A Group Experience · A novel in five acts · Edited by the late Felice Picano
Four men. One therapy group.
Everything they have never said out loud.
About what happens when gay men stop negotiating for acceptance and start demanding meaning.
Signed first edition · Original cover · Free US shipping“Doug united art and spirit to guide gay men toward rediscovery. I'm proud of what we built and the laughter we shared.”Felice Picano
Pioneering gay author and editor · 1944–2025
Andy, Bobby, Harry, John — and Dr. Glitter, who holds the room.
Healing Gay Sex and Love: A Group Experience is a bold work of psychological narrative fiction written by a practicing psychotherapist. Set inside a gay men's therapy group in Hollywood, it blends queer literature, depth psychology, and sharp camp into an emotionally risky, often funny exploration of sex, shame, love, and repair.
Five acts spanning five years. Andy, Bobby, Harry, and John confront one another — playfully and assertively — and gradually risk saying what has remained unspeakable about sex, love, power, loyalty, and shame. Campy repartee, flashbacks, and moments of group psychodrama expose their histories and fault lines, while new conflicts erupt inside the group itself.
When their therapist, Dr. Glitter, temporarily returns to New York to care for a former lover, the men take the work beyond the therapy room — performing and sharing what they are learning as they begin shaping new frameworks, including the G+Q MAP and GQSHIFT, for moving gay life beyond assimilation toward a more relational, ethical, and reparative future.
They wrestle with inherited shame, erotic confusion, family and cultural loyalty, aging, illness, fantasy, and the fear that pleasure itself may be dangerous.
How do you build intimacy without losing freedom? And what does healing look like when the culture that wounded you is still very much alive?
Projection, transference, shadow work, group dynamics — the concepts are embedded in lived scenes rather than explained from a distance. Readers interested in psychology will recognize the process. Readers drawn to gay fiction and queer literature will recognize the truth.
Fuck You, Toxic Shame · Expose Your Grindr · John's Tragic Order · Cracking Eggs · Progress Notes for Inferno
Entering the Andron · Stairway to Heaven · Alcibiades Crashes · Progress Notes
Private Lives · Aftermath · Who Holds Whom · Reconstruction · Progress Notes for Purgatorio
The Riot at Ascension · When Queens Collide · The Reckoning · Progress Notes for Crucible
The GQ Shift Class · Carter Intervenes · Bobby Under the Stars · Paris: A Comedy
Opening with Overture — Fools Rush In.
Closing with an Epilogue and Coda: Join the G+Q MAP Community.
“Heartfelt, profound, and often disarmingly funny.”Dr. Enrique Lopez
“A book our community has long needed.”David, Palm Springs
“Clinical insight wrapped in great storytelling.”Amazon reader
Every direct order is signed by hand and mailed by me. Amazon can't do that.
The signed copies are the original first edition, with the illustrated Hollywood cover — a small, numbered run.
Author of Sacred Lips of the Bronx, Sex Between Men, Healing Gay Sex and Love, and The Gay Hero's Journey (forthcoming). Creator of Psychology for the People on Substack, YouTube, and Instagram.
He founded the LGBT Specialization in Clinical Psychology at Antioch University Los Angeles and co-founded COLORS LGBTQ Youth Counseling Center and Highways Performance Art Space. He teaches at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology and begins formal psychoanalytic training in Fall 2026.
This book is a work of psychological narrative fiction. While informed by clinical experience, the characters, group, and events are fictional and at times deliberately mythic.
