About
Luke Adams is an author and activist who earned his Master of Arts degree in Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology from Saybrook University in San Francisco (offices in Anaheim), and his Certificate in Alcohol and Drug Abuse Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. He is licensed as a psychotherapist in California (MFC 104800) and Illinois (MFT 16600343), and as a telehealth-only psychotherapist in Florida (TPMF299). He is Board Certified by the American Board of Sexology (#22278). In the UK, he is registered with the College of Sexual and Relationship Therapists (#4726) and a pending member of UKCP. He is a lifetime member of both the Association for Transpersonal Psychology and of the International Spiritualist Federation, a clinical member of AAMFT (#180964), and has been certified in several areas, including trauma-informed therapy and psychedelic integration therapy.
Biography
Luke Adams has had a broad career as an activist, health worker, and essayist. He earned his Master of Arts degree in Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology from Saybrook University in San Francisco (offices in Anaheim), and his Certificate in Alcohol and Drug Abuse Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. He is licensed as a psychotherapist in California and Illinois, and as a telehealth-only psychotherapist in Florida. In the UK, he is registered with the College of Sexual and Relationship Therapists and a pending member of UKCP. He is a lifetime member of both the Association for Transpersonal Psychology and of the International Spiritualist Federation, a clinical member of AAMFT, and has been certified in several areas, including trauma-informed therapy and psychedelic integration therapy.
In the early 1980s, Luke was among the first cohort of then-student activists (which also included Ricky N. Bluthenthal, Haley V. Mack, Wulf Thorne, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the Stanford AIDS Education Project, et al.) to bring Harm Reduction Policy – for both substance use and sexual health – from the Netherlands to the United States. He then helped to craft the Harm Reduction Policy for the City and County of San Francisco, along with Hank Wilson and a task force appointed for the purpose. When Gavin Newsom was Mayor of San Francisco from 2004 - 2011, he appointed Luke (surprisingly, since Luke was politically to his left) to the Mayor’s Task Force on the Crystal Meth Epidemic, to craft policy and social health interventions to address the crisis.
Luke’s first activist involvement began at the ripe age of five, in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. His first involvement in political campaigns was in 1972, supporting Shirley Chisholm and George McGovern for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. Luke was also one of the founding members of Democratic Socialists of America.
After years of working in LGBTIA2Q+ organizing and activism, Luke also became involved in the campaigns for economic divestiture from the Apartheid Regime in South Africa. He worked in organizing and on numerous campaigns to get progressives elected and appointed to political office, for greater labor power and environmental protections, for expansion of human rights, and for the fight to save the lives of people living with and people at risk for HIV.
In 1987-88, Luke served as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the progressive-left think tank in Washington, DC. In addition to fund-raising and research duties, Luke worked with the US Student Association and the Task Force (LGBTIA2Q+) and began his critical literacy institute, which launched the New Pacific Academy in San Francisco in 1990.
Luke founded New Pacific Academy on the idea that queer youth – who were/are subjected to significant bullying, harassment, violence, suffering from related mental health issues, suicide, and murder – could find hope and healing by being redeployed into community service and activism that would help them to experience queer joy and liberation. The model used – based on numerous earlier progressive organizing and community consciousness-raising models – became the standard from which most new training models in the LGBTIA2Q+ and AIDS Activism organizations are now based. Luke continued that work in numerous areas. Highlights have included on-the-ground logistics for the Youth Empowerment Speakout at the 1993 March of Washington, coordinating early fund-rasing for the Pedro Zamora Memorial Scholarships, and many other political and community campaigns.
In addition to this very Western, very scientific construct and work, Luke has studied and worked in several areas of energy medicine, including hypnotherapy, sexual health and education, Asian Bodywork Therapies, herbalism, nutrition, and the Usui School of Natural Healing. He became a Reiki Master practitioner with Jon Coleman in 2004, tracing his lineage to Dr. Mikao Usui. A medium by heredity, Adams also studied the writings of Carl G. Jung and of Joseph Campbell, spiritualist sources, shamanistic and witchcraft sources, and ancient rites and myths to receive his Master’s degree for Ordained Ministry, and was granted an honorary doctorate, with the Nasoreans of Mount Carmel (a group of gnostic essenes).
Adams is a clergy member of the International Spiritualist Federation. He was ordained to the gnostic priesthood in 2007 at All Saints Episcopal Church in San Francisco by three bishops (Neil Christensen, Kenneth Babauta, and Lou Anthony Bordisso) from several historic lineages of the apostolic succession—both “standard” and gnostic. Adams primarily has a street ministry with those struggling with substance misuse, but also carries out his interfaith ministry operating in “the circle of the heart” of l’Ordre de Marie de Magdala of the Gnostic Sanctuary, which is led by la Voir du Magdalene d’Aix-en-Provence, et l’Ordre de Marie de Magdala.