Afew years ago, I witnessed the systematic silencing and shaming of Lily Kay Ross for having dared to call attention to severe abuses of power in the psychedelic space. Her extraordinary bravery in sharing her own experience with abuse was met with victim blaming and accusations of selfishness. Key members of the psychedelic research community turned on her for “jeopardizing” the entire field of psychedelic science with her “negativity” and “theatrics.” Her warnings about the potential for manipulation and sexual abuse in the context of the psychedelic community went largely unheeded. Lily left the field and the country, and the discipline lost a formidable intellect with tremendous talent.

Lily was told that her message was—at best—unwanted and unnecessary, but my later life experience showed just how important her work actually was. A few years later, I was sexually assaulted in a ceremonial context with a trusted elder in his 70s. This man had been a longtime mentor and nearly a father figure to me, and I trusted him. He prepared a tea for me to drink, which ultimately left me unresponsive and hence unable to provide any kind of consent. While I was unresponsive, he helped himself to my body, reaching under my clothes and penetrating me with his fingers.

Once I was able to register what had just happened, I was devastated. I was in an abusive marriage at the time, and I knew that my partner would use this against me, as he did for months – constantly mocking me about how much I enjoyed being touched by wrinkly old fingers, about how much I wanted it. But I knew I didn’t want it. In that very dark place, I remembered Lily’s talks and writings, which helped me realize what had just happened—that I had been taken advantage of, and that it wasn’t my fault. Prior to hearing Lily’s message, I would have blamed myself and thought I had somehow given the wrong message. Now I could see clearly that this man was a predator—that his grooming had been intentional and practiced, and that I wasn’t the only one he had done this to.

Seeing how much Lily helped me through this very dark and turbulent time, I knew my experience was irrefutable proof of how important her message actually was. I knew her treatment by the community was reprehensible, and I’ve had less and less tolerance for these silencing tactics as time has gone on.

Sexism and abusive behavior continues to inflict harm and to limit the field’s potential, even when it shows up in subtler forms than outright assault. Some time ago, I was invited to speak at a psychedelic conference at the 11th hour, since the organizer was desperate to fill in for some last-minute cancellations. Despite the obvious desperation (I was bombarded within the span of an hour via text message, voicemail, email and Messenger), this organizer framed the situation as a favor to me, even though I would actually be doing a favor to him.

I already had a speaking engagement scheduled for that day, which I would need to cancel. Since I wouldn’t have much time to prepare, I mentioned that I would need to model content from a previous talk, which contained the core insights from nearly a decade of work.

The organizer’s response was positively dripping with disdain: “Nese, that talk is an introductory talk and none of it will be new to our attendees. Timothy Leary, the NYU psilocybin project, all that stuff is old news to our audience.”

I was furious. Why would a conference organizer tell a young but decorated female scholar that her most consequential insights were merely “old news”? To make matters worse, it was clear that he hadn’t actually read what I’d sent him, since he followed by requesting what I had specifically addressed in that talk: “I’d love to hear you talk about psycholinguistics and Psychedelics and your scholarly research and the broadening of the definition of Psychedelic research out of medical and into literary.” I had done that specifically by referencing Timothy Leary and my experience working with the NYU psilocybin project.

Having experience with abusive people and extensive training in close reading, I could easily see the power games at play in these messages. I was upset at the thought that some other young woman might not have this same background, and might not be able to see through the manipulative tactics. She might internalize what she read, and think her own ideas weren’t really worth sharing after all. And she might reorient her work as a performance, thinking she would do better to please an older man who was ultimately only concerned about his own reputation. So I decided it was my duty to do something, since I could.

I decided to do the talk that I was told I couldn’t do, since it would be such a clear example of the hypocrisy underlying these exchanges. I could see how the whole thing would play out: it would be good, so he would take credit for it. “That was a necessary talk,” he spoke into the microphone as I exited the stage to thunderous applause. He literally said my talk was “necessary,” when he had previously told me it was actually meaningless and unnecessary, because the audience responded well. He never acknowledged the about-face, let alone apologized.

And while this is just a small thing, there are much darker allegations from credible sources surrounding this figure, and the casual misogyny that was so apparent in my exchanges often goes hand in hand with more serious violations. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. After all, even the people who didn’t know Harvey Weinstein was a sexual predator knew he was a bully. Bullying shouldn’t be tolerated either, and the same attitude and willingness to cross others’ boundaries ultimately fueled both tendencies.

