There’s a popular gay movie trope about the douchebag who relentlessly drinks himself into oblivion because he can’t accept his sexuality. Oh, how badly I wanted that to be the case for me.
In 2014, when I was 20 years old, I sat with my arms crossed and back slouched against a plastic chair in a dimly lit room in Perry Street Workshop in New York’s Greenwich Village. Rows of people faced a podium where a frail, elderly Asian man with tiny, circular glasses recounted a life of self-destruction that began with a sip of beer as a teenager. As the man spoke about the disease that swallowed him whole, I tried on alcoholism like a shoe.
“Nothing mattered to me besides not being sober,” he said, and I couldn’t relate to him less.
My problem was my secret destroying me from the inside.
Even if I was at the stereotypical rock bottom for someone my age – a Gates Millennium Scholar turned college dropout with only the next party to my name – I refused to cement in stone an identity as an “alcoholic,” which to me seemed synonymous with desperation and failure. I had a lovely upbringing and so much ambition, even if it was presently riddled with regret.
The people at AA spoke about drinking as an insurmountable temptation that occupied their existence, but I didn’t need alcohol to function. I only drank when I went out, which I could reduce from every night to the weekends. Although I probably experienced more blackouts than folks twice my age, it stemmed from my unhappiness.
My problem was my secret destroying me from the inside: I was gay, but hadn’t yet come out. Although I struggled to assimilate into heteronormativity my whole life, I managed to be in denial of my sexuality until the grown-up streets of New York made it impossible to ignore my urges. I had decided on college in Manhattan to escape the cage of fraternity culture, but while doing so, I learned my type was muscly men in their 30s.
Admitting my truth publicly felt impossible, as if one existence would cancel out the other. Growing up in the suburbs of Miami, I had never experienced LGBTQ+ visibility or access to perspectives beyond fear and stereotypes. Queerness seemed destined for exile from the world I knew. I had coped with my closeted life by binge drinking.
Instead of going back for another meeting, I decided to come out. It felt like I was losing everything I knew at that moment, so I figured I might as well start fresh.
Luckily, once I accepted my gayness, all my loved ones supported me unconditionally. Yet, my mid-twenties rolled around with a waiter from Galaxy Diner showing up at my home off-the-clock with my phone and wallet. After going to town on a burger and an omelet, I had left them tucked between the check. I had spent the entire morning ransacking my apartment without recollection of how the night had ended.
In an instant, I went from internally vowing to quit drinking – for real this time – to proudly sharing this anecdote with friends over cocktails the next evening.
“Well, was the delivery guy hot?!” one of them asked, and the rest laughed, showing no concern that I didn’t know if I walked, crawled, or was escorted to bed. I had a knack for spending entire nights on autopilot and had mastered the Irish goodbye when it was time to go home and pass out.
The consensus was that getting too drunk could happen to anyone, so why did it keep happening to me?
Addiction runs rampant in America (about 10 percent of American adults suffer from Alcohol Use Disorder), exacerbated by a mental health crisis and a doom-filled news cycle. I was one of an incomprehensible number of fish struggling to swim in a sea of countless justifiable reasons to hit the bars. A toxic relationship with booze was the least unique thing about me, yet I felt determined to be the exception.
Alcoholism had a way of sweeping everything under the rug and stomping it flat.
So much of my life was spent worrying that the exposure of my gayness would impede my will to live; I couldn’t grapple with the fact uttering “I’m gay” wasn’t the spell that stopped blackouts. I wasted my youth struggling to conceal my identity that I arrived at adulthood as a stranger to myself and oblivious to the issues beyond.
As I struggled to get my drinking under control, I tried to be the opposite of the people I had seen at that one AA meeting. I dressed as fabulous as possible during the worst of my hangovers, as if being messy one night could be disguised with style the morning after. I became a people-pleaser, going out of my way to do favors and help friends in any way I could to atone for a drunken mishap that hadn’t happened yet. I feigned memory when I had no clue what my friends were talking about. I swore off shots. I refused to chug cocktails. I never pregamed or drank at home or during the day, unless it was happy hour or brunch.
Approaching 30, I begrudgingly learned over and over again that there was a spectrum for alcoholism I couldn’t escape. The minute I forgot to prioritize moderation with every sip and allowed myself to drink like an average person, all hell broke loose for belligerence.
“You’re not an alcoholic,” a media friend told me, whom I typically only drank with at industry events limited to a few hours. “Trust me, I’d know. My old roommate used to drink vodka from a tumbler cup on her way to work.”
I shrugged and admitted that seemed like a more serious problem, too embarrassed to relive the worst of my mistakes. Alcoholism had a way of sweeping everything under the rug and stomping it flat – I could walk a straight line and prevent myself from stumbling if I knew it was under me.
I conflated control with mastering the appearance of my life, but I knew all too well I could put all the effort in the world into being something, and it wouldn’t make it any easier or more permanent tomorrow. I always reasoned I didn’t need alcohol to exist, so why was I doing everything in my power to avoid living without it?
Although I once kept a medley of secrets from my family, including pretending to attend college for an entire semester (my coming out was a double whammy), they were certain they would have noticed if I were an alcoholic. Shy of my 29th birthday, during a gathering with my mom and brothers, I came out again: “I’m an alcoholic.”
“Don’t say that,” one of my brothers advised. “Don’t manifest those words.”
Mom acted as if I called myself a slur. She didn’t drink and hated the concept of alcohol and drugs, but she didn’t understand why I couldn’t just stay sober without branding myself with such a “negative” term.
I remembered how my guts would quiver in high school when I heard someone say “faggot,” as if saying the word aloud made it true. People seemed to have this idea of alcoholism as a sickness that required me to fit their mold of self-destructive behavior to qualify. The fact I could take a sip of wine without exploding into a bender meant I was fine.
A few months later, my self-identifying alcoholic friend Eric invited me to tag along to a Northside AA meeting in Brooklyn. Nearly a decade later, I was once again faced with people presumably like me, which my LGBTQ+ community helped me learn meant we were kindred in the struggle rather than the nuances of the journey.
“I’ve run out of mistakes to regret,” a woman in her 40s said during the round circle, and it hit hard.
I didn’t want to wait to collect moments of “rock bottom” like magnets on the fridge of my drunkenness. After all, rock bottom was a particular feeling rather than any situation. Opening my heart to their words, I saw the regret and shame that connected us as a community. The illness manifested differently in every story, but was rooted in a lack of control, a stream of excuses, and sobriety as the only solution.
Just as I once believed my gayness existed before my problematic drinking, there was neither the chicken nor the egg – the gay or the drinker. Just me. Coming out didn’t change my life. Vocalizing it only granted me the permission to live and love freely, which brought me fulfillment. And I’d learn the same was true for my alcoholism.
When it comes to identity, words only have the power we give them and come alive how we honor them. Initially, I struggled to decide whether to tell my closest friends or wait until I overcame the dominos of brief relapses that followed my decision to quit. A few cocktails might’ve been harmless in theory, but it felt like a destructive buzzkill once I identified as an alcoholic.
My friends and family stepped up as allies when confronted with my gayness. What felt like a lifetime later, they became a mirror reflecting all the greatness I had to offer when I took off the armor and put down the drink.
Jamie Valentino is a Colombian-born freelance journalist and romance columnist published in the Chicago Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, Men’s Journal, Reader’s Digest UK, Vice, and more. Jamie has worked as a travel correspondent, covering the 2022 World Cup from Argentina, siesta culture in Barcelona, and the underground nightlife scene in Milan.
