LGBTQ+ Issues therapists in Los Angeles, California CA
We are proud to feature top rated LGBTQ+ Issues therapists in Los Angeles. We encourage you to review each profile to find your best match.
Dr. Christina Charlotin
Psychologist, Psy.D.
Challenges related to LGBTQ identify, coming out process, challenges and transitions.
14 Years Experience
In-Person in Los Angeles, CA
Online in Los Angeles, CA California
Julie Anderson
Psychologist, Ph.D.
With over 20 years of non-profit work experience for the LGBT community, I can help you through the specific issues that arise from LGBTQI identities and those who care about someone who is LGBT.
26 Years Experience
In-Person in Los Angeles, CA 90048
Online in Los Angeles, CA California
Don ( "Dr Don" ) Etkes
Marriage and Family Therapist, Ph.D., MFT
For over 30 years I've helped both male and female same sex couples as well as LGBT individuals.
39 Years Experience
In-Person in Los Angeles, CA 90024
Online in Los Angeles, CA California
Lucy Cotter
Marriage and Family Therapist, MFT
I have many years of counseling experience in the LGBTQ community.
21 Years Experience
In-Person in Los Angeles, CA 90004
Online in Los Angeles, CA California
Ever After Individual and Family Therapy
Marriage and Family Therapist, MS, LMFT
We provide an affirming and supportive space for individuals exploring identity, relationships, and the unique challenges faced by the LGBTQIA+ community. Whether navigating coming out, family dynamics, discrimination, or mental health concerns, we help clients build self-acceptance, resilience, and fulfilling connections.
17 Years Experience
Online in Los Angeles, CA California (Online Only)
Jillian Luz
Marriage and Family Therapist, LMFT, ATR
I have personal and professional experience knowing and working with folx who identify as LGBTQIA2S. I strive to implement cultural competency and create a safe space for you to explore and express your authentic self and lived experience.
11 Years Experience
Online in Los Angeles, CA California (Online Only)
Samer Fawaz
Marriage and Family Therapist, M.A., LMFT #149147
As a gay man living in Los Angeles for over twenty years, I have experienced the challenges of cultivating and maintaining a genuine sense of self while being bombarded with body image issues, homophobia, gay shame, and the hyper-sexualized competitive nature of the gay community. As gay men, our sexual currency can sometimes become the focus of how we see and place value on ourselves. This can lead to addiction, self-loathing cycles, self-harm, anxiety, and depression. I am passionate about helping you dismantle what society, and the gay community has led you to believe about yourself. Together, we will get to the root of what makes you feel centered, authentic, and grounded. I am highly invested in creating a judgment-free space for you to feel safe to talk about anything you feel is relevant to your growth.
6 Years Experience
In-Person in Los Angeles, CA 90039
Online in Los Angeles, CA California
Mia Turner
Therapist, MA, RYT, ASDCS, LMFT, NPT-C, CMNCS, CMIP
Therapy for LGBTQIA2S+ individuals seeking a space where identity does not need to be explained, defended, minimized, or translated. My work supports people navigating gender, sexuality, relationships, family dynamics, community, spirituality, belonging, life transitions, and the ongoing process of living more fully in alignment with who they are.
This work is grounded in intersectionality, liberation, and the understanding that distress often emerges not from identity itself, but from the cumulative impact of navigating environments, systems, relationships, and cultural narratives that have not always made room for difference. Particular attention is given to the experiences of queer, trans, nonbinary, neurodivergent, disabled, chronically ill, highly sensitive, BIPOC, multicultural, and otherwise multiply marginalized individuals whose identities and experiences often exist across multiple worlds at once.
Exploration may include the impacts of masking, self-silencing, code-switching, hypervigilance, rejection, invisibility, family expectations, religious experiences, cultural belonging, internalized shame, identity-based trauma, and the exhaustion that can come from continually adapting in order to be accepted, understood, or safe. It may also include making space for joy, pleasure, desire, authenticity, connection, creativity, chosen family, and the parts of yourself that have had fewer opportunities to be fully expressed.
My approach integrates EMDR, somatic therapy, mindfulness, parts work, expressive arts, neuropsychotherapy, attachment-focused therapy, and liberation-oriented healing. Rather than focusing on who you should become, the work centers listening more deeply to who you already are. Support is offered in cultivating self-trust, nervous system safety, embodied authenticity, meaningful connection, and a life that feels more aligned with your values, relationships, needs, and ways of moving through the world.
10 Years Experience
Online in Los Angeles, CA California (Online Only)
The Connection Clinic
Marriage and Family Therapist
At The Connection Clinic, we affirm and celebrate LGBTQ+ identities, providing a safe space to explore unique challenges. We foster acceptance and personal growth while addressing issues relevant to the LGBTQ+ community.
