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Gay Hollywood Los Angeles Queer

Trevor Project Trevor Live 2015

Last week a very young gay friend attended the Trevor Project’s Trevor Live 2015 event.  My friend is a proud member of their youth advisory council.  The Trevor Project remains one of the most ambitious and honorable LGBT organizations currently available to at risk LGBT young people, providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth.

The Trevor Project was founded in 1998 in West Hollywood, California, by James Lecesne, Peggy Rajski, and Randy Stone. Creators of the 1994 Academy Award-winning short film Trevor, a dramedy about Trevor, a gay thirteen-year-old boy who, when rejected by friends because of his sexuality, makes an attempt to take his life.

Before this brave film aired on HBO the filmmakers, realizing that some of the program’s young viewers might face the same kind of crisis as Trevor, searched for a support line to be broadcast during the airing. They discovered that no such helpline existed and decided to dedicate themselves to forming an organization to promote acceptance of LGBTQ youth.

My young friend flew from the east coast to attend the event and by all accounts had a very enjoyable time… until he was sexually assaulted by an older gay man in front of his friends who thought it appropriate to cat call and high five each other when they saw my young friend being inappropriately groped.

It was not the only time that night he was sexually harassed/assaulted.

“I don’t understand why people think it’s ok to grab my ass and say crude, sexually charged comments.”  He said.

When I urged him to write to the Trevor Project and let them know what happened he was worried that they wouldn’t take the complaint seriously because the rich white men who had assaulted him were big donors to the Trevor Project.

I could write endlessly about gay white men, their pink privilege, their resistance to the notion of sexual consent and a widely held gay belief that men can’t assault, harass or rape other men.

My friend has (as of today) not written to The Trevor Project to report these incidents at their Trevor Live event.  It’s very hard for a young man, recently out, to articulate his disgust for this kind of behavior.

The assault did not take place in a bar or club where these assaults occur  all the time… more often than not overlooked by victim and perpetrator.  It happened at a fund raising event for at risk youth.

 

Categories
Queer

AA Upstate NY

 

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I woke at 5am.  It’s still dark.  The wind roars through the maple trees. The last of the leaves scoot up chilly North Road.  The dogs lay under the covers, they know the drill:  every morning I get up at 5am, I take a bath, I drive to Rhinebeck in the beaten up Mercedes the crazy artist gave me.

I sit with the same kindly, sober men and women in the cozy church basement.  I toast raisin bread and drink mugs of black coffee.  I sit at the back, close to the piano.  I am knitting another fragment.

I like morning AA meetings.

Remember the Palisades?  That 7am meeting over the bank?  The fat agent?  The lawyer who couldn’t stop looking at porn whilst this wife lay sleeping.  Remember the good doctor, the beneficent politician who by the ‘grace of god and this program’ stays sober today?

Recently I woke up and had a radical, disturbing thought.  I had a crazy AA cult thought: that if I dared be late for the meeting, dared miss the AA meeting in Rhinebeck something catastrophic would happen.  That I might die.  That I might not be able to depend on God to keep me safe.  Even though I have committed to the path he has chosen.

They say in the rooms of AA: if you desire anything more than AA you will never achieve your desires.  That putting things ahead of AA means putting them in jeopardy.

I waited for a moment.  I thought more about the crazy catastrophic thought.  It made me angry.  What was I thinking?  I wondered how I’d ever achieve anything ever again?  How could I escape this ‘sober’ thinking?

The sober life they promised when I walked through the doors of AA was a ‘bridge to normal living’.  But my normal living has become enslaved by Alcoholics Anonymous.

I understood momentarily that living a fearless, hand it over to God life… has become inert.  The furrow God has ploughed for me, the one I dare not leave.  They say in the rooms that he’ll never put anything in my path I cannot handle.  As long as I hand my will and my life to him.  My will and my life.

Sometimes I’m willful.  Occasionally I want to take my will and get something achieved in my time.. not God’s time.  But I fear those thoughts.  Immediately I run back to the safety of a prayer, God Grant me the Serenity.  I am once again taken care of by the benevolent force.

Sobriety is no longer about not taking drink or a drug. I am committed to a way of life. So I might not make the same mistakes, create chaos, or harm those around me I commit daily to a strict routine of making lists, taking inventories, I pray and meditate, I reach out to the newly sober, I practice the principals of Alcoholics Anonymous in all my affairs.

But…

Where’s this leading me?  I’m on my own, and rather than invest in a robust social life with similarly healthy souls… sobriety causes me to think twice about any and all interactions.  I no longer desire the normal friction that casually brushing up against another human being causes.

I think twice about driving to the city.  I think twice about having my hair cut.  I think twice about leaving the house.  I think twice because I don’t want to think at all.

I say to myself, “Sit silently in the coffee shop.  Do not live in fear.”  I crave the promise that I might effortlessly know how to deal with problems that used to baffle me.  I take the route that most likely avoids any and all people.    My fantasy is: with God’s help I am a slender ghost who haunts my own life.

The following morning I went to the meeting and told them my doubts.   I explained the crazy thought.  They were very kind.  They have the same thoughts.  They reach the same conclusions.  They keep coming back.

I get home at 9am.  I let the dogs out.  They chase squirrels and deer. The day unfolds before me.  Sober.  A ghost.