We absolutely need to do better. We need to clean our own house and step up to the table on justice and equality. We need to support marginalized voices and take survivors seriously. As Carl Jung has said, whatever remains unconscious will play out in your life as “fate.” If we don’t bring light and acknowledgement to these pervasive dynamics, they will eventually make themselves seen and felt in other ways. We have an opportunity now to right our wrongs, to make amends with those we have injured, and to chart a path for a more welcoming and inclusive future. I hope we do the right thing.

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Psychedelic Sisters In Arms was produced in collaboration with Oriana Mayorga.

Discussions about psychedelics, identity, and disclosure inevitably provoke strong emotional responses. As the Teafaerie describes in her essay, these emotions sometimes make it difficult to continue the conversation. The diversity of perspectives represented here is encouraging, since it is only through respectful dialogue that we can learn from one another and refine our thinking about these timely issues. With this spirit of openness in mind, I will close with some reflections on the varied perspectives offered here.

Some of the respondents reject using words like “discrimination” and “oppression” in the context of people who use psychedelics, arguing that the social costs are miniscule and asymmetric when compared to those that attend the widespread prejudices against racial, sexual, and gender minorities. While I agree that the challenges are not identical in either scope or severity, the claim that things could be much worse is not a sufficient justification for silencing other critiques of marginalization.

As a scholar of intersectionality, I agree with Vivian M. May’s argument in Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries that since systems of oppression are “enmeshed and mutually reinforcing,” one form of inequality should not be treated as “superordinate” and used to silence other struggles for self-determination and equality. Intersectional activists have emphasized that the “single-axis” approach to social justice that focuses on individual groups often leaves the operative logics of discrimination unchallenged.

By restricting forms of redress to sanctioned groups, single-axis tactics risk reinforcing the very foundations of inequality and discrimination that resulted in the problem to begin with.

As May describes, “many equality strategies paradoxically legitimize and even expand the forms of violence and harm they seek to dismantle, in large part because they do not depart from the binary logics and hierarchical processes that undergird inequality.”

In her presentation at the 2012 Psychedemia psychedelics conference, Dr. Julie Holland contrasts psychedelic psychotherapy with traditional pharmaceutical approaches to treating psychological distress. Instead of “sweeping dirt under the rug” by treating symptoms with daily medication, Dr. Holland describes psychedelic psychotherapy as addressing the root causes of suffering, or “taking your rug out back and beating it with a stick.”

Rather than treating oppression through a game of whack-a-mole with infinitely proliferating groups and grievances, the inclusion of psychedelic use in discussions about social justice is important precisely because of this impulse to exclude it from consideration. By denying the transferability of social justice struggles beyond pre-ordained categories, I argue that these detractors rely on the very us/them logic that creates conditions of oppression to begin with.

In order to dismantle the foundations of discrimination, we must learn to cultivate tolerance for and extend hospitality towards differences of all kinds.

In arguing against the relevance of psychedelic use to movements for social justice, Emma contrasts queer identity from psychedelic identity according to differing levels of vulnerability to the negative consequences of disclosure. In describing an unequal “continuum of violence” between these groups, Emma compares psychedelic discrimination to merely “talking down to a woman,” while she compares LGBTQ discrimination to forcefully “raping” a woman.

But should we really tolerate verbal abuse of women just because other women are being physically abused? As a survivor of both sexual assault and a verbally abusive relationship, I can attest to the profound psychological impact of both acts of subordination. Emma’s examples, after all, are not unrelated: both threats result from the desire to exert control and dominance over another person, and gender equality is only made possible when this underlying impulse is confronted.

In an April 2016 article in Harper’s Magazine, author Don Baum explicitly describes how the “War on Drugs” was founded on the desire to control minority social populations. He cites John Ehrlichman, a top aide to Richard Nixon:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. […] We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Beyond this historical connection between drug laws and social control, there continue to be very real and very troubling consequences to disclosing psychedelic use. People who choose to take psychedelics run the risk of losing their jobs, being disowned by their families, and losing their children to state custody. These are not insignificant dangers.

There are people like Timothy Tyler, who is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for the nonviolent charge of “conspiracy to possess LSD with intent to distribute” even though he viewed LSD as a spiritual sacrament. As a follower of the Grateful Dead, he was locked away in a federal prison where—for two decades—listening to music was forbidden altogether. Another Deadhead was Rudd Walker, who died in prison in 2014 after serving over a decade of a life sentence. Should we not speak up for them, simply because the likelihood of imprisonment for white users of psychedelics is astronomically less than for black drug users?

