Saturday 4 July 2009

For Queers-It’s a Mad World!


I sat across the room from my North London psychotherapist at my first appointment and bravely asked what was her position with regard to LGBT issues.

“Ah, you should have no worries on that account my dear, she said, I treat you all exactly the same way that I treat my normal clients”

It was only on the journey back to Brighton that I stopped feeling pathetically grateful about this ostensibly benevolent stance and saw it for the patronising insult that it was!

They say what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Well, not necessarily.

Take an innocent LGBT soul. Plant it in a family ignorant about, or hostile towards, queer folk. Send it to a school where bullies can freely taunt and humiliate it. When its straight peers are taught spiritual values whilst being allowed to experiment sexually in adolescent relationships make sure that it feels excluded from access to a spiritual world and invalidated during it’s sexual awakening. When it finally makes its first faltering moves towards the stresses of adulthood and maybe requires some psychological help ensure that psychotherapists and mental health professionals have no diversity training and therefore no understanding of the lives and concerns of LGBT people. Where does a queer tortured soul turn?

Many would say that the adversity we have faced has given us the strength to exist as strange outsiders. That we have become capable of creating our own unique spiritual and therapeutic structures which contradict yet sustain and liberate mainstream culture. Maybe our own ‘woundedness’ fosters in us an ability to heal ourselves and our own kind.

But then again take a look at our communities. Give any other soul an emotionally abusive and invalidating life experience and you would fully expect an insecurely attached personality to emerge, either lacking in self esteem or with an overcompensated inflated ego, limping along in life with a clutch of co-dependent personal relationships and an unhealthy attitude to any or all of the following: food, body shape, exercise, sex drugs and alcohol. Ring any bells?

Is it any wonder that the recent ‘Count me in too’ Health Survey of LGBT folk in Brighton found that we’re all at a much higher risk than the general population for being hooked on drugs and booze!

What do we do about it? We need to take some responsibility for the formative experiences of our LGBT infants, children and adolescents. They are not in safe hands. Straight parents generally don’t know how to handle them, schools allow them to be bullied and churches torture their tiny minds encouraging them to be what they aren’t. We need to fight homophobic ignorance in families, schools and churches. We also need to insist that health workers and mental health workers in particular have undergone LGBT diversity training. Homophobia is alive and well outside of our cosy tolerant-ish gay ghettos and it is poisoning the healthy psychological development of future queer generations.

Maybe what doesn’t kill you can be so toxic that it messes with your head and makes you a lifelong psychological cripple. Maybe we just keep quiet about it and hope it will get better without too much fuss? It won't!


Email me:GaySocrates@gmail.com or google GaySocrates for my blog

[This is my column for the September 'Mental Health' edition of GScene Magazine]

2 comments:

  1. Wow. Interesting piece! When I first realised I was gay I nearly had a breakdown because I had no concept of what 'being gay' was all about. The 'otherness' really messed with my head. As you say, the paradigm that is forced upon us from an early age is straight-straight-straight. Then it turns out that we're not straight and we're left to figure it out ourselves.

    I do think our sexuality and the lack of a framework to nurture it when young sets us up to fail in relationships etc. We do have to be stronger, find our own place and make our own paradigm.

    In many ways, the LGBT community is at the cutting edge of diversity. Or perhaps it's on the trailing edge of anti-discrimination policies. Despite lip-service, there are still many people who believe we are perverts, when we're not (except in the good way).

    Closing circular thought:
    Society says we're different and pushes us out. We do what we can to survive. Society then derides us for not trying to conform and calls us an abomination.

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  2. Oh, and we have a neighbour who came out late in life. He really p****ed off Hubby by saying that he has dinner parties for 'the gays' and separate parties for 'normal people'.

    Can't mix The Gays with Normal People. Imagine what could happen!

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