The chapter situates sexual orientation within a broad, relational field, arguing that desire organizes relational life and self-formation while unfolding inside sociocultural norms. It distinguishes sexual identity, gender identity, and orientation; maps major orientations and nonbinary gender identifications; and shows how heteronormativity renders majority experience invisible while demanding self-definition from minorities. A historical overview traces the depathologization of homosexuality and critiques the persistence of “conversion” practices. The text reframes homophobia as a wider homonegativity—cultural, institutional, and internalized—linked to minority stress and to the developmental challenges faced by lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, especially in adolescence.

Using a Gestalt lens, the chapter describes the “sexual self” as an emergent, field phenomenon: contact intentionality moves toward encounter, but introjects and stigma can interrupt cycles of experience, prompting concealment, false identities, or meandering paths to belonging. Coming out is read as a performative, relational practice of visibility that supports empowerment and collective imaginaries, yet entails ongoing situational choices. Clinically, it advocates an affirmative Gestalt approach: recognize homosexuality as a healthy variant, decenter heteronormative assumptions in language and setting, and provide a fertile, inclusive ground where figures of desire can emerge. Therapy becomes a protected space to metabolize shame and loss, reclaim imagination, integrate personal and social dimensions, and support responsibility and creativity in living one’s orientation—individually and within communities.