it is the definition of objectification. Whatever you do, you need to be able to step out of your roles and check in with each other when things come up.

    If a stranger seems very pushy, eager, insistent, reticent to share important details with you (like a face picture), and you get a strange feeling you don’t trust them, listen to that.

    I don’t have much advice about drugs and sex. I’d be concerned if drugs became the center of your sex life, or if your intoxication consistently overwhelms your judgment, or if you need to be drunk or high to have sex.

    I would encourage you to avoid meth altogether. It has ruined a lot of decent people.

    Etiquette for Open Relationships

    Many long-term gay couples and throuples have a version of open relationship, but it’s not universal nor necessary for a fulfilling life and relationship. Don’t agree to it just because you feel pressured or expected to do it.

    In general, it’s helpful to cultivate a sense of partnership in which you both want happiness for yourselves and each other, and are willing to do the work to support each other in that happiness. Mismatches in desire is not only normal, it’s inevitable, and it’s a dynamic you need to work with whether the mismatch is in how much you want sex, how clean you need your place to be, whether to go on vacation this summer, or whether to have an open or polyamorous relationship.

    When a mismatch of desires arise, avoid the pitfall of making it one person’s fault. Neither of you is “causing” the mismatch, but it’s a problem for both to work on together. The desire for monogamy and the desire for an open relationship are both valid in their own ways, all rooted in your histories and dreams, and equally rife with blessings and pitfalls.

    If you have such a mismatch and choose to commit to monogamy, polyamory, or an open relationship, let the person who didn’t want it have time to find their own reasons to accept and find value in the new shape, without rushing or guilting them.

    Should you open your relationship, take some time to explore individually and with each other your fears and concerns about it. Let those fears and concerns help you shape the agreements that work best for both of you. Do not use rules as a way to cudgel or control each other.

    Expect these agreements to be renegotiated and evolve with time. You will encounter gray areas and unexpected situations that bring up feelings and concerns you didn’t think to have before. When these happen, try to honor each other’s feelings but see if you can avoid blaming each other for not knowing what to do before you knew it would be an issue. Then figure out together how you want to handle it if it comes up again.

    Early on, agreements in open and poly relationships tend to be rigid and legalistic. There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s an important step, but every law has unexpected consequences to manage. If you will only have sex with other guys when you’re together, you may discover that it’s hard to find a third person that you’re both into and who is into both of you equally.

    The process of making, honoring, and revising agreements builds a stronger sense of trust and partnership, along with understanding of each other’s desires and vulnerabilities. This may lead to the rules becoming simpler and more flexible over time. Power comes from your partnership and trust; the rules are simply an exercise to cultivate it.

    If you begin to find you resent one of your agreements, do not break it without talking to your partner and renegotiating it. Breaking your agreements without consent is a form of cheating and will deteriorate the trust you have in each other, which will make it harder to renegotiate.

    If you’re in an open relationship and have sex buddies, treat them with hospitality. Your sex buddies are not responsible for knowing and upholding your agreements; that’s your and your partner’s job. If your sex buddy wants something off limits, it’s your job to communicate the boundary without framing your partner as this awful person keeping you from joy. Simply saying, “I don’t want that,” or “That’s not something I can do” is enough.

    Sex buddies are also not responsible for keeping your secrets, hearing all of your complaining about your partner, or being the communication go-between for you and your partner. Consider them guests unless you all decide to deepen the relationship.

    If you’re the sex buddy and you’re hooking up with one or more guys in a relationship, you have the right to your own boundaries and to not be put in the middle of their conflicts. Neither should you feel responsible for solving or managing their problems, keeping their secrets, and you definitely should avoid playing one against the other.

    In all relationships, we each have our own unique relationship with one other person. Charles and Chuck may be lovers; Charles and Patrick may be husbands; Chuck and Patrick may be friends. When Chuck and Patrick are having a conflict, Charles should let them work it out without making it his responsibility.

