A Voice from Working with the GLBT Community

Keville Ware, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker at Montrose Counseling Center, joined us for a discussion about the shame experienced in the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Community, and the effects of those experiences on individuals.

Ware has been working with the GLBT Community in the Houston area since 1992; hence, we were eager to get his thoughts on this important issue. We asked him questions based on his professional experience...this post is a feature of some of the major highlights of our discussion.

Throughout the process of creating this blog, it became evident to us that shame is a major issue within the GLBT Community. In speaking with Mr. Ware we discovered that not only is shame as a core problem for the individuals of this Community, but that many of his clients experience depression, negative self-talk, feelings of worthlessness, and cycles of self-medicating as a result of their shame experience(s).

Ware specializes in working with gay men who have tested HIV+. We were curious if the shame experiences of HIV+ homosexuals were different than those of HIV+ heterosexuals. We got a resounding “YES.” Ware discussed how society attaches greater stigma to HIV+ homosexuals than HIV+ heterosexuals. The straight community treats the HIV+ gay community differently. In addition, the non-HIV+ gay community also treats the HIV+ gay community differently. Being outcast by your own community can be very shaming…for anyone!

Although any given individual processes and deals with shame in a different way, we thought it was important for future social workers to be aware of some of the most common consequences of shame are in the GLBT Community.

Based on his professional experience, Ware identified high rates of depression, substance abuse, sexual addiction, relationship struggles, body image disorders, anxiety, eating disorders, and symptoms of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) as the most prominent issues that social workers would encounter in relation to shame. Another problematic situation is when clients present with the “if society says I’m wrong then I am wrong” mentality...that is internalized homophobia. Ware also identified perfectionism as a means to compensate for experiencing shame.

So, what triggers shame for the GLBT Community? Like anyone from any background and community, there are no universal shame triggers for each gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender individual. Each person is unique (no, they are NOT all the same because they are gay), and therefore, they have their own set of shame triggers.

Ware described politics as a major shame trigger for the GLBT Community. For example, the highly publicized political campaigns to promote to promote policies, such as "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" and the illegalization of gay marriage. These policies serve as discrimination which isolate and belittle gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals. The more difficult aspect of these political campaigns is not that they initiate shame, but that they constantly reinforce shame, making it difficult for healing and, as Ware stated, recovering from shame.

On a different note, Ware noted that there are major life stressors that also trigger shame for some, such as losing a job, aging, loss of an important relationship, testing HIV+, and life rejections.

In society today, shame is a taboo talk – it lives in silence, it breeds in silence, and it can be destructive in silence. Obviously, there is a certain discomfort that evolves through discussing a dark, taboo topic. Let’s face it...it’s not your typical conversation starter! Ware described the importance of psycho-education to explain shame to struggling clients.

An important aspect of Ware’s psycho-educational program involves implementing the Shame Resilience Model of Dr. Brene Brown, PhD, LMSW. He describes this model as being useful in helping clients to recognize thoughts and feelings that surround the emotion of shame. Ware often utilizes the term “mindfulness,” which he describes as a combination term encompassing the concepts of shame, learning positive self-talk, and becoming resilient.

As the discussion progressed, the issue of “Gay Pride” came up. One would think that having pride in your culture would (or could) minimize the shame associated with being a part of that culture. However, Ware offered a different spin on the idea of pride and what he believes may be that actual result of "Gay Pride." He discussed “Gay Pride” being detrimental to the GLBT Community in the sense that it only focused on being proud of one’s sexuality and not acknowledging the collective pain and suffering of growing up gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender in a straight world.

Ware acknowledged that while being able to celebrate is important, the community also needs to stop ignoring the negative feelings (like shame) that are ever present. The GLBT Community needs to address the idea that it’s okay to have shame, but it’s also okay to feel pride in embracing who you are. For example, Ware suggested that part of “Gay Pride” should be holding a candlelight vigil to mourn the shame felt within the Community.

Since one of the goals of our blog is to educate future social workers and other helping professionals to understand the shame of the GLBT Community, and how to effectively work with them by building cultural competency, increasing empathy, and increasing compassion, we felt it was appropriate to ask the “advice” question. What better way to be advised on how to work with the GLBT Community than from a seasoned professional? Ware believes that part of working within this community is walking with individuals on a journey of self-acceptance, which involves being uncomfortable. Learning about sexuality is essential to do this work.

Ware recommended a book by Joe Kort entitled Covert Sexual Abuse of the Gay Male Culture for any future social worker wishing to work with this particular population. In addition, any other reading material (book, or journal articles) that discusses the phenomenon of internalized homophobia, oppression, and trauma of the psyche due to shame can be helpful.

