Douglas Sadownick

Douglas Sadownick, Ph.D., is a psychotherapist, educator, and author whose work bridges LGBTQ+ healing, depth psychology, and community activism. For more than three decades, he has worked across therapy rooms, classrooms, performance art spaces, and communities, attending to the ways sexuality, culture, power, and longing shape gay and queer lives.

His most recent book, Healing Gay Sex and Love: A Group Experience (2026), blends psychological narrative fiction with clinical insight, following a gay men’s therapy group as it wrestles with desire, shame, intimacy, masculinity, and meaning.

He is the author of the award-winning novel Sacred Lips of the Bronx (St. Martin’s Press, 1994), reissued in a 30-year commemorative edition by Rebel Satori Press in 2025.

Sadownick is also the author of Sex Between Men: An Intimate History of the Sex Lives of Gay Men, Postwar to Present (Harper San Francisco, 1996), a foundational text in gay cultural studies.

He founded the nation’s first LGBT Specialization in Clinical Psychology at Antioch University Los Angeles in 2006 and co-founded COLORS LGBTQ Youth Counseling Services in 2011, helping to establish affirmative clinical training and services at a time when such models were still emerging. He currently serves on the organization’s board.

His intellectual and creative formation was shaped by earlier traditions of gay psychology and cultural experimentation, including influences associated with the Uranian Institute, as well as community-based dialogue and performance spaces such as Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, which he helped to co-found in 1989.

Before entering clinical academia, Sadownick was an award-winning journalist writing for the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly. He also created several performance-art touring troupes while at Highways. He currently teaches at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology–Los Angeles and maintains a private psychotherapy practice in Los Angeles.

His writing appears on Substack, and his videos on YouTube, under the banner Psychology for the People. Companion G+Q workbooks and queer pedagogy texts expanding Healing Gay Sex and Love are forthcoming.