I am writing this as my train departs Glasgow Central, one of the most beautiful train stations ever built, after attending the 2nd annual conference of the Rainbow Therapists Network (so I hope you will forgive the title, but it had to be done!) My feelings about pride month have been complex over the years, especially as companies who ignore queer lives the rest of the year go for full on pinkwashing. However this year we seem to have jumped straight into wrath month and I am here for it!

So, attending an unapologetically queer conference, for queer therapists and allies, where we were allowed,encouraged, to take up space and be our unapologetic authentic queer selves was so in keeping with where many of us seem to be this June – screw love is love – stop killing us and let us live.

The theme of the conference was “Doing it Well” and focused on sex, shame, and the darkness and light of both. It was such a breath of fresh air. Part of the respectability politics of the past 20 years or so has been the erasure of the sexual from discussions about lgbtqaai lives. It of course has not worked, as the recent attacks, weaponsing “groomer” have shown. You can be gay married in the gay suburbs with your gay volvo, and any acceptance you think you have won is wiped away in an instant because it was never true acceptance.

The keynote at the conference was given by Silva Neves, a colleague whose work I had admired for a long time, but who I had not had the opportunity to meet in person previously (pandemics really suck for meeting interesting people!). As a proponent of smashing all the false binaries it was so good to hear him talk about the beliefs and cultural norms which hurt so many around sex and sexual shame. He has written powerfully about the sex addiction snake oil movement, which grew out of the ex gay conversion therapy movement and is rooted in the desire of the religious right to remove all queer people from the planet. Sex addiction as a diagnosis does not exist in either the ICD or DSM (assuming you are using a medical model) but it is advertised in the pages of Therapy Today and other counselling and psychotherapeutic spaces. Silva highlighted the therapeutic harms he sees over and over in his practice, people who have had a form of conversion therapy enacted on them, left in extreme distress and believing they are broken, diseased or unfixable. Despite sex addiction having no scientific basis, and its religious roots, no governing body has taken action against the many therapists who claim to treat it – a sadly growing number as it is a lucrative and booming business. It seems membership fees matter more than protecting clients from harm in therapy.

The rest of the day was equally inspiring and thought provoking. Each workshop invited participants to actively participate, rather than passively consume the content. Towards the end, speaking on the panel in shame I reflected that everyone seemed very full, as if they were disgesting a rich meal, and I think this did sum up the day for so many.

I was very grateful to the organisers for inviting me to present a workshop on barriers to working with sex workers – Schordingers Whores. Whilst, as I said in the workshop, we must be aware of coercive queering and acknowledge that the majority of sex workers across the world are cis het women of colour (with an understanding that terms like cis and het are often white suprmacist labels) in a GSRD space, rather than a specifically LGBTQAAI space, it is vital to include sex workers. The themes which intersected and intertwined throughout the day, themes of het, cis and mononormativity, and the shame which is deposited on us from early childhood if we dare to even consider stepping outside the prison of these norms. These themes meet in the projections we create about sex workers, and the beliefs we have about both who and what they are.

I started this piece with what may have felt like a bleak assessment of the situation in the UK this Pride Month. The conference this weekend is the vital way we navigate a hostile anti lgbtq country – hope and community. If we have those we can hold each other, raise each other up, and fight like hell for our rights.