    If you have an open or polyamorous relationship, you will experience feelings of jealousy, disappointment, envy, and occasionally feeling rejected or left out. These aren’t signs of being unevolved or weak or inferior, and they’re not necessarily signs that an open relationship is wrong for you, they’re simply human feelings worthy of care.

    Open relationships and polyamory are like relationship graduate school. Before you begin one, you might imagine this amazing world of unfettered sex and love. What you forget to imagine is how much it will bring up all of your old wounds around being left out, rejected, or unwanted.

    When they come up, take time to reflect on the feelings, journal about them, and then share them when you and your partner(s) are rested, sober, fed, and available for a conversation. Acknowledging the feelings is often enough, but they may also be signs that you are needing more time, energy, and attention from your partner, or to renegotiate an agreement.

    Closing Thoughts

    Once I got past my initial fears and insecurities about the gay community, I became entranced by this vision of mutual caring and love for each other expressed in all its forms. What I aspired to has been a culture of love without coercion, and love that exalts and brings out the best in each other while honoring our individual selfhoods. Experience has taught me that ideal is not universally shared or even known, and love and lust are as potent in bringing out the worst of us as the best.

    We make too much of sex and love. Not that these things are unimportant or not worth pursuing, but we burden them with so many unacknowledged fantasies and fears and desires that these activities really cannot accomplish for us. There is no one hot enough in the world that their desiring you will make you feel free of your insecurities. There is no moment when you finally achieve the sexiness you’ve always wanted and become clear of your sense of inadequacies. There is no lover or partner for whom being in relationship is an endless easy ride where you never have to feel bad or hurt or have hard conversations.

    In life, there will be seasons of great activity, and seasons of quietude. You may find yourself not as interested in sex as you once were, or very interested and struggling to find partners, or beset by interest from people that don’t interest you. In long term relationships, there may be seasons of great connection and seasons of coolness. Don’t imagine any of these seasons will last for the rest of your life or your relationships.

    When I was coming out, the joke was that gay men functionally died after the age of 25; there was an obsession with the beauty of youth, looking young, and having younger partners, or bemoaning not being attractive to young partners. This can’t be divorced from the context, in the late 90s and early 2000s, of being at the tail end of the worst of the AIDS epidemic that killed most of the men who would have become our elders and mentors, who might have shown us ways to age and find beauty in aging.

    I know the obsession with youth continues to exist in some parts of the community, but it’s been fascinating and heartening to watch as men live into their later life and discover a whole new phase of being desirable to those who are attracted to maturity.

    Even in times of horror and hardship, living and loving in all its forms offers us joy. There is still merit to living toward an aspiration—toward cultivating maturity, responsibility for self and community, honesty, integrity, and the capacity not to be taken for a fool; all the while continuing to grow our capacity for open-heartedness and speaking to the best within each other.

    I want us to have all the joy that’s possible in this world while we’re also experiencing the struggles and the greater purpose. Listen to yourself, respect yourselves and each other, be smart, and don’t let yourself believe you have to be stuck in misery.

  • Coming Out is Courageous

    For Pride I want to say what has been on my heart for years. There has been a thread in Queer Discourse that seems to be comparing the conditions of “coming out.” Some people, it is said, have the “privilege” to be out, while others experience too much oppression or precarity. People who come out late in life likely experience some scorn and criticism for waiting so long, while recently I read a dear friend suggesting that youth have an easier time coming out than those later in life, who have to deal with the complexities of coming out with a career and sometimes a family and children that do not align with their sexuality and gender.

    Multiple conflicting things are simultaneously true. No one should be pressured to come out if they’re not emotionally ready or if their life circumstances are too precarious. And the challenges and heartbreak of coming out late in life is certainly much different than the risks of coming out young. What rankles me, however, is the way these perspectives seem to subtly invalidate the courage and risk-taking of those who do come out, whether early in life or at all.

    The truth is, you do not know if you have the “privilege to be out” until you are out. When I came out to my parents, I had no idea whether they’d be accepting or affirming or even allow me to stay in the house, as kids my age at that time (and today) are at risk of being thrown out when they come out to their parents. My own friends made jokes about beating up queers.

