h
lust out
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Steppin’ Out
Renée LaChance
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ACKERUY
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a Lie - Voting to
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C O N T E N T S
Page T w o ...........;.................................... 2
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A ID S 101 ..................................................5
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just Youth
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Out About T o w n .................................. 20
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Sandra De Helen
The other epidemic:
Addiction in the gay and lesbian community
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just out ▼ 2 ▼ June 1990
Besides being a recovering alcoholic and
addict, I have also worked in the chemical
dependency and mental health fields for 20
recently, I celebrated 11 years of living a
years. I am much less comfortable with the
clean and sober life. I do not claim
idea of recreational drug use than I used to be.
much credit for this miracle. There were
many, many people along the way who helped There is a continuum in which use progresses
to abuse. Drugs are used to medicate a
and supported me, particularly during those
constellation of intolerable feelings: fear and
early days when it was so difficult for me to
anxiety about sex and AIDS, guilt and anger
imagine that there was life after alcohol and
over one's inability to accept life and
drugs.
intimacy; the grief, depression and stress that
I lived in San Francisco during the 1970s
many of us feel who sec our friends dying
when drug use was an accepted, unremarked-
around us.
upon aspect of the gay socio-sexual scene.
Gay people often internalize societal
Psychedelics, cocaine or speed helped create
oppression and because of it suffer from low
that rush of ecstasy experienced on the dance
self-esteem. We often believe, consciously oi
floor. Some drugs — coke, poppers,
otherwise, those negative judgments of
marijuana — seemed to ease the anxiety of
ourselves. We don’t get to integrate sex and
cruising and made sex more exciting and
romance into our total lives like heterosexuals
uninhibited. What dinner party was complete
do. Our interpersonal activities are often
without a few joints or white lines?
concentrated into certain times and places: at
Everybody, it seemed, got high.
night, and in bars or at parties where alcohol
Did that attitude obscure the damage being
and other drugs are consumed.
done by drugs in the gay community? By
seeing in drugs possibilities for liberating
For me, it was often easier to be gay while
hedonism, did we overlook the potential for
1 was on drugs or alcohol. After I got off
wretched excess? According to many in the
drugs, I went through a painful process of
health care field, drug dependency has
trying to figure out what my sexuality meant
become a major problem for gay men and
to me. I looked for gay men who were clean
lesbians. Research in the gay/lesbian
and sober who serve as role models. What a
communities of Los Angeles and New York
revelation to discover that in sobriety I could
create my own role model, one that was
have shown that 30 percent are addicted to
totally unique to who I was as a man, a gay
alcohol (exclusive of dugs) as compared to
man, a recovering man.
about 10 percent of the general population.
The emerging focus on chemical abuse in the
Alcoholism and drug addiction is a
gay community is part of our increased
disease. The focus of recovery should be to
attention to health issues in general.
get off drugs and alcohol. Once the chemicals
BY C H R I S T O P H E R
ESKELI
R
Christopher Eskali
are out of our lives we can begin working on
the underlying reasons, and that is where the
guidance of qualified, sensitive professionals
and self help groups come in.
We gay people are struggling to establish
identity, to secure our personal integrity.
There is nothing that robs us of these
opportunities more than an addiction to
chemicals.
We, as individuals and as a community,
are proclaiming to the world at large, “I am
gay.. .1 am proud.” How wonderful to be
able to add, “And I am clean and sober.” w
Christopher Eskeli is coordinator of an
alcohol and chemical dependency program at
St. Vincent Hospital and Medical Center. He
served as administrator in the first two gay/
lesbian treatment programs in the world. He
is also in private practice in Portland.