ABSTRACT
In this essay, Seamus Prior recounts the personal journey he undertook in response to a disturbing moment he encountered in his work as a gay psychotherapist with a gay male client. In the moment he experienced shock, confusion, and dissociation and, in the days that followed, he traced the origins of his experience back through his life course. His writing explores the lifelong process of unravelling shame in relation to sexuality and the continuing havoc that internalised homophobia can wreak on the relation to self and others even in maturity. His story interweaves the personal and professional, demonstrating the myriad ways in which they interpenetrate in his chosen occupational field. It is a search for relation and encounter, between a man and his sexual subjectivity and between one gay man and another. It concludes with a powerful advocacy for non-exploitative intimacy founded on an ethic of care and puts acknowledgement of vulnerability, and acceptance of our flawed yet evolving sexual and embodied subjectivities, at the heart of the meeting between two gay men.
