ABSTRACT
The author offers a queer critique of dominant lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) coming-out models in use in counselling and psychotherapy today. These models present particular difficulties when working with LGB and especially queer (Q) clients as they incorporate a belief that successful coming out involves a move towards a fixed and stable identity and quiet acceptance of the wider social world. Vivienne Cass first proposed her model of homosexual identity formation in 1979. She describes six stages of identity formation based on two fundamental assumptions that: identity formation is a developmental process and stability and change in behaviour lies in the interaction between the individual and their environment. Queer theory is hard to define but is concerned with disrupting binary categories of identity and therefore providing a radical challenge to many of the assumptions underpinning common-sense understandings of self and identity, in the West at least.
