[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":262},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog-transcript-gordon-isaacs":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"description":247,"extension":248,"meta":249,"navigation":257,"path":258,"seo":259,"stem":260,"__hash__":261},"blog\u002Fblog\u002Ftranscript-gordon-isaacs.md","Transcript from Interview: Gordon Isaacs",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":243},"minimark",[9,13,16,19,22,25,28,30,33,35,38,40,43,45,48,50,53,55,58,60,63,65,68,70,73,75,78,80,83,85,88,90,93,95,98,100,103,105,108,110,113,115,118,120,123,125,128,130,133,135,138,140,143,145,148,150,153,155,158,160,163,165,168,170,173,175,178,180,183,185,188,190,193,195,198,200,203,205,208,210,213,215,218,220,223,225,228,230,233,235,238,240],[10,11,12],"p",{},"Razorsmile:",[10,14,15],{},"Welcome and welcome to another interview that me and Eric are carrying out as part of our Freudian spaceship project. Today we are talking to Dr Gordon Isaacs from South Africa. Dr Isaacs is a community mental health worker, a psychotherapist and a clinical and developmental social worker who's been working in South Africa for I think, but I think you mentioned 57 years just now. So a long, long time working, a lot of experience to bring to the table.  talking about his experience and life. So welcome Gordon, welcome to the interview.  So we're going to ask something that we're asking a number of other people at the moment. And this is kind of part of a starting point for a number of our conversations. Would it be correct to say that you're both an activist and a psychotherapist?",[10,17,18],{},"Dr  Gordon Isaacs:",[10,20,21],{},"Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.  Absolutely. The two are symbiotically linked. And specifically in South Africa, where we have a multitude.  of problems that need advocacy, lobbying, protest, and certainly working from a human rights and social justice perspective. That is my ongoing mantra. So when we talk about therapy and advocacy, I have many case studies that I can share later. But advocacy is not advocating on behalf of the people or for the people. We advocate without client.  system  as equal partners in the therapeutic process. So we look at, for example, strength -based approaches. We look at task -centered approaches. We look at direct participatory action research, where clients become co -researchers, so that there isn't a sense of power from the top and those who are subjugated below.  So any psychotherapist who sits in their office with a multitude of case studies just sitting there, not necessarily recognizing that the content of their work with their client systems remains sterile. It's not brought out into the community. An example of this is a research that was done.  some time ago by an anthropologist, and the title of his research was called Fuck, Fuck, Fuck. And what the research really unpacked was that when researchers actually interviewed their subjects or their respondents,  The raw data which spoke with the language of the client, which included words like fuck, cunt, puss, penis, et cetera, were actually sanitized and taken out in case the presenters believed that the audiences would be uncomfortable.  Now that fundamentally is advocacy where you don't sanitise.  what you're doing with your clients, but you gather momentum, you form small groups, you work within the communities, you have ambassadors and or plenitentiaries who accompany you into spaces where angels fear not to. I'll give you an example of advocacy when I was doing an outreach.  for our sex work community with a partner called TB HIV Care, where we had a mobile van. We went out at night with a nursing sister and peer educators who were trained as paralegals, as well as human rights defenders, HIV counseling, et cetera. And we would give.  condoms, lubrication, safer sex pamphlets, know your rights, et cetera, to sex workers, as well as take their CD4 count with a Pema machine and find out how they were complying with their ARVs, if any were on them. So we stopped in a main road going towards Goodwood, which is in the northern suburbs, where we stopped where at least  there  were 20 female, rather younger sex workers, and this was about 9, 10 o 'clock at night. We opened the door and one young sex worker came up to the window and she was high on crystal meths and she was rather rude to the nursing sister.  And the nursing sister then said to me and the peer educators, we are not going to test or even go out and talk to this woman. And I said to the nursing sister, this is our job.  What are you frightened of? No, we can't talk to somebody who's under the influence of drugs. So I said to her, well, let me try. So I got out, and I went up to her, and I said, darling, you're looking absolutely gorgeous and so sexy. Tell me, what are you on? So she said to me in her vernacular, it is on tip. I am on tip. So I said,  you looking fabulous on Tick, you must have a very, very good dealer. So she said, yes, do you want his number? So I said, not tonight, but maybe the next time. And she said to us, you know what? You guys must fuck off right now, because you are disturbing our clients. We are waiting here for clients, and they seem like an ambulance. Therefore, they all think we're sick. So I said, well, what time?  Would  you like us to come next week? She said if you come at five o 'clock, I'll be there with all the girls and more.  The moral of the story is we didn't consult with the community beforehand to find out what the time was. My advocacy was to confront the nursing sister in a nice way afterwards, give a talk to the peer educators to show what community participation and community auditing is like. And when we went back the following week, that same sex worker was there.  completely  sober with her girls and she remembered the color of my shirt and what exactly I had said to her and she still asked me if I wanted the name of the dealer which in effect tells us that when people come to us and they high on drugs we can see them we can hear them and we can listen to their story with the using of drugs unless the person becomes psychotic or unmanageable.",[10,23,24],{},"Eric:",[10,26,27],{},"So my question Gordon is I know that intersectional theory is very important to you and that you teach intersectional theory but I'd like you to consider intersectionality in your life when you very first became aware of intersectional issues and I'm thinking particularly around sexuality",[10,29,18],{},[10,31,32],{},"doesn't",[10,34,24],{},[10,36,37],{},"and",[10,39,18],{},[10,41,42],{},"impact the memory at all. In fact, it sharpens it. So we defuse mythologies and that's another form of advocacy.",[10,44,24],{},[10,46,47],{},"When you first became aware of these issues in your life, the  intersectionality of race and sexuality, when did you first become aware of this in your life?",[10,49,18],{},[10,51,52],{},"Yeah. Yeah.  As Eric, I've always been a late developer, literally and figuratively, learning something new much later, but not recognizing that I had been doing it. So the theory of intersectionalities became very apparent to me when I was teaching.  and recognizing that you cannot work with people unless you work within the systems and the intersectionalities of gender, race, class, power, ethnicity, privilege, white privilege, black privilege, colored privilege, ageism, religion, faith.  living with different abilities, et cetera. So my work when I started out was looking at crisis on the one hand.  and looking at the range of problems that intersected with crisis. That's how I learned at a very early age that when I was working with crisis intervention, I recognized that not only was I working with the presenting crisis, but recognizing that it was intersected with unfinished business from the past, which the crisis, once it exploded out, revealed  past traumatic events, intergenerational events, and transgenerational events. So when I was working with crisis, I came across sex workers, I came across people using drugs, I came across people who were divorcing, in other words, relationships. We were working at that stage with all the populations. I was very fortunate to be working when I opened the crisis clinic for the Department of the  of  social welfare in the apartheid state, which was still working with all populations. So I saw race. I saw privilege, white privilege. I started to work with people who were coming out during apartheid and very fearful. So the coming out crisis was, during the apartheid era, formidable because it was illegal. And  people,  including myself, were arrested for dancing in a club with men and put into the police cells for breaking the sodomy laws in terms of the sexual offenses act. But over the years,  The context of race and gender became very, very important because at one stage, race superseded gender. People spoke about race, in particular white privilege. They spoke about tribalism. People spoke about inequities.  but gender somehow was underscored.  