Even outside of prison, the police also have a history of conscripting drug users into dangerous undercover informant roles under the threat of lengthy prison sentences. Coerced to participate without legal aid or even discussing the arrangement with their parents, young people like Andrew Sadek and Rachel Hoffman have been murdered as a result of botched sting operations.

Beyond the explicit harms to psychedelic users, Emma’s critique fails to account for the indirect harms caused by limited access to psychedelic therapy resulting from stigma and illegality. As Dr. Holland describes, psychedelic therapy shows significant promise in the treatment of a wide range of psychological disorders, including end-of-life anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and addictive substance abuse, among others.

The unavailability of effective treatments for these issues presents implications far beyond the lives of “recreational” psychedelics users. What would the world look like if more of us felt increased connection to the earth and to each other, less afraid of dying, less paralyzed by personal and collective traumas, less imprisoned by destructive habits?

To reiterate, I am not saying that everyone “must” come forward to profess their psychedelic interests and experiences, but I do think that increased disclosure will ultimately help to transform the cultural climate around these substances.

Although some suggest that the movement for increased tolerance of psychedelics might be better served by speaking out anonymously, I think that a greater visibility of the diversity of actual psychedelic users would make it more difficult to cling to one-dimensional stereotypes in the long term.

In the conservative context of institutional review boards and dwindling sources of research funding, I can understand why psychedelic scientists would be particularly reticent to speak out publicly about their personal interests. However, I believe that Dr. Garcia’s proposed “psychonaut’s dilemma” constitutes a false flag rather than a genuine catch-22. It is ridiculous to suggest that personal experience leads to impartial fanaticism on the part of the “compromised” investigator. Is a psychoanalyst “compromised” during training when she is required to undergo psychoanalysis herself?

Just like psychoanalysis, the efficacy of psychedelic therapy is inseparable from the experience of an unfolding subjective process, rather than being reduced to merely chemical alterations in the brain. As Aldous Huxley suggests in The Doors of Perception, an investigator’s familiarity with various stages of this process can be helpful in interpreting the narrative accounts of research subjects, whose “paradoxical” descriptions of non-ordinary states of consciousness might otherwise appear as gibberish to the inexperienced observer.

Regardless of what conclusions we draw, the topic of psychedelics and identity politics is important at a time when public assumptions about psychedelics are transforming. Two days after I submitted the draft of my original essay to Psymposia, Ido Hartogsohn published an essay titled “Psychoactive identity politics: What drug activists could learn from identity activists” on his blog, Psychedelic Cultures. This synchronicity points to the fact that it is time to think critically about psychedelic use beyond the narrow context of therapeutic efficacy.

By expanding the conversation beyond the limitations of medical discourse, we will have to account for the personal significance that psychedelics have for so many people. In aligning the struggle against discrimination with larger social justice issues, we can encourage individuals to organize for the betterment of all marginalized communities.

The decades-long “War on Drugs” has created a situation in which the use of psychedelics is a social justice issue.

The existing international moratorium against psychoactives, including psychedelics, is a form of cultural hegemony. Although psychedelics have been used for millennia by cultures around the world, the United States during the 20th century successfully exported its ideology against “illicit drugs” through international treaties.

But this proscription against psychedelics such as LSD, ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms, and mescaline is problematic on multiple levels: It is an affront to cognitive liberty – the right to freedom of thought and mental self-determination. As Amanda Feilding – executive director of the Beckley Foundation – wrote in a recent newsletter: “If a person is not in any way damaging anyone else by their actions, it should be their freedom to choose their preferred state of consciousness.”

It is also an attack on freedom of religion. Although there are a few exceptions protected under the Religion Freedom Restoration Act, the ban against psychedelics outlaws the practices of longstanding indigenous traditions, and it disregards the spiritual import of psychedelics to which people have attested in countless other contexts.

In addition to these perspectives, I suggest that the ban also impacts the realm of identity politics. Since psychedelics are deeply entwined with some individuals’ sense of personal identity, I advocate for cultural and political activism to address the systematic discrimination against psychedelic use and psychedelic interests.

Over the past five years, I have drawn on queer theory and the LGBT rights movements for inspiration. Since psychedelics have been returning to major research universities after decades of prohibition, our moment holds the potential to shift the public perception of psychedelics away from dogmatic and fear-based generalizations. By encouraging individuals to come out of the closet about their psychedelic interests and experiences, we extend the universal struggle for the human right to self-determination.

