Has Sex Positivity Gone Too Far? What Gay Men Need to Know About Trauma & Healing

Happy Healthy Homo

Joel Wood & Keegan Hirst

Gay, Relationships, Society & Culture, Sexuality, Lgbt, Lgbtq, Lgbtq+, Education, Health & Fitness, Self-improvement

4.8 • 779 Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 2025

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Going to therapy is a sign of strength, not weakness. Our paid partner BetterHelp makes therapy simple, with 10% off your first month to help you get started: https://betterhelp.com/happyhealthyhomo

Find Michael Pezzullo on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michaelpezzullolmft

What does it really mean to be “sex positive”? And has the movement actually gone too far? 🌈

This week on Happy Healthy Homo, we sit down with therapist Michael Pezzullo (He/Him), a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist specializing in LGBTQ+ mental health, trauma, and chemsex. Together we dive into some of the toughest but most important conversations for gay men today: sexual trauma, the chemsex scene, ketamine-assisted therapy, and how we can reclaim masculinity in a healthy, authentic way.

Michael also shares how trauma shows up uniquely in gay men’s lives, why so many avoid reaching out for help, and what real healing can look like.

If you’ve ever wondered where sex positivity ends and self-destruction begins — or how we can build healthier relationships with sex, masculinity, and ourselves — this episode is for you.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey homos, welcome back to our podcast.
0:06.8	We are Keegan and Joel.
0:08.3	I'm still Keegan.
0:09.2	And I'm still Joe.
0:10.0	And we're still boyfriends.
0:11.0	We are.
0:12.0	So just before we get into this episode, I wanted to talk about the paid partner of this episode,
0:16.1	which is Better Help.
0:17.5	You probably know if you've been listening to the podcast,
0:19.7	I've recently been through a
0:21.0	big transition in life with my heart diagnosis of dilated cardiomyopathy, which when we found out
0:28.6	was, well, it is serious and it had a big impact on what I was able to do. I wasn't able to go
0:35.4	to the gym. My fitness, I was really struggling,
0:38.6	and the mental health took a real nose dived. And I, you know, was beating myself up thinking
0:45.6	that I should be doing better. I should be thriving. I should be okay. I should be managing it.
0:49.7	And it was something that I really struggled with. And I went back into therapy to speak about this change.
0:56.6	And we've ended up talking about me grieving for a life that I thought that I was going to have
1:02.1	compared to one that I've got, managing my own expectations.
1:06.6	And it's just really helped me to adjust in a healthy way and to manage things, to manage my own expectations and to just take things at my own pace without putting loads of pressure on and feeling loads of shame.
1:21.2	And I've been a big fan of therapy for the longest time.
1:24.7	It's had a profound impact on my life.
1:29.5	And I just wanted to share that in case you're going through something that's really big or a big transition, you know,
	...

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