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.
Part I: Gay Men’s Open Relationships: Starting a Dialogue With Your Partner
Perhaps no word in relationships, including those between gay men, is as inflammatory as “cheating” – the slang to denote one person in a relationship having sex with someone outside of that relationship in a way that too often results in feelings of anger, betrayal, and disappointment in the remaining partner. Yet some would say this dynamic simply borrows from an antiquated Legendary psychotherapist Michael Shernoff, LCSW, who has been an author, professor, and therapist specializing in gay men’s issues in New York City for over 30 years,
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=269518430 Ken gives helpful tips to start your day on a good note, and end your day with appreciation for all that the day has brought.
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.”
Part I: Gay Men’s Open Relationships: Starting a Dialogue With Your Partner 