9 Years Experience
Online in Los Angeles, CA California (Online Only)
Jonathan Kruger Therapy
Marriage and Family Therapist, LMFT
Members of the LGBT community face unique and multifaceted challenges that add additional layers of complexity to the therapeutic process. It is vital that therapists working with LGBT clients have a deep understanding of these challenges in order to serve as an effective partner in the journey of self-discovery. My work with LGBT clients, as well as my own personal experience, have taught me that throughout each stage of life, LGBT persons are confronted with issues and prejudices that can be easily internalized, resulting in a profound struggle within themselves trying to maintain a healthy sense of self, self-confidence, and self-acceptance.
Indeed, for many LGTB persons, these issues begin early in youth: a significant portion of the LGBT community have faced down unaccepting parents and families, bullies, and, at times, a deeply prejudiced society that teaches from birth that LGBT persons are defective and unworthy. These are messages that wound at a fundamental level and, unfortunately, can reinforce an internalized message of unworthiness and defectiveness. Left unexplored, these external attacks on the self can manifest in many ways: shame which leads to substance abuse, reckless sexual behavior, an inability to sustain long-term intimate relationships.
Another unique aspect of my work with the LGBT community is the continued reverberation of the AIDS crisis that swept the community in the 80s and 90s. While we have made enormous strides in both understanding and the treatment of the HIV virus, learning of an HIV positive diagnosis remains a traumatic life event, where one’s sense of self may become gravely damaged or perhaps even destroyed. In addition, a large portion of the LGBT community directly experienced the peak of the AIDS crisis, and faced the untimely loss of beloved friends and colleagues, leading to intense bereavement, grief, and the relentless death of entire communities. The effects were and are ravaging; the trauma intense and enduring.
Furthermore another challenge facing this generation of openly gay men is that they are the first entering old age openly gay and out of the closet. How to not become invisible to the community, disappear and lose all sense of oneself becomes a vital priority. There have been few role models, no one demonstrating how to age in a successful, happy, purposeful way. So with age comes the loss of physical vitality and attributes, which for many gay men has been the leading currency of their lives. How does one reinvent oneself so as to stay vital and relevant, or risk slipping into the invisibility cloak that old age often brings upon gay men and people in general?
In treating the LGBT community, I strive toward creating and fulfilling a sense of completeness and wholeness within the self. Working empathically, slowly and deliberately to heal old wounds, and eradicate the innate sense of defectiveness. Always seeking to understand the sources from which that sense of defectiveness derived. With insights, understanding, processing and evaluating we then begin to reinstate a sense of enough-ness, perfection (even where there may be imperfection), wholeness, and completeness within and unto the self. It is a journey of self discovery which I have lived, understand and continually work on healing.
Slowly building understanding and conviction that the LGBT person is as complete and perfect as any other differently sexually identified person. The goal is to create and improve a strong, authentic sense of self, not one that needs to be propped up by the creation of a “false self” in order to be loveable or to feel adequate and enough.
13 Years Experience
In-Person in Los Angeles, CA 90046
Online in Los Angeles, CA California
Ken Howard, LCSW, CST - GayTherapyLA.com
Licensed Clinical Social Worker, MSW, LCSW, CST
Ken has been a gay men's specialist psychotherapist and coach for over 30 years in 2022, the most experienced gay men's specialist psychotherapist in the United States today, and as one of the first openly gay licensed psychotherapists to be associated publicly with LGBT-affirmative, gay-specific services, and one of the first two websites ("GayTherapyLA.com") nationally to feature the words "gay" or "LGBT" in the URL. He was trained at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, AIDS Project Los Angeles, Pacific Clinics - Pasadena, and the AIDS Service Center. He has been living with HIV/AIDS since 1990, and has been working continuously in support of the Los Angeles and national LGBTQ+ community since 1988. He has written hundreds of magazine articles, conference presentations, blog articles (GayTheraypyLA.com/blog), and podcast episodes ("Gay Therapy LA with Ken Howard, LCSW, CST") on specifically gay men's mental health and well-being, as well as other LGBT advocacy/activism.
34 Years Experience
Online in Los Angeles, CA California (Online Only)
Jayson L. Mystkowski
Psychologist, Ph.D., ABPP
Affirmative Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (ACBT) is an individualized, active and goal-oriented type of psychotherapy, with evidence-based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy interventions targeting SGM-specific stress and concerns. Topics addressed in Affirmative Cognitive Behavioral Therapy include the following:
Stress management (e.g., coping skills, substance abuse and recovery)
Gender identity (e.g., evaluations for medical transition and supporting documentation, non-binary)
Coming-out (e.g., concerns about one’s family, religion, culture, and workplace)
Sexual health (e.g., safer sex, STIs, sex positivity)
22 Years Experience
Online in Los Angeles, CA California (Online Only)
Laura Anderson LPCC, Eff Shame Therapy
Licensed Professional Counselor, LPCC
You deserve a space where you are fully seen, not explained or tolerated. I work with LGBTQIA+ clients from a shame-free, sex-positive perspective, bringing years of experience and genuine investment in the specific ways that systemic harm, family rejection, religious trauma, and identity-based shame show up in our lives and bodies. I am completing certification in sexuality therapy and work from a trauma-informed approach that gets beneath the surface — because you came here to actually heal, not just be accepted. You already deserve acceptance. Let's get to the rest.