Ware described that many times individuals of the GLBT Community will begin to develop their own form of internalizing homophobia due to the oppressive experiences of living in a heterosexist/homophobic society. This is something that social workers need to be mindful of to help these clients navigate a difficult path. Social workers also need to weary the phenomenon of counter-transference, where the social worker develops their own homophobia and internalized hatred by vicariously experiencing the same issue as the clients. Perhaps having your own therapist is helpful!

To conclude, Ware made a beautiful point that is the heart of being a social worker – and, in fact, it should be the heart of being human. To work with, to relate to, and to live in harmony with the GLBT Community, it is unquestionable that there must be empathy, there must be understanding, there must be a respect for diversity, and there must be compassion. You do not necessarily have to know what it is like to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, but you do have to know what it is like to experience shame and what is would feel like to bring that to light as a client. That is how empathy and compassion for the unknown begins to develop.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank Keville Ware for his time and willingness to discuss shame with us. It was a valuable learning experience for us all, and it is our hope that it will be a learning experience for you all.
Thank you.

A Voice in the Transgender Community

We had the pleasure of interviewing Josephine Tittsworth, a social worker in the field of mental health and the Transgender Community. Josephine is on the Board of Directors of the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC) and Parents and Families of Lesbians And Gays (PLFAG) - Transgender Network (TNET).

This interview proved to be very insightful and informative into the shame experienced within the Transgender Community.

One of the most powerful things Josephine offered to us was this saying, "The GLB Community faces shame, but they do not have to identify their sexual orientation; the shame in the Transgender Community is stronger because they have to identify their sexual orientation."

This resounded with us because if you see a transgendered man, you automatically assume they like women, and if you see a transgendered woman, you automatically assume they like men...what we learned...that is not always the case!!



Many thanks to Josephine for meeting with us and providing us with such an insightful and interesting interview!

The following document, provided by Josephine, is an umbrella chart showing the overall term of "transgender" and all of the different types of people who fall under its general heading.

Transgender Umbrella Chart - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Transgender Umbrella Chart

For more information on the Transgender Community, please read some of the articles that Josephine has published. They include:

1. Tittsworth, J., Erich, S., & Kanenberg, H. (2008). Foster care: Transgender youth. National Association of Social Workers Specialty Practice Sections Newsletter.
2. Erich, S., Boutté-Queen, N., Donnelly, S., & Tittsworth, J. (2007). Social work education: Implications for working with the transgender community. Journal of Baccalaureate Social Work, 12(2), 42-52.
3. Erich, S., Tittsworth, J., Dykes, J., & Cabusas, C. (in press). Family relationships and their correlations with transexual well being. Journal of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Family Studies.
4. Erich, S., Donnelly, S., & Tittsworth, J. (2006). Passages: From feeling woman to being woman. In Messinger, Lori & Morrow, Deana F. (Eds), Case studies on sexual orientation & gender expression in social work practice (pp. 3-6). New York: Columbia University Press.

All Love is Original: Moving Past Homophobia

"It was hard to enjoy being one of the chosen people, the 'heteros,' when so many people that I admire were not invited to the party. --- George Weinberg


George Weinberg, writer of Society and the Healthy Homosexual and Self Creation, is a heterosexual, clinical psychologist, and gay activist, who has championed gay rights for many decades. He coined the concept of "homophobia" in his work, and challenged the "old school" concept that homosexuality was a disease...giving many gays and lesbians their dignity and pride.

Below is an eye-opening interview, with great thought-provoking concepts between George Weinberg and Raj Avyar. It is an important piece to learning that all love is original and worthy of acceptance in the world. And even more importantly, it is excellent insight into how the GLBT Community might experience shame because of this concept "homophobia."


Raj Ayyar:
George, it's an honor to interview you. Your insights have challenged so many negative myths and stereotypes about homosexuality. Can you tell us a little about the rhythms and patterns, the high points and the lows of your life?

