The Gay Man’s Experience During the AIDS Epidemic

Stephen Arnold, MSW, LCSW

Stephen Arnold received a masters in social work (MSW) in 2011. He obtained most of his hours toward his Oregon Clinical License in Social Work (LCSW) working with youth incarceration facilities, completing his license in 2017. He also proposed and helped found a transition house for LGBT youth leaving incarceration and has worked as a mental health professional for a Job Corp school in Oregon.

Stephen has a thriving private practice in Portland, Oregon and currently does online psychotherapy for his clients, many of whom are Gay men. He also completed the Drug & Alcohol Counseling Program at Portland Community College. After completing a course called Men and Addictions taught by Dennis Morrow (author of The Male Box video), Stephen was asked by Dennis to create a special class to better understand the Gay man’s experience during the AIDS Epidemic.

On a personal note, Stephen Arnold is a Gay man who experienced the height of the AIDS epidemic and has actively been involved with Gay male communities. Currently living in Portland, he has lived in cities such as Philadelphia, New York City, Atlanta, and San Francisco. In addition to having been married to a man who is HIV positive, he witnessed the harm HIV/AIDS has done to his community.

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The main significance for licensed clinicians is that there is no graduate program that we know of in the country that offers gender-specific treatment for boys/men or for gay men and also very few, if any, professional workshops available on these topics.