The first in a long history of gay consciousness groups I’ve facilitated was with Mitch Walker in 1981 in San Francisco, called Gay Voices and Visions, whose format had been previously developed by Don Kilhefner, who was a co-founder with Mitch, Harry Hay and John Burnside, of the Radical Faerie Movement in 1979 and with Walker of Treeroots in 1981, a non-profit dedicated to the development of and education in the theory and practice of gay-centered depth psychology. Since then, I’ve led or co-led a wide variety of gay consciousness-raising groups, workshops, gay empowerment therapy groups, and conferences, with titles such as “Gay Soul-Making, “Gay Soul Talk,” and “Gay-Centered Inner Work Club.” I also co-founded a gay psychology school in 1995 called The Institute for Uranian Psychoanalysis, for which I was a director and trainer for fifteen years.

The various occupations I’ve had specifically in the health or mental health fields started in 1984, with my work as an outreach health educator for the Gay and Lesbian Community Center in Los Angeles (now the L.A. L.G.B.T Center), in which capacity I engaged with sex workers and homeless individuals, educating them about AIDS, handing out condoms and encouraging them to get check-ups at the Center’s health clinic. As educator, I also worked in various group home settings that cared for foster and probation supervised youth, many of whom suffered from serious conditions as conduct disorder and major depression. After several years of that, I became a children’s social worker for four years, during which time I also gained a Marriage, Family Therapist license in 1991. Then I was a therapist at and eventually a director a high school-based clinic for ten years which prominently included L.G.B.T. group and individual therapy and internship training programs.

In my private practice, established in 1995, I’ve provided individual, couples’ and group psychotherapy for people of varied backgrounds, interests and needs. As an analysand myself, I participated in a Mahlerian form of psychoanalysis for twelve years. See My Professional Background page for a little more detail.