George Weinberg:
The high point in my life was one that I certainly didn't see or appreciate when it happened because I was a few months old. My father, who was from a wealthy family and highly educated, a lawyer, Yale and Columbia, walked out with the benefit of a healthy push from my mother, a seventh grade graduate, who took a typing course and got a secretarial job as fast as she could.
My father was a pedant and a bully who cared about nobody, and I was not to see him until I was eighteen. My mother was devoted, very bright, and above all, very humane. "You judge someone by how that person treats the least important person in his life," she would tell me often, and she watched over me to safeguard my caring as much as my intellectual development.
Having her to myself without him anywhere near me was the great break of my life, one that I could evaluate only after getting to know him later on. It wouldn't have mattered to my mother if I married a black, was gay, lived in a commune or wore a dress. I didn't grow up with any concept of people being deviants unless they mistreated others.
So the step into my later life was very small and took very little courage alongside the giant steps taken by some of my friends, especially my gay friends who had to first accept themselves, then love themselves, then make peace with their being outcasts and disappointments to others, and then build new lives.
Another high point was getting a PhD in clinical psychology at Columbia and seeing how hidebound, unimaginative, inhumane and stupid my classmates and the professors were, with very few exceptions. I realized that the world was left to us who cared, it was our time, and that the people we looked up to had mainly climbed a many runged ladder to nowhere.
Though I wasn't gay, I was loose in all the heterosexual ways that I could think of, and in other ways that I'd rather not put in print. And to quote Robert Browning, "And yet God has not said a word."
Finally, fighting for gay rights, speaking out in various places and making friends, men and women, was great. I felt like an apostle of the obvious and people imagined that I was doing something daring. My mother would have done the same thing, and in fact one of the last things I placed in her hands, as she lay dying of a brain tumor, was my book summing up my views on the doctors who said that anal intercourse was sick but had lived their whole lives with their heads up their ass.

Raj Ayyar:
In the mid-1960's, you coined the word 'homophobia' which has become part of the lexicon of gay theory and activism. It's a concept that identifies a certain class of prejudice and parallels terms like 'racism' and 'sexism.' How would you define homophobia?

George Weinberg:
Homophobia is just that: a phobia. A morbid and irrational dread which prompts irrational behavior flight or the desire to destroy the stimulus for the phobia and anything reminiscent of it. Because human beings are the stimulus, a common homophobic reaction is brutality in many cases, as we all know. We also know its consequences.
I am very proud of being the one to have coined the word. I remember the moment in 1965 when it came to me with utter clarity that this was a phobia. I was preparing a speech for a homophile group, which set me to thinking about "What's wrong with those people?"
By "those people," I had in mind that day a few therapist friends who had liked a gay friend of mine, spoken well of her until I told them that she was a lesbian. Hearing that, they didn't want me to bring her to a party, as if she was a contaminant. Since I kept my own life quite a secret from them, having heard their views too often, perhaps a little bit of rage spurred me on to finding the word. The Roman poet, Catullus, describing how he came to write his love poetry, one wrote, "Anger moves my verse (Ira versum movet) and I think that healthy anger at injustice has strengthened the love within the gay movement, of which I am very much a part.

Raj Ayyar:
What are the roots of homophobia? Or, if that's too broad a question, what environmental influences are likely to generate this blind fear and hate of gay people?
George Weinberg:
The roots of homophobia are fear. Fear and more fear. It is based on the preposterous notion that if you are like everybody else you will be safe, secure and happy. And in the extreme that if you are good, you won't die. "Well, no wonder he died, he smoked a few joints." Or "He went to India." Or "He was homosexual. I would never do that."
Envy plays a part too because fearful people who constrict their lives resent others who don't constrict them in the same ways. Many people secretly think that gays are a lot happier than they are, and want to punish them.
Of course, any answer to the question of how an illness develops, (and homophobia is an illness, no doubt about that) has to be incomplete. What worse illness can there be than acute conventionality. You should pray every night that you don't wake up with it.

Raj Ayyar:
Tell us a little about 'internalized' homophobia. Do many closeted gays suffer from profound self-hatred? Is the coming-out process part of the healing journey out of internalized homophobia?

George Weinberg:
Internalized homophobia is the same disease, it is the dread of being different, of being singled out, punished or laughed at. It is the idea that I must suffer some withering illness because I lack a fundamental ingredient that everyone else has.
Unfortunately it isn't a lack that's killing you. You have at least one too many ingredients, namely conformity. You would be better off in exile than priding yourself on be like everyone else. The penalty for that kind of pride is that you can't turn to the right or left without misgivings.
As Alexander Pope put it "More true joy Marcellus exiled feels than Caesar with a senate at his heels." If this is so, the goal should be to become Marcellus, not Caesar.

Raj Ayyar:
Is there a 'universal' coming-out process? Can we apply a single Western post-Stonewall model of coming out, or do gays in different cultures need to work out their own indigenous, culture-specific ways of coming to terms with their sexuality?

George Weinberg:
There is no universal coming out process, so far as I know. I've met gays who never had a problem, especially women who came out during a love affair which bathed them in its beauty. And I've known people who came out with a sense of torture. I'm sure that every culture, every neighborhood, every family influences the experience. But the cure for most obstacles is, Be decisive. The world will step aside for nearly anyone who has the courage of his of her opinions.