Rather than an uncritical appropriation of queer discourse, this alliance represents a commitment to “intersectionality” – the theory that various kinds of oppression and prejudice are interconnected and cannot be addressed in isolation. Linking the struggle for social justice across identity categories, intersectionality resists discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and age, among other categories. That the inclusion of psychedelic identity with these categories remains controversial demonstrates the work that remains for securing the rights of individuals to determine their own states of body and mind.

Born This Way

Critics of my use of queer terminology have argued that psychedelic identity isn’t a “real” identity the way that gay identity is real. Although people are born gay, they argue, no one is born interested in psychedelics. Since people are born gay the same way that people are born black, they claim that it’s acceptable for the gay rights movement to draw from the discourses of civil rights and identity politics, but they don’t think it’s acceptable for psychedelic people to draw on gay rights discourse.

I see many problems with this argument.

For one, many queer theorists have questioned the universal reliance on biological explanations for sexual preferences. Biological predestination relies on an absolute “nature versus nurture” dichotomy that is unable to accommodate all sexual minorities. For example, Suzanna Danuta Walters writes in The Tolerance Trap about political lesbians who characterize their sexual desire as “a positive and pro-woman choice that explicitly rejected both compulsory heterosexuality and medicalized models of homosexuality.”

Vera Whisman, author of Queer By Choice: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Choice, argues that basing the legitimacy of homosexuality on the absence of choice is disempowering. To predicate human rights through biological determinism implies that homosexuality is acceptable only if it is not chosen, and thus it remains “stigmatized, illegitimate, deviant.” Even if taking psychedelics is a choice, the presence of choice does not preclude the formation of social identities around them.

But even within the biological framework, it’s possible that some people are born with a predisposition to experiment with psychedelics or respond favorably to them.

As famed psychedelic chemist Sasha Shulgin writes in the beginning of PiHKAL,

“For many thousands of years, in every known culture, there has been some percentage of the population… which has used this or that plant to achieve a transformation in its state of consciousness.”

For that segment of the population, the use of psychedelics can feel like a homecoming, as Ann Shulgin’s description of her first mescaline experience:

“The funny thing is that, despite all the newness, there’s something about all of it that feels – well, the only way I can put it is that it’s like coming home. As if there’s some part of me that already knows – knows this territory – and it’s saying, Oh yes, of course! Almost a kind of remembering!”

Just as someone can be gay without ever having sex, I believe that some people are psychedelic explorers of the mind without ever taking drugs.

As Bill Richards, author of Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences, speculates:

“Some people live their lives, never worrying about where we came from, where we’re going and why we’re on this little planet spinning through space. Others do. Maybe it’s a gene. Some of us have a religious or philosophical gene that wants to understand what life means.”

Accordingly, one can argue that psychedelic people have existed throughout time and across cultures.

Extending Queer Theory Beyond Sexual Identity

Although the oppression of psychedelic people is by no means identical to the oppression of sexual and gender minorities, the continuing struggle of one oppressed group is not sufficient reason to avoid discussions about other kinds of systemic oppression.

I argue that it doesn’t serve us to cherry-pick which identity groups are worth protecting and which are not. We need to focus on a common set of core principles and honor the right of individuals to make decisions about their own minds and bodies. The struggle to upend prejudice and discrimination will never be won by simply determining the “right” set of identity categories worthy of protection.

In recent years, queer theorists have undermined the notion of a fixed and stable “identity” or “authentic” self that remains constant throughout time. Some writers have even suggested that focusing political efforts within the framework of identity politics is shortsighted, since it relies on the very political systems and dichotomous us/them categories that encourage discrimination and oppression to begin with.

Rather than attempt to assimilate within these expected categories – as Paisley Currah writes in Sexual Identities, Queer Politics:

“Queer theorists have focused their attention on identity’s contingency, fluidity, and constructedness, and suggested that it is in the destabilization of identity categories that effective political practice is to be found.”

Many queer theorists now emphasize how identities are continuously shaped by discourses and relations of power. Expanding on this notion, Jimmie Manning writes in Queer Identities/Political Realities that:

“Queer theory’s spirit… is about not accepting one way of living and being; it is about the radical notion that we are not trapped in essentialized identities.” Rather than being limited to sex and gender, queer theory is “also about a person’s right to do what they please with their body.” Manning concludes, “If queer theory is truly an umbrella theory… then it is time for the queer to go where it may not be welcome.”

