HEALING GAY SEX AND LOVE

A Group Experience

By Douglas Sadownick, Ph.D.

In a Hollywood therapy group, four gay men—a dutiful Asian screenwriter, a campy Southern diva, a fallen Black lawyer, and a charismatic Chicano sexual healer barely 25—confront their deepest traumas around sex, intimacy gay self-esteem and love. Guided by the unconventional Dr. Glitter, they journey through psychodrama, ancient myths, and raw confession. What begins as a struggle with shame evolves into a revolutionary project to map a new path for queer healing, transforming patients into pioneers of their own liberation. A new offering my longtime author, psychotherapist, and professor Dr. Douglas Sadownick.

A Queer Journey of Healing

Healing Gay Sex and Love: A Group Experience comes from Dr. Douglas Sadownick—psychotherapist, educator, and award-winning author of Sacred Lips of the Bronx and Sex Between Men: An Intimate History of the Sex Lives of Gay Men, Postwar to Present. His journalism has received national recognition, and his clinical leadership includes founding the LGBT Specialization in Clinical Psychology at Antioch University Los Angeles and co-founding the Colors LGBTQ Youth Counseling Center.

This new book is a radical form of queer literature—part clinical theatre, part confessional myth, part psychic map of shame, eros, and survival. Drawn from thirty years of LGBTQ-affirmative psychotherapy, it follows four gay men—Bobby, Andy, John, and Harry—as they fight to heal the buried wounds of sex, love, masculinity, and memory.

Their group therapy sessions unfold through dream, memory, and raw emotion—from cracked leather couches in Los Angeles to the imaginal world of Plato’s Symposium, where ancient gay wisdom returns as a living tool for recovery. Against a backdrop of AIDS loss, assimilation, and erotic shame, their journeys blur the line between psychoanalysis and performance, sacred eros and queer rage.

This is not your typical self-help book. It fuses queer theory, depth psychology, and group drama into a bold new form. With humor, tenderness, and rawness, Healing Gay Sex and Love offers no blueprint—only a group portrait for those done apologizing, done pretending, and ready for something messier, harder, more beautiful, and more real than anything the mainstream can offer.

For readers of Paul Monette, Sarah Schulman, Essex Hemphill, and Felice Picano—and for anyone who has ever sat in the back of a gay bar or therapy room wondering if healing was possible, and what it might cost to get there.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DR. DOUGLAS SADOWNICK

Dr. Douglas Sadownick founded the LGBT Specialization in Clinical Psychology at Antioch University (2006) and Colors LGBTQ Youth Counseling Services (2011). He is an award-winning journalist & author (Sacred Lips of the Bronx will be republished this year by Rebel Sartori Press) and has contributed to queer healing as a therapist, professor, and autthor for more than thirty years. Alongside his private practice, he is active on YouTube & Substack and teaches at the Los Angeles campus of the Chicago School of Clinical Psychology.

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