Raj Ayyar:
In the new book Before Stonewall Jack Nichols remarks that 'while defining homophobia, (you) proffered a radical concept: healthy homosexuality.' What are some of the criteria defining a 'healthy' homosexual?

George Weinberg:
To love and to work these are the basics. I don't mean loving just one person, or your cat, though that's more than a start. We each have a personal myth, a vision of who we really are and what we want. Health means that part of what you want is to give to others.
This isn't moral, it's psychological. As soon as your aim, is to achieve something for others, to give to others (or to at least one other person), you have that person along with you, as if watching you and rooting for you. You aren't alone. The healthy homosexual is simply a healthy person who happens to be homosexual and accepts this fact. As for work, whatever your work happens to be, I agree with Goethe who said "Only the person who has spent a lifetime of hard work can truly say, 'I have lived.'"

Raj Ayyar:
Apparently, your pioneering work Society and the Healthy Homosexual (1972) shocked the pundits of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association. How did you deal with the hostility of your peers and of the power structure within your profession?

George Weinberg:
I try not to deal with people's hostility, though I must if they have something I need from them, as the professors did at Columbia or my landlord did. I like the lines of the poet Walter Savage Landor, "I strove with none for none was worth my strife."

Raj Ayyar:
There are many countries (India is a good example till recently) where 'men who have sex with men' (MSM's) engage in same-sex acts that are labeled 'fun' 'mischief' etc. but are not categorized as gay or even as 'homosexual.' Are such men 'closet' cases? Doesn't one need to be minimally self-aware and aware of the discourses of homosexuality to run for cover in the 'closet?'

George Weinberg:
I look ahead to the day when we won't think of anyone as gay or straight altogether. The fewer labels the better.

Raj Ayyar:
Does your model of homophobia apply as easily to lesbians as to gay men? Or, are there grounds for interpreting 'lesbophobia' differently than 'homophobia?'

George Weinberg:
The model applies but men tend to suffer more acutely. We have many cases of men committing suicide rather than face their own individuality. I know of no case of a woman who committed suicide because she was gay.

Raj Ayyar:
I have a great respect for the fact that you are one of the few avowed heterosexuals that championed the cause of gay rights for many decades. How did you get past homophobia?

George Weinberg:
I've had so many friends who were homosexual and who shared interests with me, who were generous and non-competitive and sensitive. I couldn't afford to lose them and to condemn them in my own mind would be to lose them. So I lined up with them emotionally. I'm really not an avowed heterosexual. I'm no more proud of it than of being white or tall. As T.S. Eliot put it, "I could have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas." We're all here at the same time and we should celebrate that.

Raj Ayyar:
Are your wife and family okay with your pro-gay activism and writing?

George Weinberg:
My family is better than OK.

Raj Ayyar:
You are quoted as saying that 'all love is conspiratorial and deviant and magical.' I love the quote. But, what does it mean?

George Weinberg:
All love is original, no matter how many other people have loved before. It is the greatest possible leap of faith and trust, a bearing of the soul. Here we are, as Whitman put it, in measureless oceans of space… hoping to catch somewhere. Whitman was comparing love with the task of the spider trying to reach across a void. The very decision to do this instead of to wear a full metal jacket is a conspiracy. All who love are conspirators. We refuse to go with the drift of things and gays are really more conspicuous instances because their love is questioned.

Raj Ayyar:
Shakespeare is one of your heroes. Can you tell us a little about your book Will Power: Using Shakespeare's Insights to Transform Your Life? Going back to a cliched but still interesting question: was Shakespeare bisexual?

George Weinberg:
I feel pretty sure that Shakespeare loved men and women erotically. In the sonnets he makes clear that he loves a man. It would take a profound commitment to conventionality to deny the evidence which screams out. People have known of Shakespeare's homosexuality down through the ages.

Raj Ayyar:
Your book Self Creation was a huge success in the popular self-help market. Can you share some insights on creating a more positive reality with readers of Gay Today?

George Weinberg:
An essential idea is that if you give to some person or endeavor in life, you will make that more important. Coming out to gays is a way of affirming sanity and self-worth. We are constantly creating ourselves by what we move toward or away from. If every time you engage in a sex act, you go into a confession box, you will never accept your own sexuality. I found in my own life that heterosexual acts that initially made me feel like a freak became second nature and quite reasonable very quickly. That was because I didn't atone. The important thing is not to hurt other people. If they hurt themselves by staying up all night worrying about your behavior that is their own self-tortured decision.

Raj Ay
George, it's been a pleasure and a joy talking with you. Thank you for sharing your insights with us.

George Weinberg:
Thank you, Raj.

This interview was obtain from http://www.gaytoday.com/...an on-line publication.