Today is an important milestone for me. It’s been 25 years since I gave up alcohol and drugs. I have not had a glass of wine, a Wild Turkey on the rocks (my favorite), a hit of a joint, or even a valium in a quarter century. That’s twice as long as I drank. I first started drinking at 15 and by the age of 25 had nearly killed myself because of it. I joined AA and quit cold turkey. I was one of the lucky ones.

Shortly after my third anniversary, around the time of AA’s 50th anniversary, I was invited by the Village Voice to write a personal essay about my experiences in Alcoholics Anonymous. I debated it at the time since I was a firm believer in AA’s principles which includes remaining anonymous at the level of press and film. Of course, times have changed dramatically since 1985 when I wrote the piece that follows. Thanks to celebrities such as Betty Ford and Elizabeth Taylor, AA has been dragged out of the closet. And society no longer shuns recovering alcoholics. In fact, there’s a case to be made that going public with one’s disease can be a tremendous help to others suffering from the same affliction.

When I wrote this article, I decided to use a pseudonym. But today in honor of my 25th anniversary, I am going to republish it under my own name. Keep in mind while reading it that I wrote it many, many years ago and it was one of my first published pieces. Today, I probably would have written it much differently. But I think it stands up over time. And I hope it helps someone else out there who might be wrestling with the same issues I was way back when.

Living Sober

by Brooks Peters

(This article first appeared in The Village Voice, July 23, 1985)

A psychiatrist once asked me if I was gay. I replied jokingly, “No, I’m worse than that.” Making light of my homosexuality was a clever way of rising above it. Today, I don’t condescend to my gayness. I embrace it. Four years ago, my alcoholism had progressed to such a degree that I had no self-esteem left. At 24, I had given up any hope of having a successful and meaningful life. I was willing to die.

Homosexuality played a major role in my drinking story — or perhaps I should say, I used gayness as a reason to drink. For many gay alcoholics our first drink and our first homosexual experience occur about the same time. Liquor gave me the courage to act like a “man” — or at least what I supposed a man was.

When I drank, feelings of isolation and fear disappeared. I became outgoing, outspoken, and outrageous. Since I could drink more than anyone I knew — more even than the largest football player — I not only felt like one of the guys, I was treated like one of them.

Drinking was my entree into the Gay World… a world that seemed to me to be one never-ending, sizzling, cocktail party. I only met gay men in situations where there was booze: bars, discos, parties, etc. By the time I learned about the baths and the parks, I had no interest in them because liquor wasn’t served.

I went to my first gay bar on Independence Day, 1976. It was the Bicentennial in Boston, my freshman year in college. I cruised a man at the Boston Pops concert at the Esplanade and ended up in 1270, a popular gay disco on Boylston Street. Thus began a love affair that lasted six years — a love affair with gay bars. Lots of gay men describe how they needed a drink just to go to a gay bar. I needed a gay bar so I could get drunk.

By sophomore year, it took just one drink to set me off on a steeplechase. Blackouts became a common experience, terrifying but unpreventable. I began to take drugs and to use sex as a form of self-abuse, where quantity was more enticing than quality. After college, I drank my way across the country, using gay bars the way travelers once used inns.

I came back to New York, drank around the clock. Within a few months, I was drinking alone. Not even gay bars would have me. I started stealing money, panhandling, taking speed to stay awake to drink more. I started hallucinating, shaking uncontrollably, and crying involuntarily. I became more erratic and violent. I was slugged a few times and once landed in jail. My liver was so enlarged, I gave it a name, Larry. My kidneys hurt so much sometimes I couldn’t stand up. I started to vomit blood and lose control of my bladder. By the end, I was sleeping with bums on street corners because I wanted to be one of them.

Perhaps few of you can relate to my experiences, but maybe you can identify with the feelings of hope and faith I discovered upon joining the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. When that psychiatrist I mentioned earlier suggested I go to AA to stop drinking, I told him that I didn’t think I could make it unless I went to a gay meeting.

The first AA meeting I went to was the gay group, Live and Let Live, on the Upper East Side. The speaker that night was a handsome bartender — the kind I used to kill for. He’d been sober over a year then and as I listened to his story — how as a gay man he knew no other life than that of bars and sex, I identified. He was not only telling his story, he was telling mine. One of my reservations about quitting drinking had always been, what does a gay drunk do other than drink, get down and do drugs?

What I discovered changed my life. I learned that gay men have much more to offer each other and the world than simply living it up, partying, and camping out. I had to get over my own self-hatred before I could possibly contribute anything of value. Once I was satisfied to play the clown, laughing with the crowd, at myself. The gay groups of AA have taught me that I am not a joke. I no longer have to say– I’m worse than that.

The last three years and eight months have been the most exciting times of my life. Anyone who thinks that AA is boring has never been to a gay meeting. The same humor and attitude that often make gay life so enjoyable are in play in the program, only the goal is different. You don’t need to be drunk to have a good time. In AA, we’d laugh and carry on just as much as in a bar, only we do it around a coffee urn or a jug of lemonade.

Here in AA our sole purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics achieve sobriety. What they don’t tell you when you first come in is that sobriety means more than just not picking up — it means a complete reevaluation of your life and your self. Sobriety is a positive approach to reality.

Getting better doesn’t happen overnight. It took me almost three years to open up enough to let other members of AA even have my telephone number. I went to New Group, a gay meeting in the Village, regularly every Sunday for three years, refusing to go to other meetings or any group functions, dances or the yearly convention for gay alcoholics called the Big Apple Round-up. I was finally brought out of my shell by a very patient fellow member who became my sponsor.

There’s an expression in AA, “Don’t drink before the miracle.” I never understood that expression, only thinking of miracles in religious terms. But miracles occur daily in minuscule ways, some hardly noticeable. The miracle happened for me when I told this fellow alcoholic that I did not want to have sex with him. His reaction surprised me. He didn’t become defensive or bitchy, or analyze me. He didn’t even judge me. He simply wished me well. What he wanted, even more than me, was my sobriety. As a recovering alcoholic, he needed me to be sober too. It was the first instance in my life when I felt I could really open up to another human being.

Since then I have taken part in the program, working the 12 steps suggested as a means to recovery, and helping to form a new gay group on the Upper West Side called Lambda West. I have also reached out to other alcoholics, attending a weekly schedule of non-specifically gay meetings. To me it is just as important to be accepted and to accept “straight” people as it is to embrace my own sexuality. I don’t think I could have become so tolerant and comfortable if it weren’t for the support and affection demonstrated by all rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Now I see that I was a prisoner of alcohol and that my homosexuality had nothing to do with it. It was my conception of gayness that was negative, not gayness per se. Society at large encourages the gay alcoholic to keep drinking by condemning homosexuality, but it is our choice to drink.

Many gay people come into the fellowship of AA confused by our conflicting needs and our place in society. What we have been lacking has been there all the time, but we’ve been too busy trying to establish an identity that we’ve overlooked it. The answer lies in our inherent humanity.