Hi, my name is Mac and I am an Alcoholic.
Due to the high incidence of alcoholism and drug addiction amongst
members of the gay community, I feel that I would like to share the story
of my own alcoholism and addiction. With it, I will also share the story
of the sometimes rocky road of recovery.
I know today that alcoholism is a disease, mental, physical, and
spiritual, not necessarily in that order. My alcoholism did not begin
with the first drink I ever took, and that is a truth that took many
years for me to accept.
I had my first drink a long time ago, and when I had that first drink it
did not make me want to sang and dance, or get into a fight. It did not
make me want to go out and make love to somebody, perhaps because I was
only ten years old at the time. What it did do was make things better,
and helped push reality a little further away. I really needed things to
be better in my life. I was a very unhappy child who didn't like his home
life. I was mentally and physically abused by my father on a daily basis.
Nothing I could do seemed to please him, so I just tried to keep out of
his way. I didn't like the fact that we were so poor that we couldn't pay
attention to anything. I knew I was different and I just didn't fit
anywhere and felt like I was in never never land.
We hear a lot these days about a condition called dysfunctional. Well I
am going to tell you, our family invented it. My father was the eldest of
a family of thirteen and all of them were drunks. My grandfather was a
daily drinker and was still getting into fights in the bars at eighty
years of age. My father was the only non-drinker in the bunch. He
suffered from the disease of alcoholism in every respect, with the
exception of the consumption of booze.
You can just imagine what it was like when there was a family gathering.
Every wedding and funeral ended in a brawl, and Christmas and Easter were
no exception. Nobody in our family had any feelings, or if they did, they
never allowed them to show. The only acceptable emotion was anger. I can
never remember any show of affection between members of my family, but
after a few drinks, it didn't seem to matter that I felt unloved or that
I didn't fit in. As I was always trying to make things better and trying
to make my self feel better about myself, I was always drinking. I wasn't
long before it became apparent to everyone but me, that I was in trouble
with booze.
Until this time I had never made a connection between my drinking and my
sexual nature. Then one night on one of my drinking sprees, I picked the
wrong guy as the focus of my sexual attentions. This guy was a friend of
mine and one of the usual drinking gang. He was completely straight and
one hell of a talker. Panic, fear, and one terrible case of, "God was I
drunk last night" syndrome followed the incident.
I knew that I had to find a safe place to hide as soon as possible, so I
did as many closet cases do. I got very involved with a woman who was
afraid that she was going to be left an old maid, and who was
co-dependent enough not to ask too many questions. So about a year later,
at the tender age of eighteen, we got married.
Marriage; the perfect place to hide. What a hell I had created for the
both of us. This turned out to be a real tragedy, but there were some
funny things that happened as well, at least I thought they were funny at
the time. My wife was several years older than I and the neighbour kids
used to come to the door and ask me if my mom was home? I thought this
was a big joke, but the poor woman had plenty of reasons to be
prematurely grey.
As the children of this unlikely union began to appear, my drinking
really increased and everyone involved in my life became more unhappy
with each passing day. I spent more and more time away from home for any
reason I could dream up, and my hiding place became less and less secure.
I can recall coming home one Christmas Eve at three am. drunk out of my
mind, to find my two little daughters still up, waiting for me, heart
broken and in tears. What a gut wrenching experience that was. But it
wasn't enough to cause me to quit drinking. I would stay sober for short
periods of time to keep the peace at home, but without fail, my need to
hide the real me would take over and I would be gone again. I then
started bringing my drinking friends home with me, and it wasn't long
before my wife had enough. So I arrived home one night to an empty house.
I was destroyed, I loved my children very much, but not as much as I
loved booze. So I quit my job and got drunk for a month or so, that would
fix the bitch for what she had done to me!
When I got too sick to drink anymore and didn't have a dime left in my
pocket, I took a look at the absolute mess I had made of my life and the
lives of the children I loved. I was desperate. I wanted my children
back, and I would do anything to protect my hiding place. I could not
have anyone find out who I really was.
At twenty seven years old, I joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and a month or
so later I went to see my wife with a story that would bring tears to a
concrete wall. She bought the story and soon I had my children and my
place to hide.
I went to meetings and didn't drink for almost eight years, but in my
heart I believed that drinking was the way of life and homosexuality was
the disease.
My period of sobriety brought me a lot of material success, for like most
alcoholics, I had a lot of drive, and I used work to keep my mind off my
cravings and the real me. As long as I didn't drink I seemed to be able
to control my sexual attraction to other men, but I was in agony most of
the time.
As the time passed, more children were born until there were six in all.
Life in my prison of the fear of discovery became almost unbearable. I
had several extra marital affairs with women to throw the people I
thought were watching me off the track, but I became obsessed with the
need to experience some intimate time with other males. I formed a couple
of very emotionally charged non-sexual relationships with men I had met
in the A. A. program, and that helped for a while, but I felt so utterly
incomplete.
