Come do the work in good company.

Self, Democracy, Self-EsteemNew

What self-esteem actually is, how a self gets built, and why a citizenry with no working model of its own inner life is easier to enrage than to persuade.

In thirty years of practice I have almost never met a person who arrived already knowing how a self gets built. Nobody teaches it. This class does, as a conversation rather than a lecture, because the material does not survive being lectured at. Not therapy, and not a substitute for one: a working model, and the vocabulary that goes with it.

Read the essay this class comes from →

The six sessions

• What self-esteem is not: confidence, positive thinking, grandiosity
• Freud, and the demotion of the ego
• The relational turn: Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott
• Kohut, and the three things a self needs from other people
• How a self gets built after childhood, through rupture and repair
• The practice, the politics, and the wager that they are the same subject

The Soul in the Sentence

A generative writing workshop for memoir, fiction, and the autobiographical essay, for people who want to write the thing they have been circling for years.

We read like writers and write toward what frightens us. Each week opens with a short craft talk, moves into a prompt written in the room, and closes with response that is rigorous and kind. You leave with pages, not just notes.

What you will do

• Write new work every week from prompts designed to find the live wire
• Learn the craft of scene, voice, and structure without jargon
• Give and receive feedback in a small, steady group
• Build the start of a manuscript you can carry forward to the press

The Gay Hero's Journey

A guided passage through the framework of my book: a map for gay and queer men who sense there is more life beyond coping.

We move through the G+Q MAP and the GQ SHIFT and into the Three Houses, the Inferno, the Recitare, and the Crucible, toward what I call erotic sovereignty. This is depth work, done in story and in practice. For seekers, not tourists.

▶Watch: the history of gay psychology

The arc of the course

• Name where you are on the map, honestly
• Pass through the Inferno without being consumed by it
• Find your voice in the Recitare
• Forge something durable in the Crucible

Heavenly Love

A gay intellectual history, from the Greeks to now. Where our idea of ourselves came from, who made it, and what it cost them.

In the Symposium, Pausanias distinguishes two loves and names one of them heavenly. Nearly everything written since about love between men has been an argument with that sentence, and most of us inherited the argument without ever being handed the text. This course hands it to you. We read the Greeks, the Renaissance men who resurrected them, the Victorians who made a case in secret, the doctors who invented the category, and the movement that broke it open.

Not a survey and not a celebration. A lineage, with its losses. And it does not end in the seminar room. It ends where Isay and Walker and Hopcke took it, in a depth psychology that begins from gay life rather than tolerating it, which is the ground the rest of my work stands on.

Where we go

• Plato's two Aphrodites, and Sappho on the other shore
• Ficino coins Socratic love, and the Renaissance smuggles Greece back in
• Whitman, Symonds, Carpenter, and the Victorians who wrote in code
• Ulrichs and Hirschfeld invent the homosexual, for better and for worse
• Wilde in the dock, and the century that took his name in vain
• Harlem, Bloomsbury, Mattachine, Stonewall, and the Radical Faeries
• Foucault and Sedgwick take the category apart, and are right to
• Gay-centered depth psychology, and what gets built where the category was

Depth Psychology, in Plain Language

Freud, Jung, the unconscious, and the alchemy of change, taught for the curious rather than the credentialed.

Each evening takes one big idea and makes it usable: what the unconscious actually is, why we repeat what hurts us, what the shadow wants, and how change happens. Bring your questions and your dreams. No background required.

▶Watch: Depth Psychology in plain language

The four evenings

• The unconscious, and why it runs the show
• Repetition: the patterns that keep suffering alive
• The shadow, and the gold buried in it
• Alchemy: how the psyche remakes itself

Healing Art

You do not need to call yourself an artist. You need a dream and a willingness to follow it onto the page.

In this class you make images from your dreams and your active imagination, the way I have made hundreds of my own. You learn to read what your hands already know, and to meet the unconscious directly, without waiting for the right words to arrive.

▶Watch: making art from dreams

What you will do

• Make images from dreams and active imagination, no skill required
• Learn simple ways in when the page feels blank
• Read your own images for what they are trying to say
• Build a practice you can keep going on your own

Productivity Hacks for Healers

For therapists, writers, and soul workers. The inner work is yours. The outer work, getting seen, can be learned.

This is the practical class I wish someone had taught me: how to build a brand that still sounds like you, shoot simple b-roll, and put AI to work for healers and creatives without losing your voice. You leave with a system, not just inspiration.

What you will do

• Shape a brand and a message that actually sound like you
• Shoot and use simple b-roll without a film crew
• Put AI to work for the parts that drain you
• Leave with a repeatable system, not a one-time burst