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Tony Carroll, LCSW, established a psychotherapy practice in the Neartown area of Houston (Texas, USA) in 1983, making it the oldest LGBT psychotherapy practice in the city. He served as the first openly gay president of the Texas Society for Clinical Social Work and conducted one of the first studies on the stability of gay couples, though his research was never published. He practices psychotherapy in Neartown in the same building as his domestic partner, Bruce W. Smith, DDS. ==Personal life== Carroll was raised in a small town in Arkansas by a religious family and later studied music at Hendrix College, where he began to question his sexuality. He discovered the book The Sixth Man by Jess Stearn, which suggested to Carroll that communities of productive gay people actually existed, causing him to question the prevailing attitudes about homosexual people. During his junior year of undergraduate school, he was engaged to a female vocalist in a trio for which he was the keyboardist. However, she broke off their engagement because she believed he was in love with the third member of the trio, a male vocalist, rather than her. This became Carroll’s first gay relationship, and it lasted eight years, despite tremendous opposition from the parents on both sides. In August 1968, Carroll took a choral department job in Houston and settled in the Neartown area of Houston. He later decided to abandon music in favor of pursuing a degree in social work, so he began to research long-term gay couples in graduate school at the University of Houston. He describes the motivating force behind this decision as deriving from his “20 years in the chair” himself: he had difficulties finding therapists willing to work with a gay patient and later, gay couples, so he decided to help the gay community through this venue.〔 Carroll first met Dr. Bruce W. Smith, a Houston-area dentist, at a Log Cabin Republican Convention in 1995.〔 In 2003, they were married in Toronto, Canada. Carroll has said that although the marriage is not valid in the United States, he and his husband felt it was important to them to have their marriage recognized, and that it was an “amazing” and “emotional” experience.〔 Carroll believes that religion’s stronghold on America’s politics and society is the main reason the US has not granted homosexuals the right to marry, while Canada and other countries have. He does believe, however, that the US will legalize gay marriage in the future, and that people are infinitely more accepting of gays now than they were.〔 Carroll and Smith continually presented themselves as a publicly gay couple because they believe that it provides a role model for others in the gay community. They claim that their image as a professional gay couple is one of their greatest accomplishments to Houston’s gay community.〔 Their friends affectionately call them “Dental and Mental” because their practices are located in the same building.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tony Carroll (psychotherapist)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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