Carl Stychin describes the unbounded scope of this umbrella theory in Law’s Desire: Sexuality and the Limits of Justice:

“[Q]ueerness might challenge binary and categorical thinking which has inscribed the ‘normal’ and the ‘other.’ Central… is the contestation of boundaries and categories, not only of sexual identity, but more widely to include all boundaries of normalcy… It represents a subversion of categorical thinking so that ‘queer’ is capable of constant reworking to serve new political purposes.”

Taking all of this into account, it is ultimately counterproductive to discredit claims to psychedelic identity while acknowledging others. Psychedelic identity unquestionably meets the criteria of contesting boundaries of normalcy, and of advocating for the individual’s freedom to make decisions about their body. These parallels indicate that the oppression and alienation of both psychedelic and queer people results from a common cultural prejudice against those who experience and interact with the world differently from the dominant and traditional population.

Parallels With the Struggle for Civil Rights

Despite critics’ resistance to acknowledging the legitimacy of a psychedelic identity, the gay rights movement initially had to defend itself from criticisms that were essentially identical to the criticisms being directed against psychedelic people today.

For instance, some argue that psychedelic people don’t have a right to claim that they’re an oppressed group, since psychedelic people are mostly from privileged white communities, focused on appropriating legitimate struggles in service of hedonistic recreation.

Compare this to legislation debates about gay rights from the early 1990s, as described by Michael Bronski in his book The Pleasure Principle.

Bronski describes the view that:

“Gay men and lesbians did not need ‘special rights’ because, far from being disenfranchised, they already were wealthier, had better jobs, more leisure time, and more disposable income than almost any other group in the U.S. economy… For many in the mainstream, the ‘privileged economic status’ of homosexuals was conflated with their already established view of gay people as pleasure seekers and sexual libertines.”

Although being gay was seen by many as a deviant lifestyle choice, gay people weren’t convinced by this argument.

Michael Nava and Robert Dawidoff set out a defense of the alliance between gay rights and civil rights in their book Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America. For our purposes here, I swapped out the authors’ original race and sexuality terms for my own sexuality and psychedelic terms. The argument is still valid with these changes. Take, for instance, this altered quote:

“The special character of [sexuality] within this society and of the [gay] rights movement that grew out of it cannot preempt other movements for civil rights… [Some members of LGBT communities] are understandably sensitive and protective about the routine appropriation of their particular historical experience and the particularity of the extraordinary movement they carried forward to challenge their oppression. Nevertheless, the movement’s claim… was to a common set of principles that must apply to everyone… If women, racially and ethnically diverse groups, [LGBT people] and now [psychedelic people] rush to the standard first carried by the African-American civil rights movement [and subsequently by the LGBT movement], that is not stealing but believing. Those who are so quick to denounce the appropriation of civil rights by movements based in gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, and [other modes of identification] probably need to examine their own record with respect to human differences other than race

The authors suggest that the key contribution of the gay rights movement to the history of civil rights and civil liberties is its re-emphasis on the individual – an “individual asserting personal rights to personal freedom for personal choice about the personal life.”

They continue:

“The labeling of gays as… degenerate and unnatural is the same kind of labeling that has always been used to justify the denial of rights to individuals belonging to ‘minority’ communities.” People who are quick to shoot down the possibility of a psychedelic identity “deny the validity of personal experience when it is at odds with convention… In effect, [psychedelic] men and women are taught that their experience of themselves as decent, productive, loving humans is false, because [drug use] is unnatural and sinful.”

In the face of this, the “act [of coming out] is the acceptance of one’s fundamental worth… in the face of social condemnation and likely persecution.”

Coming Out as Psychedelic

Even if identity categories can’t be fixed and essentialized, they remain useful vantage points to challenge discrimination and forge communities through solidarity. Behind identity labels are, in the words of Jimmy Manning, real “people who are struggling to enjoy the same dignities, privileges, and rights to self-expression and full life as others.”

Within this context, we need to expand the concept of identity in order to extend the right to self-determination to all people. Transformative politics requires the incorporation of diverse viewpoints and identities. When we refuse to listen to someone’s descriptions of their lived experiences of self-identity (as a psychedelic person, for instance) and of their encounters with discrimination, we risk reinforcing the conditions that give rise to oppression to begin with.Coming out about one’s psychedelic interests or experiences is important for both personal and cultural reasons.

