1st Edition
Enhancing Pleasure for Gay Men A Clinical Guide for Healing and Acceptance Through Better Sex
This book aims to help therapists understand the challenges gay men face in their sex lives, providing professionals and gay men with evidence-based interventions and clinical tools to help them heal and live overall healthier lives.
Gay men have unique and debilitating issues that can get in the way of them having pleasurable sex. Instead of sex being a space to learn about themselves, heal, release, and receive joy, for many sex is fraught with shame, anxiety, self-hate, and feeling isolated. Written for both professionals and the clients they treat, this book aims to heal sex-related wounds through sex and, in turn, improve every aspect of gay men’s mental health. The book begins by exploring what is special about gay men and sex before looking at assessing and presenting medical issues impacting sexual functioning, such as childhood trauma, attachment styles, body issues, anxiety, depression, long-term relationships and parenting, and hookup apps. It then moves onto clinical interventions to address these issues, with intake questionnaires and information on how to adapt sensate focus exercises, neuroscience, narrative, CBT, and somatic modalities to provide sex therapy interventions specific to gay men.
With special focus on marginalized communities within the LGBTQIA+ community, such as trans men, BIPOC, aging, disabled, and chronically ill voices, this book is essential reading for sex therapists and mental health professionals working with gay men, as well as gay men themselves looking to live authentically and happily in their sexual lives.
Introduction
1. The Unique Role Sex Has Played for Gay Men
2. Myths About Gay Men and Sex
3. Assessment for Sexual and Medical Issues
4. Mental and Sexual Health Issues
5. Body Issues
6. Anxiety
7. Depression and Substance Abuse
8. Intimacy Issues
9. Hookup Apps
10. Sexuality Assessment: Conversations to Have with Gay Men
11. Medical and Physiological Interventions
12. Healing Developmental Issues and Improving Sexual Experiences
13.Clearing Up Body Misconceptions and Enhancing Pleasure
14. Managing Anxiety and Increasing Sexual Enjoyment
15. Decreasing Depression and Substance Reliance and Increasing Pleasure
16. Improving Intimacy
17. Safely Navigating Hookup Apps
18. Further Methods to Increase Pleasure
Biography
Israel Martinez (he/him) has his doctorate in clinical sexology and is a psychotherapist, lecturer, and supervisor. He has been working with gay men clinically for over 15 years and is the author of Helping Gay Men Find Love.
“Enhancing Pleasure for Gay Men provides a sure-to-be-indispensable guide with a pleasure-centered ethos that is steeped in intersectional approaches and social justice methods. It not only raises awareness of specific issues of vital concerns to gay male clients, but also provides ethical and effective resources and tools to enhance clinical practice and promote greater empathic attunement.”
Lucie Fielding, PhD, author of Trans Sex: Clinical Approaches to Trans Sexualities and Erotic Embodiments
“In a nonjudgmental, respectful and non-pathologizing way, Martinez explains the unique role sex has played for gay men. Not only does he offer numerous strategies for resolving specific sexual issues, he postulates that sex can heal larger 'developmental, attachment and systems' issues for gay men. Thus, this clinical guide is thoroughly sex positive!”
Gil Tunnell, PhD, co-author of Couple Therapy with Gay Men
“In Enhancing Pleasure for Gay Men, Israel has provided a comprehensive, candid, clinically-sound, and practical framework that informs and invites clinicians to more effectively help gay male clients work on their complicated and misunderstood relationship to pleasure so they can feel free to have more pleasurable sex.”
Buck Dodson, LCSW, creator and host of Gay Men’s Life Lab