until there was an incredible documentary called People versus Patriarchy, which I used for my teaching. And one of the actors in the movie, these were young poets, literary scholars, lesbians, advocacy people, but very young. And an incredible document where the one person stated, I've been talking about white privilege for a  a  long time and suddenly have now been confronted with gender -based violence and certainly hegemonic male toxicity. And they spoke about their relationships with women, and the women spoke about how they believed because of their relationships with absent fathers.  and single mothers that when they got married and their husbands beat them, they deserved it. And they stayed in that enmeshed process because it was believed that if your husband hit you, he loved you. And it was relative to past experiences where.  Absent fathers were on the mines or were distant or working afar. And in the household, the head, the single parent or the adult child parent used to wait until the father came home who then said, clean the house.  said to the wife, do the dishes, et cetera, et cetera. So you've got that heteronormative phenomenon, which Bell Hooks talks about it in her book as being very sexist. So the intersectionalities now of gender, race, privilege, and faith.",[10,54,12],{},[10,56,57],{},"I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the crisis therapy centre that you established. Apparently you established the first crisis therapy centre in South Africa. Could you tell me a little bit about the history of that and what stood out in the experience of that?",[10,59,18],{},[10,61,62],{},"stroke religion, stroke spirituality, and living with different abilities, as well as working with vulnerable populations, have become the work that I am, over the last 20 years, currently working with.  Yes, it happened by accident. When I qualified, I was told by my teachers that I would never get to standard eight because I was an undiagnosed dyslexic.  So my parents took me out and put me into a private school. And I went to the private school. I had to repeat a year. And I managed to pass my matric during the time that my sister's nephew was dying from leukemia. And he was dying whilst I was writing trick.  and he died in my arms. So my metric results were possible, but not very good, excepting for English. I then got into social work, failed the first year because of my coming out.  crisis which I kept inside of me so it was internalized, but I was fearful and then I repeated and I went into second year, had to repeat psychology because I failed statistics. Eventually the social work department said I'll never see the inside of a fourth year. But by the time I got to fourth year, my passion was realized when I did my practicals at a colored community college.  community  in Johannesburg and a black community in Johannesburg, Alexandria Township. And I was working with a diverse population. So that already fed into me the excitement of working with diversity at that stage. I then...  got a distinction for psychiatry for social workers because I spent my internship at a psychiatric hospital. I then got appointed to the Department of Social Welfare. A lot of VITS graduates worked there. They gave a very good training. It was during apartheid. So obviously, we were.  unwittingly or wittingly still colluding with the system, the apartheid system, but something weird happened. During my tenure in my first year,  A client came into my office in a terrible state and said to me, where were you people when my husband was released from prison and committed suicide? Where were you? Why couldn't we get hold of you when he said he was going to commit suicide and then ultimately drank all his pills? I...  This reverberated with me, and at a regional meeting, I presented a paper to the Department of Social Development of which, ironically, the prime minister of South Africa, John Foster's wife was there, who was a social worker. And she heard this, and she liked the paper.  And I spoke about a 24 -hour service delivery that is absolutely essential. And what had happened then is that the mayor of Cape Town went to all the clubs and discovered, and discovered in inverted commas, that there was a huge drug problem, amphetamines, heroin.  Malpita, et cetera. And he wanted to have a facility where we could work with substance users.  That would be available 24 hours. So the government made me a senior social worker, and they sent me overseas for three months to study crisis clinics. And I came back and opened the first crisis clinic in December of 1972 and worked there for six to seven years with volunteers who were lawyers, psychologists, social workers.  et cetera, who we trained in the crisis intervention methodologies, which basically my colleague Alan Zimbler, who was a professor of psychology and business science, developed a template, as it were, for working with crisis. So that's how the crisis clinic actually started. And to this very day, it's one of the subjects that I teach, but I combined it with crisis and  trauma  intervention which I teach at the honors and undergraduate level. So the crisis clinic actually started or started by a client telling me that problems don't start at nine o 'clock in the morning and finish at five o 'clock at night. And I have made it my practice in the 57 years to give all my clients to this very day my telephone number,  and that I am available for them 24 hours. By just saying that, it transmits the therapeutic shadow onto the client, and they feel held, knowing that I'm there. So it has never been abused. And what I tell them is,  write me a message on the WhatsApp. And if I can't answer, I'll get back to you. If I can answer, I'll message you back. And therefore, we can dialogue on WhatsApp. And it's been extremely helpful. I had one instance where there was an anethetist who lost his patient. And.  During that period, the loss of the patient wasn't his trauma. It was the fact that his much younger wife was in the process of wanting to leave him.  And he was extremely distressed about this. And one night at 10 o 'clock, he phoned me to say that he's at the edge of his tether. And I said, have you got Thanatos thinking? Are you wishing yourself away? And he said, yes. And I said, do you have a plan? He says, us Neathetists always have access to plans. And I said to him, shall I come over?  and we can do tea together. This is at night. And he said, yes. So I said, fine. So I got into my car, went over to his house. We had tea. And I debriefed him around his feelings. In other words, as a psychotherapist, I have the latitude to go into people's homes.  which was something that Yalom only wrote in his books after he decided to practice, where he decided to do a home visit because for him it was breaking all therapeutic boundaries, who had the power, the client or the...",[10,64,24],{},[10,66,67],{},"After your time at the Crisis Centre, from what I understand you went to UCT and you became the professor and I had the honour of being your student. It was a very exciting time to have been taught by",[10,69,18],{},[10,71,72],{},"therapist because you were in the client's house. So it was a very interesting phenomenon. So that's one of the features of working with",[10,74,24],{},[10,76,77],{},"you. But I also know that one of your experiences of being the professor was that you came out and if I'm correct you were probably the first academic to actually come out in the country.",[10,79,18],{},[10,81,82],{},"crisis that I have always made a rule. And it served me and my clients, I think, particularly well. And it's never been abused.",[10,84,24],{},[10,86,87],{},"I wonder if you could just reflect on your time around coming out as an academic as well as your time at the Social Work Department.",[10,89,18],{},[10,91,92],{},"OK. When I came, joined the Social Work Department, it was a very liberated department run by Professor Helm. And we had the first colored social worker lecturer on campus. So the first department to have a person of color.  And I came out to the department very quickly because there was a lesbian and a gay guy who were both senior lecturers. So it wasn't a problem coming out in my department. However, what I did do was I decided when I was developing courses to develop the first course on sexuality. And.  teaching that course soon spread around the campus and more and more people were becoming curious about the issues of sexuality where I included in particular LGBT and I. And...  A student came to me and said to me why he's a medical student, he failed medicine because of his internalized homoprejudice, and he says why isn't there a student club or a student society for the LGBT community on campus, which would include staff and or lecturers.  So I set up a meeting with some SRC members, including a couple of lecturers and Kathy Jago, who was head of the disability unit and the head of the student counseling service. And we put a proposal through to the University Council and Senate. And there, I was demonized as a  a person who, if I started a society for perverts, then we might as well start a society for people who have sex with animals. That was the message that came back to me.  