12 Years Experience
Online in Los Angeles, CA California (Online Only)
Omer Harari
Marriage and Family Therapist, MA, LMFT
I approach therapy as an anti-oppressive project. In my work supporting LGBTQ+ clients, in addition to identifying and managing the impacts of traumas, patterns, beliefs and narratives, we focus to identify the specific impacts of homophobia, transphobia, gender binaries, and other power structures that contribute to marginalization.
9 Years Experience
In-Person in Los Angeles, CA 90004
Online in Los Angeles, CA California
Carl H. Shubs
Therapist, Ph.D.
CREATE THE LIFE YOU WANT.
Things not working the way you'd like? Find out why and change it.
Anxiety, depression, trauma, gay/lesbian/bisexual issues, addictions (substances or behaviors)? These are some of the areas where I can help.
YOU SET THE COURSE, AND I'LL HELP YOU GET THERE.
41 Years Experience
In-Person in Los Angeles, CA
Amber McKinney-Morgan
Licensed Clinical Social Worker, LCSW, LICSW
I provide affirming, inclusive care for LGBTQ+ individuals navigating identity, relationships, family dynamics, and societal stressors. My approach recognizes the impact of systemic oppression while also supporting personal growth, self-acceptance, and connection. Therapy is a space where all parts of you are welcome and understood.
8 Years Experience
Online in Los Angeles, CA California (Online Only)
David Andreone
Registered Psychotherapist, MA, MFT
I'm well-versed in the pain-points that come with being queer in America -- the discrimination, the family shame, the religious judgment, the micro-aggressions, and more. Love is love, acceptance is acceptance, and you're perfect regardless of who you love.
5 Years Experience
In-Person in Los Angeles, CA 90036
Online in Los Angeles, CA California
G. Roman Gupta, LCSW
Therapist, LCSW
I have been practicing for almost 20 years and I have a strength-based, trauma-informed, culturally aware, LGBTQ+ affirmative, sex positive, kink positive, poly affirming, feminist perspective. I have trained and practiced in a variety of treatment methods that offer us a variety of ways to meet your goals whether as an individual, couple, or family.
18 Years Experience
In-Person in Los Angeles, CA 90068
Online in Los Angeles, CA California
David Strah
Marriage and Family Therapist, MA, LMFT
I have a year-long training in LGBTQ Affirmative Therapy.
In-Person in Los Angeles, CA 90004
Online in Los Angeles, CA California
Forest Williams
Life Coach, ICF
I'm a pansexual trans man who supports lesbian couples, gay couples, ENM couples, and anyone in the LGBTQ community.
7 Years Experience
Online in Los Angeles, CA California (Online Only)
Los Angeles has one of the highest concentrations of therapists in the United States, with a culture that broadly embraces personal growth, self-development, and long-term therapeutic work. The entertainment industry generates distinct demand for therapists who understand performance anxiety, identity, the psychological pressures of creative careers, and the particular challenges of fame and public scrutiny. LA's extraordinary diversity means therapists fluent in Spanish, Korean, Mandarin, Farsi, Armenian, and Tagalog are all abundant, making culturally matched care particularly accessible. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the UCLA Health system anchor institutional mental health services across the Los Angeles basin.
LGBTQ+ Issues therapists in Los Angeles, California Statistics
LGBTQ+ Issues therapists in Los Angeles, California average 16 years of experience and charge around $209 per session. 97% offer online sessions. The top treatment approaches are Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) (58%), Psychodynamic Therapy (44%), and Existential / Humanistic Therapy (36%).
Average years in practice
16 Years Experience
Average cost per session
$209
Accept insurance
39%
Offer sliding scale
51%
Gender ID
| 57% |
Female |
|
| 32% |
Male |
|
| 6% |
Non-Binary |
|
| 5% |
Gender Fluid |
|
Session Type
| 67% |
In Person and Online |
|
| 30% |
Online Only |
|
| 3% |
In Person Only |
|
Top Treatment Approaches
| 58% | Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) |
| 44% | Psychodynamic Therapy |
| 36% | Existential / Humanistic Therapy |
| 36% | Person-Centered Therapy (Rogerian) |
| 34% | Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) |
| 34% | Somatic Therapy |
| 32% | Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) |
Ages Served
| 99% | Adult |
| 65% | Young Adult |
| 59% | Senior |
| 59% | Teen |
| 29% | Children |
Client Focus
| 72% | LGBTQ+ |
| 63% | Women |
| 42% | Men |
| 30% | Black / African American |
| 29% | Hispanic / Latino |