For those who feel that their identity is inseparable from their experiences with psychedelics, being forced to keep quiet because of stereotypes, stigma, and misinformation can be emotionally crippling and alienating.

As Sandra Lee Bartky writes in Sympathy and Solidarity, “There is an inexpressible relief in ‘coming out’… Joy and relief are proportional… to the corrosive effects of having to live a lie at best, at worst, having to live under highly repressive circumstances, i.e., in fear of exposure, persecution, and disgrace.”

By openly expressing the impact of psychedelics on our lives, we reveal the vast spectrum of doctors, lawyers, scientists, writers, and politicians who encompass the category of psychedelic people, thereby dismantling dismissive assumptions and overgeneralizations that encourage silence and secrecy. It is only by speaking out as psychedelic people that we are able to effectively “find the others,” building solidarities among participants that can form the basis of a unified political movement – a community – with the potential to expand our culture’s tolerance for difference.

Coming out as psychedelic empowers psychedelic practices of knowledge and community, and it connects this movement to other continuing struggles for social justice.

In adopting the language of civil rights and gay rights, we place ourselves in the context of these larger struggles and the importance of fighting against oppression of all kinds.

Read part 2: Why I’m Staying in the Psychedelic Closet

Presented at Psymposia: Envisioning a Post Prohibition World. University of Massachusetts Amherst, April 18, 2015. Read the Coming Out of the Psychedelic Closet conversation.

The question of identity arises from the psychedelic experience itself: Who am I? How do you answer that question? I’m a mother, a wife, a teacher, a scholar. And I’m also a psychedelic woman. I first heard the phrase “psychedelic woman” during a talk by Annie Oak at the Horizons psychedelics conference. It resonated with me, and I started to think more about the intersection of psychedelics and identity.This presentation is the result of five years of thinking deeply about the parallels between psychedelic identity and the LGBT rights movement.During this talk, I’ll address three main questions:

1. First, What does it mean to identify as psychedelic?
2. Next, What parallels can be drawn with the LGBT rights movement?
3. What does it mean to “come out” as psychedelic?

So first, what does it mean to be a psychedelic person?Sasha Shulgin writes in the beginning of PiHKAL that “For many thousands of years, in every known culture, there has been some percentage of the population…which has used this or that plant to achieve a transformation in its state of consciousness.”Going back even further, the recent discovery of a 100-million-year-old psychoactive fungus supports Mike Jay’s argument that “we’ve been taking drugs longer than we’ve been human.” The intense stigmatization and criminalization of psychedelics is a recent phenomenon.But I want to return to Shulgin’s phrase, “some percentage of the population.” There are some people for whom psychedelics are more than just a fun time on the weekend.

Take Ann Shulgin’s description of her first mescaline experience, also from PiHKAL:

“The funny thing is that, despite all the newness, there’s something about all of it that feels–well, the only way I can put it is that it’s like coming home. As if there’s some part of me that already knows—knows this territory,—and it’s saying Oh yes, of course! Almost a kind of remembering–!” – Ann Shulgin, PiHKAL p. 120

My friend Becky semi-jokingly compared this experience to receiving a letter from Hogwarts. You go about your life thinking you’re a Muggle, and all of a sudden you discover a part of yourself that actually existed all along.

But not everyone has this kind of a reaction to psychedelics, and that’s okay. And just like someone can be gay without ever having sex, I believe that some people are psychedelic without ever taking drugs.

But I discovered that this comparison of queer and psychedelic identities is controversial after I first published some thoughts about it in a 2010 Reality Sandwich article.

Reactions were extremely polarized. Some people wrote to tell me how much the comparison resonated with their own truth and their struggles. But other people were deeply offended, and felt that the appropriation of LGBT discourse trivialized LGBT struggles.

I am certainly not suggesting that the oppression of psychedelic people is identical to the oppression of LGBT people. But the continuing struggle of one oppressed group is not sufficient reason to avoid discussions about other kinds of systemic oppression.

Which raises the question: are psychedelic people actually oppressed?

It’s an injustice that people like Timothy Tyler are serving life sentences—without the possibility of parole—for the nonviolent charge of “conspiracy to possess LSD with intent to distribute.” Many murderers and rapists get less time than that. Tyler considered LSD to be a sacrament. He’s a Grateful Dead follower who was locked away in a federal prison where, for two decades, listening to music was forbidden.