After discussions with other people, including the professors of sociology, psychology, anthropology, and social work, we formed the society under the auspices of the disability unit and the student health. So we bit our tongues, but it started.  Because I was writing my thesis, both master's and PhD, on homosexual identity. We don't use the word homosexual anymore. We talk about queer. Queer identity, crisis, and identity development. So we were then allowed to show banned movies at lunchtime, which drew hundreds of students around LGBT stonewall  gay relationships, Masters and Johnson's work, and other stuff that was linked to sexuality and sexual reproductive health. And that led up to the formulation of the first.  gay organization on any university campus in South Africa and it still exists to this very day and most universities have it. However, Carol Charleywood was one of the first women to present talk shows on TV and she later became a member of Parliament. This was during apartheid.  She then invited me and a lecturer from Wits University, a very formidable lesbian, to dialogue with two pastors from the Dutch Reformed Church. I still have the old tape recording on those funny video things because I haven't passed the first Industrial Revolution, never mind the fourth.  In that documentary, Anne said, how can you take a moral injunction? Morality is not the same as reality is on the ground.  and your misinterpretation of your faith renders people who are described as perverts, as victims, and it's unjust. And I spoke from a humanistic point of view around empathy and warmth and non -judgmentalism, et cetera, the typical kinds of narratives that form values for ethics.  And I then received poison letters and death threats, which I still have. And one came to the university principal and said, I was.  abused by a pedophile, kill all those homosexuals, they all need to die. I will come and kill him. How can you let a homosexual teach our students and pervert them? So that came back to me, but it was water off my back because it told me that that was the collective unconscious of the community.  in within which we lived because it was legislated as well. Many years later, I started to, and this is over the last 10 years, I started to advocate.  for sex education that's non -binary, gender non -conforming, and gender fluid to be factored in to schools, into the life orientation programs, which the government was reasonably sympathetic to, but the opposition.  people who were on the very right, a particular NGO that had very, very right -wing morals, specifically around gender, termination of pregnancy, euthanasia, et cetera, were very against it and said sex education must be taught within the family, not recognizing.  that the family structure in South Africa is dismembered. Families are not nuclear any longer. Families are families of choice, friendships. Families in the township exist with single mothers, foster families, blended families, child -headed households, et cetera. And so when they talk about the family as being this.  magic center of learning, the majority of families are themselves dysfunctional, as revealed in our divorce statistics, where one in five recorded divorces occur across the racial lines every year in South Africa. Those are recorded. These are people not in relationships which break up or who have polyamorous or polygamous relationships. So.  I wrote a large article, you can actually find it on my Google thing, where I had tongue in cheek and I said, sex education, which includes masturbation, anal sex, kissing, frittage, condoms, the use of sex toys, etc. should be taught to people because young girls of 10 are becoming pregnant.  And the rise of HIV is on the increase in South Africa currently. It's very disturbing. So I wrote this letter and I said age appropriate, because I believe it should be started in primary school, age appropriate, and then cascaded up to grade 10 and 11, where students can talk about sex, intimacy, pornography, fetish, fantasy, desire.  et cetera, and talk about the meaning of consent, the age of consent, et cetera, and how consent in language is so differently interpreted. So language needs to be factored in because, for example, in isi koza, he and she mean the same. So we've got to be very mindful of the therapeutic use of semantics.  In this instance, when the press release came out the weekend August, the Western Cape Minister of Social Development on national TV spoke about my article and said that Dr. Isaacs, who works at Sweatt,  And at Seicab is an actual Satanist wondering how to break up family life and induce our children to have premature sex inappropriately. So that still exists to this very day. An example very recently where fees must fall at  Witts University.  a black student who is a member of the SRC and one of the people who was part of the organizing of the Fees Must Fall protest. I bought the book afterwards, which I use for my teaching. He disagreed with something in a committee meeting and they turned around to him and said,  You're a bloody moffy. You're a sissy boy and we don't like what you're saying. And you better be careful because you're not a man. And we'll come out and get you soon one day.\" He was devastated. He then went to the counseling service at UCT. And when he spoke to the psychologist, he said, there's no ways.  that I can be seen to be coming to see you. Because they will see that as a further weakness, because help -seeking behavior amongst men in South Africa is not really admirable at all. Help -seeking behavior with men. So she referred him to me, and I saw him, and he was in deep distress.  because he was in medical school and now he was threatened with his life by his colleagues because there is still homoprejudice on the campus. So currently we are still working with murders, transgender especially, and Triangle Project which has now become an advocacy unit.  We go together with them with sweat to the police and to schools and do sensitivity trainings around gender, sex work, LGBTQI phenomenon, and try and engage people who have attitudinal blocks towards things that are different or gender.  scary. We also are mindful now that in the context of the LGBTQ community and the transgender community is becoming very powerful. It's far more vocal. There are far more trans people coming out. There are far more people wanting to transition and undergo  surgeries, which we offer at two universities in South Africa. There's a waiting list of thousands. But we can only do a certain amount of operations per year, as they are regarded as cosmetic. So the issue of the transgender folk coming out is also creating a concern.  within the classroom because young children from the age of 13 are beginning to have medical affirmative interventions to block parts of their puberty so that they can start developing the transitional process. So we get conflictual messages in the classrooms around gender, gender identity from an ethical perspective.  Some people say a child of 13 shouldn't make a decision. Other people are saying, but if it's the child's decision at 12 to have an abortion without parental consent, why can't they start at the age of 13 with parental consent and medical consent to start transitioning? So the context of gender and gender nonconformity.  is a hot topic at the moment. I cannot walk into a classroom without asking anybody if they have a particular pronoun.  We now have to talk about cisgender. We don't talk about homosexuality because it was regarded as a medical illness. So we talk about queer, or we talk about LGBTQ. We talk about gender fluidity, and we talk about the various types of performative aspects of gender. For example, agender.  poly, demigender, polyamor, et cetera. So there are so many words emerging in the lexicon that I'm still learning. BDSM is becoming very popular. And Shane's daughter is a very, very, has developed a kind of club of about 80 people. It's almost burlesque.  where they have safe parties and you come in drag or whatever and you get a special invitation and you can come with whips and toys, et cetera. No drugs are allowed. They're bodyguards. And she came to me one evening and I went with her to one of these clubs, which was an amazing phenomenon.  I can tell you another story which for me was one of the most riveting and also I think led me to understand how my relationship with my clients in terms of being white, privileged, having ascribed power, achieved power, is a meritocracy society in South Africa.  We had a hooker's ball at sweat, where Maria, who is a psychologist, and I were going to perform Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Cabaret's song from the Olympics.  and in the audience were funders.  NGOs, 150 people, but including our funders as well as heads of NGOs, a member of the regional parliament, et cetera, and parents of our clients, et cetera. And I got up, I had to get dressed in drag. And I couldn't find a room.  So I knocked on the bathroom door, and there I saw Maria almost naked and about eight trans women in the process of strapping and putting makeup on, et cetera. And I said, ⁓ I'm sorry. I'll find another room. No, they said, Dr. G, you must come in, and you must be part of us.  