“Shame” is a word that has some relevance to LGBT lives. However, it isn’t positively relevant.

“Shame” is the antonym of ‘pride.’ Thus, while pride means that one positively values one’s personal attributes, any consequent social identity and community of interest based on that identity, shame means converse personal and collective devaluation of attributes, identity and community.

This leads one to ask what the origins of such devaluation might be within one’s personal life and/or social context. Given that homosexuality was ‘demedicalised’ and removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ‘pathologies’ list over thirty five years ago, the primary culprit is likely to be conservative, homophobic religious philosophy.

Fortunately, nowadays, these conservative homophobic sects tend to be social enclaves of the like-minded, and have little impact on most public policy to do with women’s reproductive freedom, sexual orientation and gender identity- except if one is unfortunate enough to have been brought up in such a family environment, in which case personal experiences of ’shame’ may dog one’s positive emotional and psychosexual development.

It’s an unpleasant double-bind to be in. On the one hand, one experiences positive valuation of one’s sexual identity attributes, independent rational thought and freedom of action, while in one’s fundamentalist/conservative Catholic environment, there is converse devaluation of those same attributes, identity and community of interest.

If one doesn’t take steps to distance oneself from this tricky existential situation, the cost is that one turns into a neurotic, self-hating conformist religious lesbian or gay man, caught between two sources of incompatible meaning in their everyday lives.  French Catholic homosexual Marcel Jouhandeau, his contemporary Australian conservative Catholic counterpart John Heard and Canada’s alleged “Homosexuals Opposed to Pride Extremism” are relevant examples, as are the predominantly elderly denizens of Exodus, New Zealand’s “ex-gay” group.

Of course, we aren’t their only targets. In the anti-abortion movement, there’s a whole group of ‘exploited women’ who have been brainwashed by recidivist return to earlier conservative religious backgrounds into regretting earlier abortions. One also thinks of the courageous young women of “Mercy Survivors” in Sydney, established to expose the absence of proper therapeutic and counselling support for young women at risk of suicide, eating disorders, trauma from past sexual abuse, and other gender specific issues within the fundamentalist/Pentecostal “Mercy Ministries Australia.”  As with the ex-gay movement, these young women experienced attempted isolation from outside influences that might have assisted real healing and positive personal development within their troubled lives.

“Shame” is a psychological and social construct, born of perceptions that one’s personal attribute is somehow the result of an individual ‘failing’, rather than either a positive attribute, or the result of someone else’s intentional act of deliberate predatory damage and exploitation of their vulnerability, due to circumstances beyond their erstwhile control.

Fundamentalists cannot ‘heal’ “shame’- it has to be unlearnt, so that new positive personal identities and affirmative participation in communities of interest can result.