Finally in one of my dry drunk trips into fantasy, I convinced myself
that I could have the best of both worlds. For my first victim, I
selected a young man in the recovery program that I was very emotionally
involved with. We were going to an out of town conference, and as we had
done this many times before, share a hotel room and the bed, he didn't
ask any questions. I was a nervous wreck by the time we got to bed, but I
mustered my courage and put my arm around him. Surprise, surprise, he
responded, it was heaven while it lasted, but when it was over, I
couldn't talk to him. I had to run. The guilt and fear were driving me
insane. What if he talked? How would I get myself out of this one? I went
through a hell on earth after that. I couldn't talk to my wife, I
couldn't even look at the kids, I was ready to blow my brains out. Then I
took what I thought was the easier softer way. I arranged a business trip
to the city via the closest liquor store, and a nightmare began that
lasted sixteen years. The increasing need for more and more booze to put
the alligators in my gut to sleep soon returned me to my old pattern of
daily drinking.
During this time, I had broken all contact with my family and avoided
them at every turn, as I was still hiding my drinking and my sexuality
from them. At this time I was doing the Social Butterfly thing, throwing
elaborate parties and making the rounds of the bars. I always tried to
stay at least partly drunk so that reality would not get to close to me.
I had so may relationships and sexual involvements that even I needed a
program in order to know who the players were. It seemed to me that if I
could get someone to spend twenty minutes in bed with me I must be O.K. I
used to abused anyone who would stay in one place long enough. I was out
on the street, but in my gut I was still in the closet.
The last five years of my drinking things really began to turn ugly,
particularly me. I became more aggressive, and abusive to the few people
who would still hand around me. As the frequency and the duration of the
blackouts increased I spent more and more time alone, and by the case for
fear of running out, as the times that I was fit to drive a vehicle to
obtain more became less frequent. It seemed that I was always trying to
fend off the D.T.'s. I couldn't sleep unless I had drank enough to pass
out, and I used to wake up at four AM to start the day with a drink
before the little green men arrived. During this period of my drinking ,
I surrounded myself with a group of drunks who needed a supply of booze
and a place to drink. I would have bought booze for the Devil himself if
he had hung around and drank with me and promised not to leave me alone.
An intense fear of abandonment had been added to the collection of fears
that haunted me.
At this point, I knew that I was losing my mind, and I knew that my next
likely stop would be the asylum or the grave yard. Both of these ideas
scared the hell out of me. I knew I had to stop drinking somehow. Cold
turkey was out of the question, and I couldn't do the hospital thing.
After all, I had to preserve my dignity. I wasn't going into an alcoholic
ward so I tapered off over several days. I had my last drink at seven
p.m., and tried to sleep, but that was not to be. For four days and
nights, I sat in a chair except for the times I woke laying on the floor
my puke, from the seizures. It was a very foolish way to quit drinking,
and I would not recommend this approach to anyone trying to quit. The
detox method is much safer.
Finally I made my way to an A.A. meeting. Going back there was one of the
hardest things I have ever done in my life. I had to admit to my self,
that the people who told me that I could never drink again were right,
and I had been wrong. I had chosen to forget that the physical addiction
to alcohol never goes away. If we are alcoholics, sooner or later booze
will take control of our lives and we will have no choice except to quit
or die.
I had deteriorated so much mentally and emotionally that my first two
years of sobriety were not very happy ones. I was so full of resentment
and fear, that with out the booze and drugs to take the edge off reality,
I got no peace at all. I was unwilling to listen to the advise of other
people in recovery, so I continued to hide and suffer.
Finally I decided that there was no way that I could live sober and I was
afraid of the results of returning to drinking. I know that I would end
up in a padded cell in a straight jacket. So I decided that death was the
only way out for me. If I was going to kill myself, I didn't want to make
too big of a mess for some one else to clean up, but I wanted to make it
spectacular enough that people would remember me after I was gone. I
heard a lot of people around A.A. talking about God and Higher Powers and
a Power Greater than ourselves, but I wasn't having any of that stuff. I
was a total atheist and before I died I was going to prove that I was
right. I sat in my chair, shotgun in hand and said "God, if you exist you
better show yourself right now because I'm checking out of here in five
minutes". Nothing happened, but for the first time in my life, the
alligators in my guts had stopped fighting. Something had happened. There
was a power of some kind at work. I didn't know what it was, but it was
real.
After that experience, my attitude to recovery and the recovery program
underwent a dramatic change. I could relate to other people in a non
drinking, non-sexual situation for the first time in my fife. I attended
and still do, regular meeting and special interest meetings for Gay
people. In these groups I found acceptance support and friendship. The
feeling that I was different and didn't fit began to disappear, and my
perception of myself as a member of the human race began to improve. I
felt much better physically and mentally, but I still had an awful battle
with the fear of discovery of my sexuality. Finally I stumbled on an
idea. Perhaps I could give the gift of acceptance of the way I was
created, a homosexual male alcoholic. It didn't feel all that bad. At
last, I was a genuine part of creation. Not a freak or a moral
degenerate. I was exactly what my creator intended me to be.
Life today is very different than it was when I came to Alcoholics
Anonymous this time, almost ten years have passed, and I have accumulated
very little of this worlds goods in that time, and will be many years
clearing up the wreckage of my past, but today I have loving friends, and
my family all around me. I live openly in a meaningful gay relationship,
and I didn't have any desire to take a drink today.
The road I have travelled has had more than it's share of pain and
heartbreak, but I would walk it again to feel the way I feel today.
Mac.
Contact:
The Legacy Group of Alcoholics Anonymous © 2005