So I went in and the one trans woman says to me, won't you help me put my penis up towards my bum? I can't get the strap right there. So there I was with one of my clients strapping her penis to her bum so that she could have a proper figure. And I helped to put her bra on. And this happened a few times. And it was my turn to get undressed.  stained my underpants, put on this huge flamboyant drag number, and then they said, we will do your makeup and we'll fix your wig up, et cetera. And we went out and performed. On reflection, for me, that was one of the most critical moments of my life in terms of utter acceptance.  no sense of judgment, participatory, no power dynamics, et cetera. And it gave me a sense of wonderment around the resilience of people and trust. So safety and trust is so important to the integrity.  of any psychotherapeutic activities, particularly when you're working with dispossessed people, disenfranchised people, and even if you're working with people who have privilege and don't recognize it. And you have to actually, in your sessions, confront it. And that's not an easy task when your clients talk about...  The Garden Boy.  and I have to help them reframe it. I can't be judgmental, it's their perception. And I have to say to them, how old is the person who's working in your garden? And my client would say, 32, I believe. And I'd say, would you call a child of yours of 32 a boy or a man? So he said,  I'd call him a man. I said, well, what makes you want to call the person who works in your garden a boy? Think about it. What are you infantilizing there? So I've changed in my therapeutic process very subtly and without judgmental impudence.  attitudes.  And I think that's an important advocacy thing that can be done on a one -to -one basis. So my clients have come to me now and said to me, Gordon, my girlfriend's talking about being gender fluid. Can you give me a talk? So what I do is I become a coach. So I transfer my therapeutic intent into a coach. And I actually give a talk.",[10,94,12],{},[10,96,97],{},"Thank you, that's fascinating. I'm gonna just pause for a moment. One of the things I'm gonna do is I'm gonna switch off my camera, so don't be shocked by that. It's just to see if I can make sure there's a little bit less data coming through.",[10,99,18],{},[10,101,102],{},"Or we go online together, up with the computer, and we search up gender fluidity together. So",[10,104,12],{},[10,106,107],{},"I wanna ask you a question that touches on that reference to one -to -one work.",[10,109,18],{},[10,111,112],{},"both of us are working as a team, which is part of narrative therapy, where you work with the client as an equal part.",[10,114,12],{},[10,116,117],{},"Whilst a professor of social work, you developed a model of intervention that included one -to -one work, group work and community work and it's a model that we find very  inspiring and very important to think about. How did you come upon the important idea of needing an intersection of one -to -one group and community relationships and what did you learn from this experience?",[10,119,18],{},[10,121,122],{},"And I'm talking.  Well, it's the training that I was given and the training that we gave to social work students. And social work students, unlike other mental health disciplines, actually start their theory and practice from year one to year four.  And it's divided up into individual work, working with families and groups, community work and development, supervision, policy development, administration, and research. So when we worked on with one -to -ones, these were clients that we saw individually in community -based centers.  When we worked with groups, we ran groups, for example, on HIV coming out, HIV disclosure, ran groups with people who had been incarcerated, who came out of incarceration, and we spoke about the experiences of being in prison and how that impacted on their sexuality, gender, and trauma.  We ran mental health groups for transgender women. We ran ARV support groups for people who are HIV positive to explore the levels of compliance and stigma particularly. And then within the community work development, we would go out into the communities. For example, we went into one of the townships called Barcelona.  which was an informal settlement. And we had a van where we were able to do screenings and testings, and we parked right by the cemetery, which led to the taxi rank. So we had queues of people, taxi drivers, fruit vendors, sex workers, et cetera, coming. And we would talk to them as a group, as they were coming in and out, it was open, about...  Health and sexual reproductive health, HIV, ARVs coming out, condom usage, protection, sexually transmitted infections, hepatitis C, cervical cancer and pap smears, et cetera. And it was extraordinary. And one thing that struck me was an elderly  Isikosa woman sat in the queue to be screened, and she was no less than 75 years. And she had painted herself in traditional Isikosa attire, almost like a sangoma. And I went up to her, and I introduced myself to her. And I said, mama, you look wonderful.  Are you coming for an HIV screen or is there something specifically you'd like to ask the nursing sister? No, she said, I'm coming here because I want my daughters and my son and their children to see that it's no stigma to come and have your blood taken and to have a pap smear. And this for me showed me the Ubuntu of working within the community.  and the community spirit is critical in our work. So we do a lot of community work and development. So for example, I supervise a registered councillor who works at a day operation where they work with homeless people but who live in shelters at night.  and they make African worried dolls. And their development profile is to empower the people who come into the center, they pay them 3 ,000 rand a month to look for work. They empower them with skills. We run groups, do individual work. And also, we've been able to lobby a big law firm.  to employ and train them as paralegals for 18 months, and they get a subsidy of 9 ,000 around a month. But we had to advocate for this with this big law firm, together with the motivation, and these kids, young people, are doing well. So it's a developmental process. So the organization in and of itself is a microcosm of the community.  So through my work with supervision of students, I hear the stories of child sexual abuse, incest, molestation, pedophilia, murders. Incest is extraordinarily high, gender -based violence. And we have a pandemic in South Africa.  of the rise of HIV. The Millenniums and the Born Free's and the X generation have no idea of condoms at all. There's no messaging any longer. The social media in any movie or any advert you see, it's immediate interaction between a man and a woman or a gay couple.  having sex, schnaufing cocaine, and using mobiles. So the social media context no longer speaks about HIV. But I am giving currently diagnoses to young people. So we are still having over 1 ,000 new infections per day, 2 ,000 new infections in young girls.  between 10 years and 25 per week and a thousand pregnancies of 10 year olds just being recorded this year. 10 year olds.  So the sexual debut of the adolescent and the pubescent person is very, very worrying because some of them are out of school, some of them drop out. The literacy rate of many of the children in our overpopulated and underserved schools is extremely worrying because kids in grade six.  In other words, in my day, standard six cannot read or write at all. But they're in grade six.  So we have major problems with political literacy, sexual literacy, gender literacy, as well as academic literacy within the schooling system. And I'm talking about public schools that are underserved, that still have latrines outside, that are vandalized, overcrowding, and of course, the  there's a new law that has been promulgated in that no parent or teacher or any person is allowed to hit or slap a child. For any form of discipline, it's an offense. A child can actually report on a helpline that my father smacked me with a leather belt. This caused major controversies with communities.  and schools who believed that corporal punishment is an essential ingredient for disciplining children. And of course, it's the opposite. So the situations in schools become sometimes untenable, uncontrollable. Kids are stabbing one another. And there's a culture or a subculture of substance using.",[10,124,24],{},[10,126,127],{},"I'd like to now talk about, as you're talking about HIV, if I'm correct, you and John Pegg and I think it was John Mahoney found an organization called Gaza 6010. I wonder if you could tell us why the name Gaza 6010 and a little bit about your experience of doing that work and you were very committed, you did that  work for a long time.",[10,129,18],{},[10,131,132],{},"within the  school system and I might also say within the university system as well.  Yeah. Yeah.  Yeah, Gaza 6010 emanated out of a social club of some gay people who believed that there needed to be a meeting place for gay people, specifically gay men. And of course, it was apartheid, so it was primarily white with a sprinkling of colored folk. And it was called Gaza 6010, the Gay Association of South Africa. And 6010 was the post box number.  