Another Deadhead was Rudd Walker, who died in prison this past December after serving over a decade of a life sentence.

People who choose to take psychedelics run the risk of losing their jobs, being disowned by their families, and losing their children to state custody. Those are very real and very troubling consequences.

So yes, I think this discussion is important.

I also think it’s important to address the criticisms against it.

Last summer, as I was preparing a festival workshop around this topic, someone wrote me to criticize the comparison of “taking” a drug with “being” queer–a comparison that she described as “very dangerous and regressive.” Her choice of words is telling: From her perspective, “being” queer is an identity that someone’s born with. But “taking” a drug is something that people choose to do. It’s nonessential to who they are.

So on the basis of this reasoning, the gay rights movement is allowed to draw on civil rights discourse, but psychonauts aren’t allowed to draw on gay rights discourse.

This person positioned herself as an authority on this subject, as an LGBT activist who has tripped and been to Burning Man. She had witnessed firsthand how nonessential psychedelics are, and I believe that’s true for her. But I don’t believe she’s in a position to speak for all psychonauts.

To consider a different angle on her reasoning, here’s an alternative scenario: What if I’ve been involved with multiple women during my life, but I don’t identify as a lesbian? If someone told me that I couldn’t be with another woman ever again, it wouldn’t be a deal to me. But does that give me the right to tell a lesbian that, therefore, it shouldn’t be a big deal to her?

My psychedelic identity is personally a bigger part of my life than my gender identity or sexual identity.

Consider for a moment the LGBTQIA acronym. It ends with the letter “A,” which stands for both “Ally” and “Asexual.” An asexual person is someone for whom, by definition, sexuality is not the most important aspect of their identity. So even within this acronym, there is an arrow that points to identities beyond it.

While we’re here, let’s also consider the letter “T,” which stands for “Transgender.” The transgender movement has taught us that we need to believe people when they say who they are. If I say I am a psychedelic woman, who has the right to tell me that my experience of myself is false?

In the process of thinking through these ideas, I decided to look more deeply into the history of the gay rights movement and its reliance on civil rights discourse. Something surprised me: the gay rights movement had to defend itself from criticisms that were essentially identical to the criticisms being directed against psychonauts, today.

For instance, some people say psychonauts don’t have a right to claim that they’re an oppressed group. Psychonauts are mostly privileged, wealthy white people who just want an excuse to have hedonistic parties, right?

Compare this to legislation debates about gay rights from the early 1990s, as described by Michael Bronski in his book, The Pleasure Principle:

Bronski describes the view that “Gay men and lesbians did not need ‘special rights’ because, far from being disenfranchised, they already were wealthier, had better jobs, more leisure time, and more disposable income than almost any other group in the U.S. economy. … For many in the mainstream, the ‘privileged economic status’ of homosexuals was conflated with their already established view of gay people as pleasure seekers and sexual libertines.”

Being gay was seen by many as a deviant lifestyle choice. But gay people weren’t convinced by this argument.

Michael Nava and Robert Dawidoff set out a defense of the alliance between gay rights and civil rights in their book Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America. For our purposes here, I swapped out the authors’ original race and sexuality terms for my own sexuality and psychedelic terms. The argument is still valid with these changes.

Take for instance, this altered quote:

“The special character of [sexuality] within this society and of the [gay] rights movement that grew out of it cannot preempt other movements for civil rights…. [Some members of LGBT communities] are understandably sensitive and protective about the routine appropriation of their particular historical experience and the particularity of the extraordinary movement they carried forward to challenge their oppression. Nevertheless, the movement’s claim…was to a common set of principles that must apply to everyone…. If women, racially and ethnically diverse groups, [LGBT people] and now [psychonauts] rush to the standard first carried by the African-American civil rights movement [and subsequently by the LGBT movement], that is not stealing but believing. Those who are so quick to denounce the appropriation of civil rights by movements based in gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, and [other modes of identification] probably need to examine their own record with respect to human differences other than race [or sexuality].”

The authors suggest that the key contribution of the gay rights movement to the history of civil rights and civil liberties is its re-emphasis on the individual—an “individual asserting personal rights to personal freedom for personal choice about the personal life.”

They continue, “The labeling of gays as…degenerate and unnatural is the same kind of labeling that has always been used to justify the denial of rights to individuals belonging to ‘minority’ communities.”