    What prompted my disclosure, at age 15, was going to church with my mother and listening to yet another homily from the priest about the sinfulness of homosexuality and the Catholic love that wants to call them home (to be straight, or celibate). By this point in my life I’d been wrestling with my sexuality consciously for three years. Catholicism was deeply important to my identity and the culture of my family—our extended relatives would pray the rosary together with my grandparents during out family vacations.

    I was fully aware of the Catholic teachings on homosexuality, and after much prayer, contemplation, and painful efforts to change, I’d come upon my own knowing that God was not the one who had the problem with me or my desires. What made me feel like my heart was being ripped in half was not knowing how I could honor my truth and my religious and family identity.

    So while I had no reason to believe I would be shunned, I also had no idea how my parents would react. All I knew was that I could no longer live with it being a secret. That took courage. That was a risk.

    Feet standing in the center of a series of rainbow-colored circles.

    Coming out is always courageous, always risky. Every time I’m in a new situation that requires me to come out, there is always a moment of assessment—how safe is this situation? Am I in a condition where I’ll be able to deal with a negative reaction? And every time, you don’t know how they’ll respond until you’ve done it.

    To cope with the anxiety of this, I made a practice of finding ways to come out as quickly as possible—mentioning a boyfriend or husband, or otherwise giving a tell. As an adult, it’s possible that being openly gay closed certain doors to career opportunities or other forms of social acceptance and privilege that would be available to those who kept their queerness hidden. And it’s possible that my being out allowed me to be an advocate and an influence on culture that wouldn’t have been possible.

    The fact that I was able to stay afloat and make a good life for myself is of course a result of the support, community, and privileges I had, including a family that did not reject me and was willing to do the work to understand and accept me.

    And there is also a privilege in receiving opportunities for wealth and status that are only available because you’re not out of the closet. And that kind of privilege is its own kind of hell, to live a life experiencing daily discrimination against LGBTQ+ folk, knowing that the life you’ve worked to build could be ruined by an accidental discovery or a disclosure.

    What I want to say is, for Pride this year, in a year when the tide of the law is turning against queer people, can we honor that it’s always a risk to come out? That it always takes courage to make visible something within you that could be hidden or repressed? That there is a cost to being out, and a cost to staying hidden?

    There is also a power in coming out that our queer elders and ancestors knew. When you are visible, you are a target, but you are also a force. The people in your life can’t have bias against a strange, foreign entity; they have to reconcile their beliefs about this class of people with the person that you are, and the relationship you have with them. Your love for each other makes you both irritants to each other’s worldviews.

    It’s comfortable and sometimes necessary to reject the irritant and surround yourself with comforting reassurance and shared beliefs. And it contributes to the polarization we find ourselves in in our culture, where we move more and more toward extremes because we cannot tolerate the irritation of loving someone whose life does not reconcile with our beliefs.

    But when you stay with that irritant, it becomes a pearl. My grandmother, with whom I prayed the rosary so much, and who said unkind things to me about gayness when I was young, came to my commitment ceremony to my husband. She was a powerful woman of sincere faith and diligent practice, attending Catholic mass daily and doing regular acts of service. She was the real deal. And as she approached the end of her life, she shared, “I just don’t think it’s that hard to get into Heaven anymore.”

    I don’t believe that change was entirely about me and my coming out, but I do believe that my choice to be openly gay and to stay connected to my family was a part of this great process that held us together. And as her beliefs changed, over time I was finally able to begin to heal my relationship with family and religion and find, for me, how my heart can be whole even if the ideologies tell me it should be divided.

    Whatever privileges I had or didn’t have, all of this has been work, and it has been hard. And it comes in the wake of the work that my queer ancestors did of coming out and being loud in even more dangerous times.

    Coming out is courageous because it’s scary. It’s powerful because it is so risky, no matter who you are or when you do it.