Ken Howard, LCSW, is licensed psychotherapist and life/career coach who has specialized in working with gay men, as individuals and couples, for over 23 years. He helps many gay men (and others) resolve the issues that undermine your quality of life, and helps you to thrive.
The book below, Affirmative Gay Relationships, I think really should be called “Affirmative Gay Dating” instead, because it’s largely about how to find a boyfriend, which is one of the topics I hear most often in my work with gay men. It’s written by a trusted colleague who is also an LCSW (Licensed Clinical Social … Read more
While the holiday season can be a time of great fun and festive celebrations all over town for you and your friends or family, for many gay men it can be a time of increased stress. These holiday stressors can include: Not having a partner at a particularly “romantic” time of year Having family visiting … Read more
Regarding the LA Gay & Lesbian Center’s new “HIV is a Gay Disease – Own It, End It; social marketing and advertising campaign (“HIV Ads Embrace, and Stun, Audience” (Sharon Bernstein, September 30): As a gay man living with HIV since 1990, and since that time working in HIV mental health and social services in various community agencies (including the LA Gay & Lesbian Center), and as currently a psychotherapist in private practice specializing in serving gay men, including many living with HIV, I am deeply offended by this campaign. I find this campaign heinous as much for what it isn’t as for what it is. It is a throwback to the early days of the AIDS crisis when anti-gay forces in this country used AIDS as “justification” to hate and discriminate against the entire gay community, without realizing that AIDS is a disease caused by a virus that can strike anyone –
In my work providing counseling for couples of all kinds (M-W, W-W, M-M), I find that the partners frustrate themselves all too frequently by falling into certain common traps that impair communication. These are some of the ones I see; the “roles” that you want to avoid in order to have productive communication:
Independence Day for gay men can have many important meanings, as a community and as individuals.
It’s July Fourth – Independence Day for Gay Men: What Do You Want Independence From?
As we celebrate the summer and the Fourth of July — Independence Day — let’s consider the meaning of that word, “independence.” Historically, this means celebrating America’s freedom from the tyrannical rule of a cruel and imbecilic king who over-taxed his hardest-working citizens to enrich the elite and fund wars that aggrandized his ego. (OK, so I guess not much has changed in over 200 years!) For gay men, the word “independence” can mean so much more. For many or most of us, we grow up hiding our sexuality for a long time, and we are imprisoned by isolation, secrecy, and lack of validation for who we are.
Independence Day for gay men, coming usually soon after the annual Pride celebrations in June, as a community, is a celebration and commemoration of the Stonewall Uprising in New York in 1969, when, as a community, we declared our independence from systemic oppression (by the anti-gay New York City Police Department in particular, but also oppression in general). For each of us as individuals, the coming out process is like declaring our independence from widespread heterosexism (“the assumption that everyone is, or should be, heterosexual”).
We declare our independence from the sexism that imprisons us into strict demands for gender-conforming behaviors, whether we like those things or not, and we certainly declare independence from the outright hate and bigotry that we hear about almost constantly in the news, particularly from conservative religious sectors and/or Republicans. We also declare independence from people telling us we “can’t” — can’t be a part of certain groups, can’t hold certain jobs, can’t adopt children, can’t celebrate our sexuality, can’t have benefits, can’t have protections from discrimination, can’t have our Pride month recognized by the government, and so on. The entire LGBT community fights for independence from oppression in many ways, not just on July Fourth, but every day, in the United States and worldwide.
Labor Day was designed to be a holiday where we take time to celebrate the accomplishments and the sacrifice of the American worker. Recently in my psychotherapy practice, I have begun to offer more and more sessions on executive or vocational coaching, because a rewarding work life as part of a satisfying career is a key component of a person’s mental health.
In part I of this article, I described some of the very practical HIV transmission risk management issues involved in sex between HIV negative and positive guys. Other issues that often confront “magnetic” or “serodiscordant” couples include not fully understanding the burden that HIV is to your partner, and being only partially able to sympathize and “relate” with his various fears, frustrations, and symptoms.
[NOTE: This article was written before PrEP. I’ve been a gay men’s specialist therapist and blogger for a VERY long time…]
You’re on your third date with someone who very well could be Mr. Right. You’re impressed that you got him to go to your favorite restaurant when you weren’t sure he would like it. You’re staring across the candle-lit table at those beautiful green eyes of his. He pauses and then takes a deep breath, a little sigh, and says, “So… I guess I should tell you that I’m HIV-positive.”
[NOTE: THIS BLOG ARTICLE IS FROM 2005, AND HAS MANY ANTIQUATED IDEAS IN IT, SUCH AS THE TIME BEFORE PREP, TASP, AND U=U. IF YOU DON’T KNOW THESE ACRONYM TERMS, PLEASE LOOK THEM UP BEFORE READING THIS ARTICLE. THIS ARTICLE IS INCLUDED HERE ONLY FOR AN HISTORICAL REFERENCE, AND IS ONLY PARTIALLY RELEVANT PRESENTLY. PART OF BEING EDUCATED…UB2 IS BEING UP TO DATE; THIS ARTICLE IS NOW OBSOLETE, EXCEPT IN ADDRESSING SOME REMAINING STIGMA IN SERO-DISCORDANT (POZ/NEG) DATING, A TOPIC I EXPLORE IN MORE DETAIL IN OTHER ARTICLES.]
Recently I was browsing through online personal ads in various online services for gay men. I was surprised at how often the term “UB2” came up. This is an appreviation for, “You be, too!”, in reference to a negative HIV status. It seems to say, in those succinct three characters,
The recent (and perhaps transient) popularity of “The Secret,” the almost “underground” self-help DVD that has become the latest rage of “Oprah” and “Ellen” in recent weeks, has been the topic of water-cooler conversations all over the country and certainly in therapist’s offices like mine.
