Dear Straight Psychonauts: An Open Letter To Cishet Folks in the Psychedelic Community from a Queer Researcher.
To my friends in the psychedelic community: It is time for a reckoning. The time for soft homophobia and transphobia is past. The community must grapple with the psychedelic movement’s entrenched bias against gender and sexually diverse people. For decades, the history of harmful and unethical psychedelic conversion therapy has been swept under the rug, when it should be put on par with MKUltra and sexual abuse as among the core harms perpetrated by psychedelic leaders that continue today. LGBTQIA+ folks are subjected in psychedelic spaces to a litany of harms, including extra homophobic and transphobic stress, prejudice, and discrimination. Straight folks should step up-to share in the work ahead through specific reforms: 100% compliance with preferred name and gender pronouns; 100% LGBTQIA+ parity for reporting of outcomes for participants in psychedelic research; the formation of a “Psychedelic Organization Equality Index” evaluation for psychedelic employers; a “Psychedelic Census” with comprehensive reporting of board and officer diversity for psychedelic organizations; and a “Psychedelic Participant Index,” evaluating psychedelic research participant and patient experiences. The time is right for the formation of a “Psychedelic Conversion Survivors” project to collect the living histories of people who underwent conversion therapy in the 1950s-70s, and those who still survive homophobic and transphobic treatments in retreat centers and other settings. There must be an explicit ban on conversion therapy from psychedelic practice organizations. New gender and sexually-diverse affirming therapies should be tested in clinical trials designed by and for queer folx. Community and underground practitioners in the Santo Daime, UDV, and at Takiwasi, as well as in Oregon, Jamaica, Costa Rica and other environments where psychedelics are being used, must stop discriminating and stop top-down gender sorting that instantiates patriarchal heterosexist gender binaries and does harm to non-binary and transgender folx. The queer psychedelic community should look inward to dismantle internalized racism, classism, ageism, ableism, and sexism in our thinking and practices. There is an urgent need for allyship with other target groups. Dear straight folks in in the psychedelic community: It is time to have this reckoning, to share the burden of reform, and to take urgent action. Psychedelic medicine in an LGBTQIA+ affirming community container may provide a powerful healing way-a way that draws on queer wisdom and ancestries and points toward a more affirming, self-loving, and collectively caring future for marginalized people.
Presentation by Alex Belser at Queering Psychedelics II (San Francisco, April 22nd, 2023)