Remixing the authors again: People who are quick to shoot down the possibility of a psychedelic identity “deny the validity of personal experience when it is at odds with convention. … In effect, [psychedelic] men and women are taught that their experience of themselves as decent, productive, loving humans is false, because [drug use] is unnatural and sinful.”

In the face of this, the “act [of coming out] is the acceptance of one’s fundamental worth…in the face of social condemnation and likely persecution.”

But it is common for members of oppressed groups to resist alliances with other groups.

Andrew Solomon describes this phenomenon in his book Far from the Tree, where he explores what he calls “horizontal” identity categories–identities that people don’t necessarily inherit from their parents.

He writes that: “Deaf people didn’t want to be compared to people with schizophrenia; some parents of schizophrenics were creeped out by dwarfs; criminals couldn’t abide the idea that they had anything in common with transgender people…and some children of rape felt that their emotional struggle was trivialized when they were compared to gay activists. … The compulsion to build such hierarchies persists even among these people, all of whom have been harmed by [such hierarchies].”

But Solomon cites the theory of “intersectionality” as an alternative to this trend.

“Intersectionality is the theory that various kinds of oppression feed one another—that you cannot, for example, eliminate sexism without addressing racism.”

Solomon quotes Benjamin Jealous, president of the NAACP, who said: “If we tolerate prejudice toward any group, we tolerate it toward all groups. … We are all in one fight, and our freedom is all the same freedom.”

I argue that it doesn’t serve us to cherry pick which identity groups are worth protecting and which are not. We need to focus on a common set of core principles, and honor the right of individuals to make decisions about their own minds and bodies.

Which brings me to the final section of my presentation. What does it mean to “come out” as psychedelic?

I’ll start with my own case: When I went to college, I didn’t understand why the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was such a big deal. Why did people need to talk about their sexuality at work? But then I moved from Bard College—a hippy school in the woods—to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate school. Suddenly I didn’t know anyone who’d had meaningful psychedelic experiences. I felt that I needed to keep that part of me hidden, and it was an extremely lonely time. I learned then the hard way that hiding part of who you are can have a deep psychological impact.

“Coming out” as psychedelic was profoundly liberating. Instead of studying Romantic poetry “because of” my secret interest in psychedelics, I started researching poetry explicitly “alongside” psychedelics. In my case, this doesn’t mean that I continue to use psychedelics today. As a mother and teacher, the current political climate makes the risks outweigh the benefits. But psychedelics helped me work through crippling social anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder during my first year of college, and they shaped my entire worldview and life’s path. This isn’t something I will easily forget.

But “coming out” as psychedelic entails a whole spectrum of possibilities. It can mean describing past use, but it can also mean striking up a conversation about the latest research out of NYU or Johns Hopkins. It can mean forwarding a recent article in the New Yorker or New York Times to your mom or your boss or your colleague, or even planning a trip to drink ayahuasca in a country where it’s legal.

Taking a different tack, you can also choose to be a psychedelic ally, rejecting the current state of the drug war while personally abstaining from psychedelic use.

What’s important here is that people are mindful of the decisions they’re making and why. Sometimes it can be more strategic to keep things under wraps. If you teach children or require a security clearance to work for the government, for example, it might make sense to hold some of your interests and experiences back.

But if you’re holding back on “coming out” because of a knee-jerk fear reaction, I encourage you to reconsider. Sometimes the risks are low, and sometimes the risks are worth taking.

The abolition of sodomy laws in this country did not eradicate homophobia, and anti-psychedelic prejudices will still exist in a post-prohibition world. By banding together, we have the power to own our narratives and to shift the cultural dialogue.

And as people have noted at this event, it’s important to create safe spaces where people can come together to share their ideas and experiences without fear of persecution. Many cities host regular psychedelic discussion groups. In Philadelphia, we have Theorizing Psychedelics, which meets biweekly. San Francisco has the San Francisco Psychedelic Society. And Baltimore has its Psychedelic Seminars, just to mention a few. I encourage everyone here to either get involved with their local groups or create a new group for people to come together on a regular basis.

Terence McKenna argued that sovereignty over one’s consciousness is the next great civil rights struggle after sexism, racism, and homophobia. “Coming out” about one’s psychedelic identity, interests, and/or experiences is an important part of redefining the public perception of psychedelics and of those who choose to experience their effects.

But this debate is ultimately much bigger than us. In the words of Nelson Mandela: “For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”

At the end of the day, despite all differences, everyone deserves our compassion and respect.