In the late 1970s, family therapy underwent a challenge, initiated by Rachel Hare-Mustin, regarding the way women were treated by therapists and their failure to acknowledge the powerlessness of women in the traditional family. Also responding to the work of Jean Baker Miller and the Stone Center on the psychology of women, and Carol Gilligan's research on women's unique voice and experience, family therapists began to incorporate an understanding that, psychologically, women strive for connection and cooperativeness, whereas men tend to develop values of autonomy and independence.

In 1977, under the leadership of Betty Carter, Marianne Walters, Peggy Papp, and Olga Silverstein, the Women's Project was launched. This project was designed to facilitate an analysis of women and women's roles in the family, and how male therapeutic assumptions had contributed to maintain sexism in the family.

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Redefining Family

In the years following the development of the Women's Project, family systems therapy also examined the role of race, ethnicity, and class within families and between therapists and clients. The deconstruction of race, ethnicity, class, and gender within families set the stage for a postmodern, poststructural revaluation of definitions of family.

Consequently, multiple realities of family life that had previously been hidden became increasingly visible, exposing the limitations of binary thinking about the family in such terms as black or white, male or female, healthy or dysfunctional. The development of a specialized field--lesbian and gay family therapy--emerged during this era.

Queer Family Therapy

family therapy is a merging of the field of gay-affirmative therapy with family systems theories. Among the goals of glbtq family therapy is the recognition of the developmental processes of glbtq people, including issues related to coming out and living in a and society.

Issues of couple relationships and commitment within a culture that does not validate queer marriages also falls within the rubric of queer family therapy, as well as the impact of HIV and other illnesses on family relationships. As increasing numbers of glbtq people choose to have children, issues of conception, adoption, and parenting, as well as separation and divorce, have also become salient issues in queer family therapy.

Glbtq family therapy is a relatively new field, and clinicians specializing in it have diverse backgrounds and educational preparation. Some are trained in social work and psychology, while others come to the field from backgrounds in education and counseling.

Queer family therapists have not only received different training in competing schools of family therapy, but they practice assorted techniques. Hence, it is difficult to generalize about the field and its practitioners. However, the goal of glbtq family therapy is to help gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people create and maintain healthy families. Central to that goal is the acceptance, even celebration, of same-sex sexuality, diverse gender expressions, same-sex partnering, and alternative family structures for childrearing.

Although there are frequently social and legal barriers to overcome, adoption is an important way in which lesbian and gay male couples create families.

A form of behavior modification that employs unpleasant and sometimes painful stimuli, aversion therapy was one of the more popular treatments for homosexuality and cross-dressing in the 1950s and 1960s.

"Coming out" is the revelation or acknowledgment that one is a member of a sexual minority, a process that is at once personal and social and often political.

In recent years there has been a push for glbtq-sensitive counselor training and glbtq-affirmative counseling, which, although occurring slowly and encountering resistance, marks a significant move in a positive direction.

Glbtq identity development has not yet been fully integrated into mainstream theories of psychological development, but recent work promises to further our understanding of the life experiences of glbtq people.

Many glbtq people reject a fixed definition of family imposed by society, and instead claim the right to define their own families as they choose.

Mixed-orientation marriages--those in which one partner is straight and the other is gay or lesbian--often end in divorce, but such an ending is not inevitable.

Even though glbtq people have been parents throughout history, recent political movements and advances in fertility technology have given rise to a much more visible and self-identified gay and lesbian parents.

Psychoanalysis, which began as a therapeutic procedure, ultimately became one of the most powerful methods of cultural analysis and critique of the twentieth-century.

Psychotherapy, the clinical process of treating mental and emotional health problems, has recently been energized by a movement to depathologize homosexuality and to enhance the dignity and self-respect of glbtq clients.

Reparative therapy is a dangerously misguided attempt, supported by homophobic religious organizations, to change a person's sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual.

A compulsive behavior that completely dominates the addict's life, sexual addiction is an intimacy disorder that frequently causes severe stress on the addict and his or her friends and family.

Since the1990s, Social Work has slowly become a more glbtq-friendly profession.

Straight men who have sex with men do so for a number of reasons, but in general such activity is about physical release and sexual behaviors, not about attraction or desire for another man.