The Personal Is Still Political: On Shame, Survival, and Queer Joy

I have been sitting with this conversation for a while now. Because what Alex Garner brought into this week’s Episode of My Therapist is Out! was not just decades of advocacy experience or a sharp political analysis, though he brought both of those things. What he brought was the particular clarity that comes from a life fully inhabited. From choosing, over and over again, to be self-possessed in a world that has spent a long time trying to make that impossible.

That is what I want to talk about today.

Shame Does Not Start With Us

One of the things that comes up a lot in the therapy room is this question of where shame actually originates. And the answer, almost always, is outside of us. We are not born ashamed of our bodies, our desires, or who we love. That gets handed to us. By families, by institutions, by a culture that has very specific ideas about whose pleasure counts and whose does not.

For queer folks, that process starts early. And for LGBTQ+ folx who came of age during the AIDS epidemic, it came with a particularly brutal layer: the message, delivered loudly and repeatedly, that their sexuality was not just wrong but deadly. That their desire was a death sentence.

It is almost impossible to overstate what that does to a person. To come into your sexuality inside that kind of fear. To have to figure out who you are and what you want in a context where the very act of wanting is framed as dangerous.

Reflection: What messages did you absorb early about whether your desire was safe, welcome, or acceptable? Where did those messages come from, and are they still shaping how you move through your relationships?

The Moment You Stop Letting It Land

Something Alex said has stayed with me. He talked about a point in his life when he made a decision. People could call him whatever they wanted. It was not going to have the same impact anymore. He was going to claim who he was, fully, regardless of their reaction.

That is not a small thing. That is an act of profound self-possession. And it is different from not caring what people think. It is more like: I know who I am clearly enough that your version of me does not get to override mine.

In therapy, we talk about this as building a stable internal foundation. A relationship with yourself that is grounded enough that external hostility does not get to be the thing that defines you. It does not mean the harm does not land. It means you have somewhere to return to when it does.

Reflection: Where in your life do you feel most self-possessed? Where do you feel most destabilized by how others see you? What is the difference between those two contexts?

Joy Is Not the Reward. It Is the Point.

What moved me most in this conversation was Alex describing a training in Jakarta. Thirty queer folks in a country where the conditions for LGBTQ+ people are becoming increasingly dangerous. And what he witnessed was their joy. Their ability to connect, laugh, flirt, and show up for the work, all at the same time.

That image is doing something important. It is refusing the narrative that queer people in difficult circumstances are only defined by their survival. They are also defined by their pleasure, their community, their laughter, their desire. And claiming all of that, in the face of systems designed to strip it away, is not frivolous. It is resistance.

We talk in this series about what it takes to build healthy relationships, and one of the through-lines has been this: you cannot build healthy connection from a place of chronic shame. At some point you have to come back to yourself. To what feels good, what feels true, what your body knows even when your mind is still catching up.

Joy is part of that. Not joy as in everything is fine. Joy as in: I am still here, I still want things, and I am going to let myself have them.

Reflection: Where in your life are you allowing yourself genuine joy right now? Where are you postponing it, waiting until things are safer or more settled or more earned? What would it look like to move toward it anyway?

We Have Been Here Before

One more thing worth naming. The political moment we are in right now is frightening. The rollbacks, the legislation, the funding cuts, the global spread of anti-LGBTQ law. It is a lot to hold.

And Alex's reminder is worth sitting with: we have been here before. The 80s and 90s were devastating and they also produced extraordinary activism, art, and community. The response to threat is not to shrink. It is to step forward, find your people, and get to work, with rest built in, because rest is part of the work too.

Reflection: How are you balancing the weight of this moment with your own need for restoration? Who around you makes that balance feel more possible?

You Do Not Have to Navigate This Alone

At Open Space Therapy Collective, we work with queer folks who are carrying all of this: the history, the shame, the grief, and the desire to build something real and sustainable in the middle of a world that keeps shifting. For some, that also means working through experiences that continue to shape their sense of safety, identity, and connection. Learn more about our trauma therapy, or book a free 15-minute intro call and let’s start there.

Written by Renae Johnson, LPCC, ATR-BC (they/them)