Gay-affirmative psychotherapeutic healing has a long and ancient history, with roots in early shamanism (the world's first religion). The first known piece of writing, The Epic of Gilgamesh , talks about how the love relationship beween Gilgamesh and Enkidu lead to a process of alchemical transformation and the crystallization of soul. Plato's work talks about same-sex loving people having their own goddess ("Aphrodite Urania") who officiates over a different form of procreation than the literal, and which results in the creation of the "children of the mind," the arts and crafts and products of self-realization. Sappho's work makes statements about same-sex loving women able to develop a sense of identity and creativity. In more recent times, Harry Hay, the co-founder of the Mattachine Society, helped, in 1950, to organize the first successful attempt to gather homosexuals politically in North America. The Daughters of Bilitis was a Los Angeles-based group in the 1950s that brought women-loving-women together. In 1969, the Stonewall Rebellion, LGBT people fought police oppression in New York City, and helped to birth the modern movement of Gay Liberation. In 1973, activists organized to have homosexuality removed from the DSM as a pathology. Thus was birthed gay-affirmative psychology. Important statements came from Don Clark’s Loving Someone Gay (1972), Mitch Walker’s, "The Double: An Archetypal Configuration" and Men Loving Men: A Gay Sex Guide and Consciousness Raising Book (1980) and Judy Grahn’s Another Mother Tongue (1984). A gay depth psychology was birthed by the work of Mitch Walker and also the authors of this important volume, Affirmative Dynamic Therapy with Gay Men (1993), and for more contemporary articles you can go to www.uranianpsych.org .
Gay-affirmative psychology holds the idea that gay people are born gay, with a gay potential to self-realization and contribute in a beneficial way to evolution. But there are blocks to realizing our true sense of gay self. Internalized homophobia plays a part in sabotaging relationships and limiting potential. Unresolved issues with the mother, who can be clingy with her gay child, and with the father, who can be absent, can create a psychological situation in which the homosexual potentials of a gay man are not fully actualized, but are hidden in the unconscious. In working together, we can help identity ways in which self-esteem is damaged due to old wounds and homo-negative parenting and what can be done in therapy to repair and recover your long-lost gay potential. Being able to have satisfying sexual relations with someone you love deeply and to be able to engage in intimate sharing and growthful engagement with a person of the same-sex is an important part of gay growth and development that can be a central focus of our work in therapy together.
Gay Videos:
"The Double: An Archetypal Configureation": Mitch Walker Gives a 35th Anniversary Reading of His Pioneering Jungian Paper:
www.youtube.com/watch
Marlon Riggs' Film "Tongues Untied" gives voice to community of black gay men:
www.youtube.com/watch