where we could receive mail. So my PhD ultimately was based on Gaza 6010's venue and they regarded themselves as apolitical, which later became a problem, but actually turned out for the best. When we say apolitical, they wouldn't subscribe to any  kind of political activism, recognizing that they were gay. They thought that being gay during apartheid, that they were equally as oppressed as black people because they were illegitimate. You couldn't be involved with another person of the same sex. So they rationalized it as what we are also punished for being gay, just as a black person has to carry a pass.  So that's the kind of justification that was given for the non -political stance. However, when I did my thesis, I interviewed, I think, about  150 people and they all believed that a counseling service should be provided. So John Pegg, who was friendly with John Malone, who was my friend, got together and we formed the first counseling service for gay men and we advertised it and it soon grew. But what happened...  It coincided with HIV. And I saw the first person living with HIV in South Africa at the end of 83, beginning of 84. And I saw him for a year, and he died in my arms. So we then decided to form a sub -organization called ASSET, the AIDS Support and Education Trust.  where we were able to then get the services of Dr. Ashraf Drumwood, Dr. Basil Peterson, Dr. Nas van der Westhaysen, and Dr. Malcolm and Dr. Jane Pierce, who was the Deputy Head of Blood Transfusion, to come and work with us where we were dealing with John Pegg and I in particular with death and dying on a regular basis.  where we would write in the diary, rest in peace, rest in peace, rest in peace, until somebody pointed out to John and myself that we were becoming professional mourners.  During that time, we were able to, I drew up the first pre and post -test counselling format.  And I was one of the few people at UCT who had my blood taken by the Western Province Blood Transfusion Center to see if I and about 50 others on campus were HIV positive. And we had to wait for three months for our results. And during that period, five of us went to our GP and said, if we've got AIDS,  not HIV, if we've got AIDS, will he put us out? Will he be kind to us? And he said, with pleasure. Gwen Griffiths. Needless to say, I've still got the document where my result was negative. And against all odds, I'm probably the oldest mental health care worker, one of them in South Africa, against all odds, who's remained HIV.  negative. However, what Asset did was two things. One, a friend of mine lost his lover with an, he had a motor car accident, was discovered to be HIV positive in hospital, they were extremely wealthy farmers, and I helped nurse his partner and took him through the death process.  And Larry came one night and gave me a check for myself for 100 ,000 Rand. So I said, I'd rather put that towards a safe house for people who were dying. So we opened the J .D. Kasner House, which was another sponsor in Woodstock, where we had Professor Steve Miller from Johannesburg, who was then South Africa AIDS expert.  come to the center once a month. And we found a district surgeon who was LGBT friendly, who would come on a regular basis. And these were, we could house nine people. And John Pegg and I were there every day. And we appointed a house matron who would sleep over.  What also happened was that Desmond Tutu handed over the cathedral for prayer, safe spaces, and worship. And on World AIDS Day, he invited me to go onto the lectern to give a lecture so that we could start hanging the tapestries up on the one nave of the cathedral and also plant roses in the rose garden.  He also sent me around South Africa to speak to the Anglican Diocese on gender and sexuality with special reference to LGBT and HIV. And he sat in one of my lectures. And he said, could he sit in the front and put his legs up after all he is rather tired? And I said, father, you can sit anywhere you like. And I gave a full on lecture on HIV, sexuality.  how men have sex with men, women have sex with women, et cetera, et cetera, and how we can prevent HIV. We only had A or V, AZT at that stage, so people were dying. So he wants to come and see the halfway house. It was like a hospice. So the...  Colin Jones, who was the bishop of the cathedral, took us and Archbishop Tutu to the JD Kastner house and we waited in the car. About an hour and a half later Desmond comes out weeping. I get out of the car and I open my arms and he rushes into my arms and I clasp him and I said, Father,  What are your tears telling me? And he looked at me and he said, my son, I have ministered to others, but today these men have ministered unto me. So I began to cry with him because that told me something how we can learn from our own clients in a way that's not patronizing.  because we should be the experts, but we're not. Counselling is about not knowing. It's about finding out. It's not about being the expert where your head is so full of knowledge that you have no space to hear. But following that, John Pegg and I and others, I used up my sabbatical, and we went with bottles that were labelled, and we had a chemist.  and Harold Sack, who ran a travel agency, did all the books. And we had false names on bottles with AZT and false names. And we would go to Holland and San Francisco, where people had died. And we were given all the AZTs, which we smuggled back into South Africa and gave it to the chemist.  who would then dispense it according to the doctor's prescriptions. And I came back one day where they said they would put my name, because there wasn't enough room in other people's suitcases. So they put AZT with a proper chemist's label, Gordon Isaacs. And there wasn't enough back. There must have been about 40 bottles. And when I went through London customs,  They opened my bag up, and the customs guy said, what on earth are all these pills? And I said, you better stand far away from me, because I've got AIDS. And these are my medications I'm taking back to South Africa. And if you stand very close, you can catch it. So you better let me go, otherwise you might catch it. And he said, go, quickly, go, go. So I used.  the fantastic stereotype in the mischievous way, in the humorous way, to get through, bringing into focus that being mischievous in the classroom and using humor in the classroom is one of the most wonderful therapy diffusers. So one student said to me, we were sitting at lunchtime in an honors class.  And there were eight of us sitting there. And the one student said to me, how old are you? So I said, how old do you think I am? They said, you're about 50, whatever. So I said, look, I'm old enough to be your grandfather. But they said, but my father looks like your grandfather. But how old are you? So I said, I'm 65, 66. That was about 10 years ago. Now I'm 76.  And they say, well, how do you keep so young? So I said, well, my gynecologist and my veterinary surgeon and my urologist have prescribed for me, not gynecologist, veterinary surgeon, so they're really looking at me a bit funny. They have prescribed for me that I should have sex three times a week. And that keeps you young.  ⁓ says the one boy, that's fantastic. Now I can go to the gay club and fuck from Friday night till Sunday. I've got permission for my lecture and that's going to keep me young. And the one girl said, well, I'm bipolar. So that means that I can really use my bipolar to freak anybody out because all I can say is I'm bipolar so I'm a bit manic today so I can go and be manic. So they began to self -disclose stuff about.  themselves in the most intimate corridor talk, which becomes, I think, corridor talk is always wonderful because there's no defense. So I often sit in the Paul's room of the college where I work, which is a private university. And I listen to the conversations of students, which if they said that in the classroom, it would be riveting how they go and snort.  snort cocaine in the toilets, and how they cross dress, and how the soccer team won, et cetera. So there's wonderful stuff. And I sometimes tell my students at the break, can I come and join you for coffee? And we can chat because we're not in the classroom. And it's amazing what comes out in terms of spontaneous interactions. And I do that with my clients. Two of my clients.  had an issue with their homes. Their homes made one got robbed in their home badly, a woman in the 65. And the other one, who is a very wealthy person, felt that she didn't choose her home. So it didn't feel right. And I'm always reminded of Eric's quote from Fanon, if you don't have a safe space in your head or a safe space in a dwelling.  Trauma leaks out, I think it's fun, Nourn, you said that. And these two people's homes were bothering them. So I said, well, why don't you invite me for lunch and tea or coffee, and I'll come and visit you in your home. And I did that. And I went into their homes and checked it out. And I said, this is beautiful. Where do you feel unsafe? What doesn't fit for you?  