John-Manuel Andriote: Exploring Resilience of the LGBTQ Community

OutBüro - LGBTQ Voices

In this episode of OutBüro Voices featuring LGBTQ professionals, entrepreneurs, and community leaders from around the world, host Dennis Velco chats with John-Manuel Andriote, freelance health/medical-focused journalist for the likes of The Atlantic, Psychology Today, and others and author.

In his early journalist career, he focused his reporting on HIV/AIDS and then broadened it to the wider health and medical topics. Over the past 10 years, he has focused on psychological and emotional resilience. He is currently training to become a personal resilience coach to help others build their own resilience.

John shares that in 2005, after reporting on HIV/AIDS, he received an HIV positive diagnosis. This rather shocking diagnosis caused John to reflect on his life, the challenges, and assessing his ability to reach a positive outlook thriving and surviving life's storms. Exploring his own resilience made him keenly interested in the topic. Stonewall Strong is not a self-help book perse, but rather a collection of personal stories that demonstrate resilience so that the readers may connect with authentic stories and glean insights.

In our engaging conversation, John discusses his book titled Stonewall Strong that focuses on resilience told through his own personal story from a Journaling archive stretching over 30 years to one on one interviews with notable gay figures like Bishop Eugene Robinson, Larry Kramer, Congressman Barney Frank, and others from many walks of life. We chat about how members of the LGBTQ community face many obstacles and challenges others don't yet still find ways to be resilient and thrive. John found that we need to tell our own stories in our own ways versus allowing others to define us. Too often still today LGBTQ people are bombarded with the negative message that they are not worthy, they don't belong, they are not loved for who they are. One must overcome these messages that can become deeply ingrained causing emotional, mental, development, relationship, self-loathing, and potential substance abuse issues. Resilience is reframing that message internally from a state of the victim to a mindset of a survivor, a hero for overcoming.

This mindset shift is very important because negativities attract negativity likewise positive attracts positive. I share my personal story of having to put boundaries in place with people who after years of trying never accepted me for who I am and vehemently kept throwing mystical dogmatic religion in my face. It was difficult, but I had to distance myself from them out of love and respect for myself.

John developed a stand-alone course on developing resilience which he offers for free. It is found on his website at http://stonewallstrong.com/

To connect with John-Manuel find him on OutBüro here. https://outburo.com/profile/jmandriote/

Join me and John-Manuel on OutBüro, the LGBTQ professional and entrepreneur online community network for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, allies and our employers who support LGBTQ welcoming workplace equality focused benefits, policies, and business practices. https://www.OutBuro.com

Would you like to be featured like this? Contact the host Dennis Velco. https://outburo.com/profile/dennisvelco/

--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/outburo/message