Quote:
Originally Posted by Favorite Jeans
Here's my 2 cents:
I've had pretty good luck just asking T's over the phone if they're queer positive. I've stopped looking for them in pink pages type listings or even looking for people who write that they're queer positive on their website. I think it's usually pretty easy to tell early on when someone feels awkward about my being queer (or is actually homophobic) and just not go back. I mention this because this way i can widen my search and minimize my risk of the kind of awkward situation you just had. Plus I really just want a T who is skilled and compassionate and accepting and being queer is no guarantee of having those qualities. (Bonus: I'm rarely attracted to straight women, and have managed to avoid feeling like I'm in love with current T. I still want her to adopt me and that sucks but I don't know if I could manage also having romantic feelings for her as I've been there, done that and found it to be incomparably suckier!)
I did once do a phone interview with a gay T who did not have room for a new client immediately but we spent about half and hour talking and got into issues in some depth. I then found another T who could see me immediately and never ended up seeing the first guy. Fast forward two years or so and a mutual friend introduced me to a guy at a party. We had babies born a month apart and made plans to hang out at his house. Well when I got there he introduced me to his partner who was the gay T from the phone interview. I don't know if he remembered my name but I remembered his and felt pretty awkward!
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Your situation with the gay T you didn't see is like the most terrifying situation I could imagine, other than my T happening to know current mentor figure because they're both gay and about the same age. (Current T does
not know current mentor figure, or if she does she doesn't know she does, but I feel like that's less because they don't run in the same circles and more due to luck/current T not having time to run in any circles not directly related to her job these days.)
The thing about queer friendly but not necessarily queer knowledgeable therapists - I mean, I don't know, because I can see how that would be a solution to this problem, but I've had several very queer friendly and somewhat knowledgeable straight Ts before and it just didn't work for me. I felt too much like they were open but didn't have enough experience in the real world and instead were asking about the rudimentary coming out story, who am I out to, how do I feel about that, which really doesn't reflect the nuances of my sexual orientation. (This might be a millennial thing, the shunning of normativity and all that.)
But for example, a straight T probably has no clue what pansexuality is. Straight, gay, even bisexual, maybe even trans, sure. But pansexual? Asexual but bi-romantic? These are just things straight Ts won't know about but many queer Ts will. (Or possibly just current T since she worked at a very LGBT friendly sexual health clinic for a few years...) I mean, sure straight Ts can learn about this stuff, but it's different. Straight Ts want to know my coming out story and don't necessarily understand that it's not a cohesive narrative; there was no big "coming out" for me. It just sort of happened in the middle of another conversation and no big deal.
I've found that past straight Ts assumed that because homophobia has never been an issue for me, then my queer identity isn't an issue, but for me, it's a big one in a lot of ways, although not your traditional self-loathing ways but in a more intersectional way. And sometimes I feel like the fact that my experience of my sexual orientation is so different and so "not a big deal but also kind of a big deal" creates a lot of distance between me and other queer people, and that is a serious issue that I struggle with all the time, feeling neither here nor there - not straight enough (because I'm not) but also not gay enough (because I'm so femme and "pass" all the time and have never experienced overt homophobia). Straight people also don't always understand the full extent of internalized homophobia or fear of homophobia, even when it's never been directed at you, or heterosexist microaggressions, or the frustration that comes from not seeing representations "like you" all over the place like straight people get to. Maybe some straight Ts could understand all these things as well as a queer T, but that hasn't been my experience.
And it's also just a comfort thing for me...but perhaps something I could overcome. Ugh. Even in the city, the queer community is quite interconnected.
I could also just be using queerness as a heuristic for something else, but on a gut level, seeing a queer T feels right and seeing a straight T feels not right, and perhaps my reasons for this are completely irrational, but that's how I feel, and 99% of therapy's successes are directly or indirectly the result of the therapeutic relationship, and your attitude towards the therapeutic relationship is a pretty good predictor of how well said relationship will go. So I might have a more positive attitude towards a queer T who meets other specific irrational criteria (ex. not having the same name as my mother, former teacher, or current mentor, being a certain age), and there might be nothing wrong with that...
This is all so overwhelming. Part of me wants to give up and just stick with current T so I don't have to think about all this stuff and deal with it in a rational way. I'm not equipped to make these kinds of decisions.