In the other person's house where she didn't feel belonged, I said, your garden is magnificent. What is it that you're missing in this house because she had lost her husband two years ago and they had a huge farm in Hauteing? So there was loss and grief. So loss and grief comes with every interview that you have because everybody comes to you, whether it's a group or an individual with a crisis.  It's always a crisis. In other words, something has happened that's caused a stuckness, an impasse, that they can't solve with their usual coping techniques. And they need help. So if you get them in the time when the crisis is still raw and ready for them to share it, you will find grief overload.  Sometimes grief that's not allowed to be expressed. For example, two lesbians in the township where one lesbian gets murdered and the remaining lesbian can't have her family because she's been expelled by the family because of being lesbian. So corrective rape in the townships with lesbians and effeminate gay men is very prominent.  And we're trying to get away from the language of corrective rape, where men say, I'm going to correct you to become a woman and not be a man. So it sounds to people that it's correct to rape. So when I teach students, I always make sure that I teach it the word rape in an intersectional way. Because.  People think that only men rape women. They don't think about men raping men, or women raping women, or children raping children, which happens on a daily basis. And I've had many in my client loads of women raping their children, incesting their children, lesbians raping their partners, and men raping their partners. And.  For your interest, which is quite extraordinary, just before the recent elections, Cyril Ramaphosa signed the new Hate Crimes Bill, of which I was a starting member of it. So the Hate Crimes Bill, which can be heard in the Gender Equality Court, is specifically for prejudice in terms of individuals and collectives.  So it's different to criminal injury. So it could be collective prejudice based on religion, gender, age, labor, occupation, et cetera. So hopefully we can use this for the decriminalization of sweat as well, because it's an additional law where hate speech towards sex workers is fundamental. They're destroyers of marriages.  They prostitutes, et cetera, or hate speech towards transgender or queers, or hate speech towards people of color, or towards people who are asylum seekers, and especially who don't have papers. And I work a lot with asylum seekers and supervised an incredible thesis on  LGBT asylum seekers in South Africa, a master's thesis, which was a gem of a thesis. So I've been working with HIV since its inception. And I'm writing all of this down in my so -called autobiography. I've got about 35 ,000 words, but I've just got to kind of try and get chat GPT to.  help me, but I've got to find a way of doing that. But certainly, if this conversation is recorded, it can go in as well. So the HIV work started in 1983 when I saw the first person living with HIV. And the case study of that person was published in my book, Male Homosexuality in South Africa, Identity, Development, Crisis, and Culture.  And I also gave a chapter on HIV, some of it which is still usable, but the book, of course, is outdated. So when Gaza, 6010, and asset moved on, it then became Triangle Project. And Triangle Project was run by Gary Adler, and John Peck continued with the AIDS Support and Education Trust, and then ultimately went on his own.  to work from his own space, I think there were political tensions because Asset Triangle Project was now being seen to be more politicized than it was before. The Treatment Action Campaign was given birth out of NAPWA, the National Association of People Living with HIV and AIDS, which was an organization started by John Pegg.  myself and Rick Stephen. And I went around the country building up units of men, in particular, who were gay, who could then join NAWPA, and then we could form an advocacy and lobby group. And out of NAWPA, the treatment action campaign, led by Zaki Ahmad, became highly politicized. And it was through Zaki's protests.  and unbelievable work where Mandela came to him and said, if you don't take your ARVs and die, the country will fail in its HIV effort. And that's when Zaki started taking ARVs because he refused to take them because they were not given to all people, but only to some in terms of the cost. In those days,  a regimen of ARVs would cost about 13 ,000 rand. Today, it's about 200 and less for one pill.  So Triangle Project grew from a service delivery organization into a social advocacy where policy documents are written, white papers are written around gender and specifically sexual minorities. And that led to a white paper for the Psych Association and the medical.",[10,134,12],{},[10,136,137],{},"I wonder if, I wonder if I, that sounds, I mean, it's fascinating history. It's a fascinating history Gordon. I wonder if I can turn to the concept of decolonization. I mean, after COVID in the UK, there's a lot more talk about decolonizing the curriculum and opening education up.  And if I'm correct, for the last 15 years or so, you've supported the development of an open university curriculum for",[10,139,18],{},[10,141,142],{},"council to factor that into all their policies on how to work with gender minorities in terms of ethical practice.",[10,144,12],{},[10,146,147],{},"sex workers and you include sex workers in lectures and when you teach at university. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the role of decolonisation in particular with regard to sex workers in South Africa.",[10,149,18],{},[10,151,152],{},"So there's been a lot of noise in that area.  Yes.  OK, well, we were talking about, I don't like the word decolonization because colonization still exists. I prefer anti -colonization because we need to be anti it, not decolonized, because colonization still exists to this very day. And imperialism is linked to that.  But however, within the sex work context, I factored in to all the subjects that I teach, which meant the whole college, online and offline, 4 ,000 students, that there would be a session on sex work. Initially, there was some resistance.  when I because it's about decriminalization and the resistance came from one person who said what about the Swedish model or the Nordic model and I said it's been disproven.  research has shown that it's equally as dangerous as prohibition, if not more so because of bribes, underground, et cetera. We want full decriminalization and nothing but that. So I then gave a lecture to the powers of the university.  on sex work and they were impressed by it but you see I brought a sex worker with me and she told her story and once she had finished telling her story and I had put my slides up  Then sex work became part of the curriculum right from first year to masters. And whenever I give a lecture on sex work and or LGBT, I pay from my own pocket and bring in an LGBT person who's black, who's living with HIV, and a refugee, and was trafficked for a year.  and worked at Sweatt. And I worked with him from off the streets to when he is now a...  coordinator for a regional program and international journal article on clinical social work used my case study of him and with him as an example of how my roles with him, both as him being my client and then working with him, training him, and then finding out that he was using drugs, body morph drugs, and then he became  became my colleague, he became a part of a lecture program. So our relationship shifted from him being a client to him being a colleague and a friend. And he's just had a breakdown again. And I've reassisted in that context. So that's how sex work came into the syllabus. However, what we are talking about is indigenizing our programs.  And there are now hundreds of research papers and textbooks that are written by South African academics, journalists, or writers. So we use these references in our teaching together with the Global North. And we believe that we work in parallel with indigenous  teachings, for example, I teach a course on African psychology and cosmology, and then we link it to religion.  on the one hand, as being very nourishing and succouring, particularly if you have good faith and you believe in something that makes you feel harmonious with a higher power, right through to how religion breeds contempt, hate, and stigma for many people. So we are offering the opposites as well.  And when we talk about decolonization, we'd rather speak about how we indigenize our work with African scholars. So most of the new books I use are written by African people, like, for example, the Rape the South African Nightmare, The Female Fear Factory, Steve Biko's book.  which I've got in front of me, and I can list many authors that impact our work, but we still teach the main psychologies because if you're a person, whether you're living in a township or whether you're living in a rural area,  If you contract HIV, we will have to use the same techniques and technologies and therapeutic interventions with a person in the township as well as the person from a privileged position because the symptoms are the same. The meaning of the HIV might be different. So I'll give you an example of...  how HIV is still seen to be a stigma in South Africa. A student of mine was working in the TB hospital in Cape Town, where people have got TB that is resistant to TB medication.  