08/09/2026
At eighteen, I had a boyfriend. A partner. Most of our friends didn't know, and we still spent a lot of time with them. One of them was a sensitive, well-read man, an artist. He told us that gay men, in his mind, were "two hairy, fat guys licking each other." It made his skin crawl, basically. We heard it. Afterward, walking away, I told myself: well, he doesn't know about us, we never told him. And I felt guilty.
If a straight teenager tells his friends he has a girlfriend at fourteen, a q***r kid might tell his friends at nineteen. If at all.
Hiding gets woven into adolescence, and it carries on into life. Being q***r means constantly living with the risk of rejection. There are pleasant surprises along the way too.
If a straight girl brings her boyfriend home at sixteen, her q***r friend might tell her parents she's seeing someone at twenty-four. Or maybe never.
Sometimes I hear acquaintances, even colleagues in the therapy field, say to me: "Look, okay, you live how you live, with a trans partner, surrounded by friends, no kids. So what's actually hard about it? We've all been through hard things and found our place, and so did you. I have no problem with you. Quite the opposite, I love you. Why do you think what you went through is so special? There's acceptance now, male couples can have kids together. You're on TV all the time. What's the problem?"
I feel a familiar tightening in my chest. If I hide, I feel guilty. If I tell, I still somehow come off looking bad. Where do I even start?
There's something in their question that sounds reasonable. What is the problem, really? Except the issue sits deeper than that. The experience of exclusion for anyone whose gender or s*xual orientation differs touches something so foundational to our culture that it's invisible to whoever hasn't lived it.
Growing up feeling like there's no place for you in the system is the foundation of a q***r child's existence. Maybe it's the foundation for every child. I hear that argument. The thing is, for someone who grows up not aligning with society's conventions, this experience doesn't stop there. It runs through adolescence, young adulthood and adulthood. Elemental parts of life become society's unspoken: your gender identity, who you love.
**As a q***r person, you're in relationship with the unspoken.**
This is what systemic constellation work has taught me to see: how the unspoken will do backflips trying to win back its place in the system. My work in constellations is to give recognition to the unspoken.
What's unspoken here, hidden, actively denied, especially now, is the experience of exclusion. Not the exclusion. the experience of it.
Notice how much effort goes into it. So much invested in elaborate explanations for why the q***r experience doesn't exist. Not for trans people, say, not for non-binary people, not even for a woman who prefers women. Charts, numbers, links, articles. All just to avoid recognizing something simple and clear: Exclusion is part of our systems and it always has been. When it isn't recognized, it only grows stronger. Exclusion and concealment cost a system a great deal of energy. That's how systems work.
A grief with no funeral
There's a term for what's hidden here: disenfranchised grief. That's what Professor Kenneth Doka, an ordained minister who did extensive work with death and bereavement, called it. Grief for a loss that never received social recognition. Think of Ennis at the end of Brokeback Mountain, calling Jack's wife, standing in Jack's childhood bedroom, with no name for what he was to him and nowhere to put it.
That.
Sometimes you don't even get a funeral to go to. The loss itself gets silenced.
Grief for the girl of thirteen whose love broke open toward another girl in her class, love she had to bury deep in the ground while it was still alive. Grief for the boy who longed to join the girls' games at recess, and had to be driven back, again and again. Grief for the twenty-year-old who searched and couldn't find friends to talk and laugh with about s*x. Grief for a life not lived, while all around, everyone else was living theirs. This is the basic experience of anyone who has lived exclusion, over and over, across a lifetime.
The recognition I'm offering isn't only for the exclusion itself, but for the experience of whoever met it. For those who, from a very young age, had to walk through the darkness it casts, eyes wide open, feeling their way toward safety. It isn't enough to tell the grown adult: here, I accept you. The teenager and the child who were there before him need recognition too, for the exclusion they lived through. That they're still living through. Every time this experience is denied, that denial is exclusion itself. It is active, and it does damage.
To me, constellation work is a remarkable tool for returning recognition and life to the unspoken. And since q***rness itself is a relationship with society's unspoken, the meeting between the two opens new possibilities.
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If this speaks to you: on Thursday, 17 September, I'm leading an introductory workshop on family constellation work from a q***r perspective, hosted by 'ISCA' . Everyone is welcome.
More dates on my site, including workshops I run myself, priced by dana: pay what feels right.
Picture: q***rhana 2003
Photo: Shay Ben Efrayim
