Playing by the Rules: On Being a Gay Male South African Psychotherapist

Being a gay male psychotherapist positions one at the juncture of gender and sexuality while inhabiting a professional identity that has its own complex relationship to heteronormativity. This paper explores how gay male psychotherapists subjectively experience themselves as both gay and a therapist, foregrounding the messy intermingling of how both the internal world and the social world frame gay psychotherapists’ experiences. Based on interviews with ten South African gay male psychotherapists and employing reflexive thematic analysis, and drawing on psychoanalytic theory, this paper explores the complexity, ambivalences and opposites inhabited by these men, where being gay and a therapist was imagined as contravening the “accepted” rules of normativity and psychotherapeutic practice. The analysis foregrounds four processes that were identified: the process of compartmentalising gay male identity, the experienced “rules” of being a psychotherapist, the ambivalence and “turbulence” of being a gay therapist, and experienced prejudice and pain as a source of empathy. The implications of experienced ambivalence for gay therapist identity are explored.