So they're there for quite a long time. And it was a young black man who, when they drew his blood and gave x -rays again, found that he was HIV positive and had been positive for quite a long time. He was 20 years of age. So my student was given the task of telling him that he was HIV positive. And the client went through a process of shame.  guilt, disbelief, and fear. And we then spoke about the crisis of disclosure and that you never give disclosure if it's premature because your sense of agency is not intact. You need to disclose when you feel that when the other listens and they respond, their response won't harm you. So we were able to get him to disclose.  system.  So this took a period of six weeks. The sister took it quite well, but they were living in Stellenbosch in quite a blended family space that was overcrowded. And he told his sister that she is not to tell anyone that he's HIV positive because he's already slept with people.  And there was another issue that was emerging that had stepped with both men and women. So that was another trauma that was emerging from the disclosure as what crisis and trauma does do. So we now had a gender issue to deal with. So what happened was that when he ultimately got this child,  the doctor together with the student.  made a decision which I had to protest. They put all his ARVs, because he was on three of them, into plastic bags marked Vitamin B.  and he had to go home with these packets marked vitamin B. Now that's unethical. It's colluding with the situation of the client. And also, they could be found and swallowed by somebody else. Where would they be hidden? He had to take them three times a day. They had to be kept in the fridge, et cetera. So there was no ways.  that we could allow that. So we had to bring those tablets back. And I then had to go and confront the doctor together with the superintendent of the hospital, together with my student, to say that this is inappropriate. We had that is advocacy.",[10,154,24],{},[10,156,157],{},"Gordon, we have two more questions for you. And I think, could you talk a little bit about your  sweat, you and your dear friend, Shane Pelzer found sweat, and you've taken some incredibly creative work. I mean, you and I, we did therapy in brothels together, but you've worked in, and you found the telephone helpline, and...",[10,159,18],{},[10,161,162],{},"So coming back to decolonization or anti -colonization, it is, we speak about it all the time. And people talk about not  just the apartheid, but they talk about 4 to 500 years of colonization.",[10,164,24],{},[10,166,167],{},"your advocacy for sex workers being paramount. I was wondering if you wanted to just reflect a little bit on your  involvement and founding of SWET.",[10,169,18],{},[10,171,172],{},"Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll tell you how SWET was founded. But before I tell you how SWET was founded, I went up a few weeks ago into the SWET's office because I'm now back on the board.  So it's a full circle. So I went up into the counseling room where Normson, Emma, and another lady were sitting. And I walked up to the door and they said, come in. And I said, hi, Dr. G. Come in. You can help us. I said, what do you want me to help you with? So she said, well, Patricia is going to move to another.  province and be trying to photograph her vagina because she wants to put it onto her webpage because she's going as a private sex worker. Will you help us? And there's Patricia sitting with her legs wide open and they're trying to angle their cell phones to her vagina. So Patricia's asking me to look at her vagina.  So I said to her, if you want to have a sexy vagina online, you must wear a pair of sexy panties and not show the whole vagina, because you've got to have some mystery about you so that your clients will find it more erotic. ⁓ she says, Dr. G, that's a very good idea. I need to go and buy some sexy pants. That's my relationship with the sex workers. And how sweat started was.  Shane Petsokai was a Quaker person. He was a conscientious objector and did not go into the apartheid army. So he had to do his community service. And he came to Cape Town and did it with Professor Knoble at the mortuary where Shane did death and dying and bereavement work because he was studying to be a priest within the Quakership Fellowship.  And he left university to do his work. So he was working as an assistant to John Peck. He was very good with administration. And ultimately, we started training him in some counseling. And I got him registered as a social work student so that he could do his training as a social worker.  And one afternoon he phoned me and said to me, he needs to come and talk to me.  And I said, fine. And he came and he was ashen white. And he said to me, I've got something to tell you that's going to make me, Gordon, lose my job. And he, Shane, lose his job. I said, what are you talking about? He says he's working as a sex worker in a male sex work agency to support himself through varsity. And he's loving every minute of it. But his cell phone is in the.  in the newspapers, and he's frightened he'll get found out. And all I've said to him, for fuck's sake, turn this into an opportunity. It's fabulous. It's a university of experience. Just think of the learning that you can get from working with people and their sexualities. And it's not about sex. They're going to tell you stories and oral histories that they want to because they can't talk to others about it. The sex worker is not just the provider of poetry.  sex. They are there as alternative therapists and healers. Ultimately that came through to Triangle Project. Gary Atlas said it's absolutely fine because I was friendly with Gary because Shane was now attached to that program as well. And Shane got sponsored.  by the Quakers to go to the first sex work conference. I went with him to the second one in Japan, where he met all the leaders of the sex work industry, including the Red Umbrella Project.  And they said, well, why don't you open up her organization in Cape Town? So he came back with the idea, and he was introduced by a psychologist to a clinical psychologist called Ilsa Powell, who had written her master's thesis on violence towards sex workers in Cape Town. So Ilsa and Shane met. And Gary allowed.  Ilsa and Shane and myself and a former sex worker who is a social worker called Bertha to form the first board. And we would piggyback on Triangle Project. So they gave us a room.  We did night outreaches along the main streets of Cape Town, found a couple of sex workers that we liked, brought them in and started trailing them. And within the year, we were able to develop a constitution, a board, and we applied for funding as a registered NPO, which we got. And our first funding...  in absolute paradoxical terms came from the Department of Health so that we'd give condoms to sex workers on the streets. And the Department of Health had been started, kept funding that program right up until I left SWET about 10 years ago. So that's how SWET started. And then Shane left.  and together with his partner, opened up a brothel in Constantia called Quarelle, which I named because there was a famous movie about a sailor and a prostitute in a French movie. And they opened it up in Constantia, but they couldn't get a lease because none of them were employed. So the lease was in my name. So whilst I was a professor,  at the University of Cape Town, I actually ran a brothel for two years. I stated this publicly at a conference where I contributed towards a paper for clients of sex workers and said publicly that I have been a client of many sex workers and still am to this very day. And.  It's authentic. It's who I am. It's my truth. So during those two years of running the brothel with Shane and Rory, John Malone, who was also a comrade of ours, had two houses in Woodstock. So Rory and Shane moved into one, and Quirrell moved into the other.",[10,174,12],{},[10,176,177],{},"Yes, yes, of course.",[10,179,18],{},[10,181,182],{},"The reason being that the house that we were renting in Constantia was sold. And so we continued with the brothel in Woodstock until Shane then joined the Red Umbrella Project as their regional coordinator, and he broke up with Rory. And then I, by irony, literally, ironically, I...  Can I just open the door? Can you pause?",[10,184,24],{},[10,186,187],{},"you",[10,189,18],{},[10,191,192],{},"I've got a colleague coming in, and she's coming up, because I've got to coordinate.",[10,194,24],{},[10,196,197],{},"We've just got one last question.  Just one last question.",[10,199,18],{},[10,201,202],{},"dealing  with Palestine -Israeli conflicts on campus. So I've got to run two workshops next week and the week after around mediating the stuff around Palestine and Israel. She's worked in Israel. She runs our counseling hub at SACAB and our supervisor. So she's coming and she's showing me a Palestinian movie as well. So I'm just letting you in, but we can continue talking.  