Queer TherapyDonning Rainbow Glasses to Reclaim the Therapist Within

In Honor of Pride Month 2022

This delightful middle-aged gay male couple had just waited too long to do any work on themselves to they had reverted to the bickering they learned from their parents. I could have educated them about couple’s therapy icon John Gottman’s concept of “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” the predictors of divorce: Contempt, Criticism, Stonewalling and Defensiveness. But a little queer birdie landed on my shoulder and told me to grab the pair of Sunglasses a Latina lesbian friend had left behind. The mammoth frames were made in the color of the Rainbow, including the new colors of black and brown, and they had surrounded her face in what seemed to be like angel wings.

I decided to ask one member of the couple to wear these. The anger turned into laugher and then some tears for how they had lost track of their gay love.

“I say this without irony,” one of the man retorted, softening. “There would be no gay movement were it not for Judy.”

He is referring to the fact that when Judy Garland, a beloved icon in the queer community, died on June 22, 1969, from a drug overdose, the trans queens were so distraught by the funeral on June 27, that they drowned their sorrows by going to the Stonewall—and the next day fought the police raid, inciting the Stonewall uprising, and the birth of the modern LGBT liberation movement.

What was he really saying, though, about himself, about his husband, and about his just-disclosed quality to help him open up and, furthermore, to allow him to claim his legacy as a “friend of Dorothy”?

Can that quality, ever so invisible, be studied? How can we better understand this quality?

And can we ask an even more controversial question: Is that quality indigenous to people like him—is this what sets gay people apart from the heterosexual?

Before I go forward with this line of inquiry, I want to take a few steps back from my focus in this book, which is a book for and about the people we today “lesbian,” “gay,” “bisexual,” “transgender,” “intersex,” “queer,” “questioning,” “asexual,” “flexible,” “sapiosexual,” “pansexual” or “label-free”—or, “queer people.” I want to help not just queer people, but all people, even though the book is called Queer Therapy.

It seems to me that all people contain an invisible quality to challenge the straight jacket of conformity.

I would go so far as to say that this quality can be personified—made into a person. A teacher. A friend. A good mother or father. A lover. A guide.

One might argue that the course of a good therapy is aimed to help all people discover within their long-lost humanity a quality as a wiser voice. What once was the sacred office of religion has now been transferred to the therapy office because, only through guided personal self-study, can this very delicate and tender quality be salvaged from trauma, from toxic parenting, from rigid roles and violent suppression. Slowly. Step-by-step.

It is my personal view that LGBTQ people exist in order to aid in this process of discovering this quality—and its cultivation as a voice—for all human beings.

I do not say this to make queer people seem “better” that non-queer people. In fact, they may, in fact, be more burdened. But other cultures, including the Native American culture, celebrated the fact that queer spirit were granted an “extra” quality—which is why they are called “Two Spirit.”

Maybe a lot of great leaders possessed this extra quality: Jesus, Sappho, Plato?

But why does it take only great geniuses and many generations to manifest this quality? The answer is simple. The big stories human beings have been telling for thousands of years suggest that only one form of procreation is needed for the continuation of the tribe. A “male” and a “female” mate to make a baby. That’s how the tribe extends its life. Those stories are not “real.” But people “buy them” even though alternative methods have existed since the dawn of history.

A new myth is needed in which spiritual children are valued at least as much if not more that biological children.

All people possess the quality to break-free from outdated patterns. But the ancient stories keep most men and women trained to be good heterosexuals. This prevents them tuning into the quality that would set them free.

Queer people are forced to challenge the old stories the quality to listen to the true self speaks rather loudly—for reasons we do not fully understand. Maybe it is something about the transformational power about homosexual, bisexual and gender variant love that releases the genie in the bottle with the power to break the chains of the straight-jackets into which all of us are born into?