Thank you.  Can't hear you.  You can keep me as long as you like. Once a... Is the cat there?",[10,204,12],{},[10,206,207],{},"One last question, Dr. Isaacs. You've continually reinvented  yourself and always remained aligned to the marginalised, be it your work with drug addiction or refugees or men who have sex with men. How do you find the vitality to recreate yourself when so closely aligned to deeply difficult issues that often might be thought to burn out most practitioners?",[10,209,18],{},[10,211,212],{},"I'm back.  by owning my burnout. And I've had burnouts on a couple of occasions. On one occasion it was after working at the Trauma Centre for seven years on the ground with rape, murder, death, drownings, heads chopped off, kidnappings, etc, etc.  And after seven years, I decided to stop work for one year and a friend of mine and I opened up a coffee shop. And it was a wonderful experience for a year. But I also realized that it wasn't fulfilling me. It was fun. It was an adventure. And we then closed the coffee shop up and...  I worked for a while with a doctor in private practice, helping him run HIV trials. Eric was with me at the trauma center, but then Eric left to go to America, I think.  And then after the trauma center, I was then headhunted. And I opened up several drug centers and worked within the addiction field, both process and substances. In other words, sex addiction, love addiction, computer addiction, et cetera. And.  I worked there for about four years and then I had, I stopped working at the larger clinic that we opened and I didn't quite know what to do and I had a meltdown and the meltdown took me to a psychiatrist.  who then diagnosed me with social anxiety of all things, with mild depression, and put me on medication, which I'm on until this very day, and he saved my life. And Eric knows about that period when I was really stressed.  So that was the first time. And then once the maceratone levels and dopamine were satisfied, Eric contacted me and asked me to come and work for, run a small group once or twice a week for eight peer educators.  And I went there. no, he came and asked me to do a session with all of them, the whole staff, because there were problems in the organization. And I ran the session. I thought to myself, my god, I don't want to work there. All they were doing was the culture of complaining, and poor Eric with all of these people there. I found it quite intimidating. And then he said, but come and just run a group with the peer educators.  So I ran it. I came once a week. And then there was an issue that happened. And the issue was, there were two issues. The one was the one peer educator who is Dudu, who is now my family. And that's a whole nother story, what I did with initiation into her family. She had been.  Her first husband had been killed. Her second husband got caught in the fire. Her third husband committed suicide. Her fourth husband got his head shot on her lap because he was driving a taxi. So she was traumatized four times by the death of her husband. She's got four kids. And they called me in to run a group. I walked in and I said, do you want to talk about it? And she says, I've spoken to all of my other sisters here, Doc.  She calls me doc. I'm absolutely fine. When I need to speak to you, I will tell you.  And then I will come. So that made me realize, of course, that when people are in trauma, you don't need to have to intrude the same or second day. They deal with it in their own way. And she dealt with her community of people around her where they prayed with her and for her. And the second issue that occurred was that.  Sweat had been granted a large sum of money from the Global Fund. And Maria, a psychologist who was running the Department of Health's program, couldn't cope with both. So Eric asked me to come to Sweat for 25 hours a week to run that Department of Health's program, which was Outreach and Development, which I did. And then I fell in love. And I had...  A full -time job with the exception of one day a week where I could teach at SayCab. So I brought SayCab in as students to be interned there. And I brought SayCab into the college. I brought Sweatt into the college. And Eric, from being a student of mine, became my boss. And he could do magnificent things on the computer.  And he put sweat on the international map. If it hadn't been for Eric, there would be no sweat. Eric put sweat onto the international map, innovated exciting programs. We did go into brothels, but then we partnered with TBHRV care. And I went into clubs and chabines and danced the night away. And I even put down beers as  refreshments, because you can't go into a club asking sex workers to take condoms if you don't buy them a packet of cigarettes and drink a beer with them. So those were the very exciting days when we were awake all night looking for a murderer who had murdered a sex worker. And I slept in the brothel with all the sex workers because we couldn't find accommodation.  So we all slept in the brothel because we were up all night. So that was another experience that I had had. And I can quickly share the experience of Gordon Webster when he was a freedom fighter who killed five policemen during apartheid. And he was going to be hanged. And I was asked to be witness to give evidence and mitigation with Edwin Cameron, who became one of our constitutional  judges and my senior counsel was our first Chief Justice in South Africa when Mandela started in 1994 and I interviewed Gordon Webster and I had to interview his family in Zululand. So I was taken to Zululand by Gordon's brother who was Issy Koza speaking. Gordon was coloured and looked very white -ish.  because his grandparents were from Ireland, but his mother was Isis Zulu, his grandfather was Irish. So Gordon was a coloured man, his brother looked more black than Gordon did, but I went into their crawl, and I had to sleep in the crawl overnight for three nights where they painted my body with Isis Causa.  markings. They draped me in skins. They had slaughtered a sheep in front of me. They had Sangomas and traditional healers throw bones so that the ancestors could come through me to protect Gordon in court. The judge heard about this. So.  Also, when they first asked me to interview Gordon, he was sitting behind a glass cage. And I told them that I don't do glass cages with my clients. I do face to face with tea and biscuits. And if they want me to give evidence of mitigation, they must put me in a room with tea and biscuits, which they did do. The judge heard that as well. So when I was.  cross -examined for two days after being flown between Peter Maritzburg and Cape Town for over a year, working to collect evidence for Gordon's, my paper, my report, including meeting his teachers, friends, et cetera, et cetera, his other comrades. The judge spat at me and told me he's not accepting my report because I was too subjectively involved and how could a wife  man's sleep in a crawl in Zululand and he threw a glass of water down and smashed it. He gave Gordon the death sentence. I left feeling despondent. The councils applied to the appellate court who overruled the judgment and said that my report showed a... what was the wording?  was sociologically an imperatively significant report and he simply said to Gordon, this was in 1989, and he sent Gordon to Robben Island where I used to visit him and he was knitting me jerseys. And I visited Gordon in Robben Island several times and then in 1990 when the ANC and the Communist Party was unbanned.  Gordon was released. So that was another wonderful experience of saving somebody's life, but in a way that is most unusual, sleeping in a crawl and...",[10,214,24],{},[10,216,217],{},"Gordon, it's been a huge, huge treat to have you speak with us. I'm deeply indebted to your teaching and to your friendship.",[10,219,18],{},[10,221,222],{},"having to meet his mother and being embraced by the family and having the ancestors",[10,224,24],{},[10,226,227],{},"And I want to thank you very much for your time. It really has been a treat both today and knowing you.",[10,229,18],{},[10,231,232],{},"come through me, which allowed me to digest the whole meaning of Ubuntu within the context of the spiritualities of some sectors of the African community in South Africa.",[10,234,12],{},[10,236,237],{},"Yes, thank you very much Gordon. Thank you very much.",[10,239,18],{},[10,241,242],{},"Thank you so much and I hope that what I said is useful and informative.",{"title":244,"searchDepth":245,"depth":245,"links":246},"",2,[],"A transcript of our interview with Gordon Isaacs on psychoanalysis, politics, and practice.","md",{"date":250,"series":251,"image":252,"tags":253},"2025-06-17","interviews","\u002Fimages\u002Fuploads\u002F20251031_140742.jpg",[254,255,256],"interview","psychoanalysis","transcript",true,"\u002Fblog\u002Ftranscript-gordon-isaacs",{"title":5,"description":247},"blog\u002Ftranscript-gordon-isaacs","IunrDhykJ_QJ1RXYCs2jKDlozsIEVbAjRbqEIij6VVM",1777636243063]