San Jose's gay/lesbian Conference

In our conference. And hopefully, I know he'll have a great message for you this morning. So, with that, I'd like to turn the meeting over to our speaker this evening, Brian I'm from San Jose. Hi, everybody. I'm Brian.

I'm an alcoholic. And this is not the Hilton, it's the Radisson. Okay, very happy. My sponsor picked me up this morning and as we were coming over here, he proceeded to start to get on the freeway and I said, where are you going? Don't you want to go north on 880?

And he said, why? And I said, well, aren't we going to 4th Street in Radisson? He laughed and he proceeded to but I did sow a seed of doubt. And so we tried to find people. Finally, we called Sotel and they said, yes, it's here.

So we made it. So and he has proceeded to tell enough people. So I think I'll tell the rest of you that you can either thank him or blame him for me being here this morning. The first thing I'd like to say is this is only the 2nd Al Anon speaker that I have heard. The first one was years ago in Living Sober when this woman went on and on and on.

And I was sitting with Richard and Charles, who many of you know. And Richard and I had a very interesting relationship. We loved one another, but part of the charm of our relationship was we traded insults. And I leaned over and looked at him and I said, and you wonder why we drank, which I suppose is an Al Anon trait. So maybe I should start seriously thinking of going to those meetings.

But in any way, I clearly qualify for this group. I am the 3rd child of 7 in an Irish Catholic family. They did not practice birth control, obviously. I was the eldest is a girl, a woman and then there were 6 sons. I am the only fag.

However, my oldest brother produced 4 sons, one of whom has been in a gay relationship for a dozen years and is also in the fellowship And his brother just left his wife and 2 of us are convinced he's one of us but still in the closet. Whether he is an alcoholic or not, I don't know. But alcoholism runs in my family. I remember as a young man when my father's dream got out of hand. And my father was never physically abusive.

In fact, he was a very loving man, except when he took beer and he was also a doctor and when he combined his meds with the beer, he got nasty. And he would say very cruel things to me. For instance, once we were playing ball with a bunch of my friends and he told me I threw a baseball like a girl. That was the last day I ever threw a baseball. That just cut me right to the quick ball.

Of course, the reason it cut me to the quick was because I knew I was different from my brothers. And I always felt different. I never felt loved by my family. Of course, the problem was, it wasn't that my family didn't love me, it was that I didn't love me. I found that out to the that's another that's further along.

In any event, my father's drinking really destroyed the happiness in the family. He could never get sober. I know several times he tried. But they said no one's too dumb to get this program, but you can be smart. And I think that was his problem.

However, 4 of his 7 children did find these rooms. And we often talk one to the other about how why is it that we have been able to get it and he couldn't and one of my brothers said, well, maybe he is looking out for us now and making sure that it's not a problem for us. But any event, I realized when I was 15 and had my first can of beer that it made a profound chain in my opinion of myself. I felt I fit it in. And I became the life of the party, the story was that Brian got high on the smell of it, which was probably true.

It didn't take to set me off. And for many years it worked. It was the way I enjoyed myself. I don't ever remember taking a drink for any reason other than to get wasted. And I was what I call a functional alcoholic.

I never lost a job, lost my car several times and had to go find it. But I never lost a job, I never lost a home, I never went to jail although today I'm sure I would have if I was stopped. The first time alcohol really got out of control for me was I was 27 years old, I was a teacher in Rhode Island and I had become President of the Union and we had just conducted a strike, which back then was very unheard of, teacher strikes. And we had been enjoined by a court, but we were given 4 legal days to strike, which was a great victory. So we all decided to go out and have a party.

And on the way home, I was so drunk, I pulled over to the side of the road and passed out. And the next thing that happened was the state police officer came up and knocked on the window and said what's wrong. And I had the presence of mind to say, someone slipped me a Mickey at a party and I can't drive. So he said, well, we live. And I told him, he said, well, I'll take you home.

Well, the next morning when I came downstairs to breakfast, my roommate was sitting at the kitchen table and he said, I didn't think you were here. And I said, why not? He said, well, your car is not in the parking lot. I said, what do you mean? I had forgotten that I about this experience.

I didn't know where my car was. And I had all these legal papers from the court in about my car, which could have resulted in several $1,000 in fines and stuff from not only myself but for other leaders in the union. So I called one of the people I was partying with and I said, Fred, get me, I can't find my car. Well, he had brought a group back to his house the night before after the party, so they all came over to pick up and thought it was great fun. Fortunately, being in Rhode Island, there were only 3 North South highways in the state.

So it had to be one of those 3. And I remembered that I vividly in my mind is dotted the white line, the space white line. So that meant it was the one four lane North and South Highway. Sure enough we get on it and there was my car parked right across the street on the freeway from the entrance to the state police barracks. Okay, I had several other instances like that.

But for me alcohol worked for a long time. Towards the end of my drinking, I was living in Chicago. I remember I began to think I had a problem. One night I was out at a staff meeting and I was sitting along on a highway trying to figure out how fast I could go on this 2 lane country road in DuPage County. And all of a sudden it hit me that I was trying to kill myself.

And so that but that didn't get me sober. Now in my family, my father died when I was 17 and a freshman in college. The morning that he died, my mother woke me up to tell me and the first words out of my mouth were, thank God he's gone, because I did not have a healthy relationship with him. I now know it was because I'm exactly like him. By the time, I thought he was really not a nice person and I've now gone on with my life.

However, the family started to come unraveled. We discovered or my mother discovered shortly after my father's death that my sister was pregnant. So that and back in 1960 meant shut down marriage to the man who got her pregnant to whom she stayed married for 17 years and 3 more children. But then my older brother decided to get married that summer. The brother after me decided that drugs was a good way to go and the one after him at 15, but a girl pregnant.

He married that girl at 18 and they've been married for 35 years I think now. And it's my sister-in-law joked about she said, when I married your brother, I was going to make him pay for what he did to me. I never thought fall in love with him. And but in any way, he's also in the program. So I'm trying to think of where I'm going with this.

In any event, my drinking progressed to the point where I would come home from work at night and I would either drink a half gallon or gallon of Gallo hardy burgundy until I passed out. That's when I stopped drinking. And I decided in the summer of 1978 when I was unemployed temporarily that my dream was because I wouldn't accept my sexual orientation. So I had a conversation with God along the lines of I tried for 20 years not to be, I still am, so you must want me to be, so I'm just going to be. And that's that changed that took away my excuse for drinking.

And the following March the following January, I met a man who made quite clear to me that he was very interested in having a relationship but not with a practicing alcoholic because he had done that three times and didn't want it anymore. So if I was willing to do something about my drinking, then we could continue to date. So I started going to a meeting and he started going to Al Anon. We then moved to California and we moved to California in the summer of 'seventy 9. And in January, he left.

He had been running around on me out here. I did not know that at the time. I was crushed that he left, although now I wonder what I ever saw in him. But at that time, I was very angry. And I went to a friend's house and Don Lavoy was there.

And just because of the conversation I was having with a friend, Don suggested why don't you go to meetings, why don't you come by meetings, because I'd stopped going to meetings. I hadn't drunk, I hadn't had anything to drink, but I was not going to meetings. So I was really on a dry drunk, I was not sober. So I started going to I went back to the Thursday night meeting and in very angry terms told people what had happened. And someone asked me, so I thought I'd drink over it in my exact words where I wouldn't give the goddamn motherfucking son of a bitch the satisfaction of thinking he could drive me to drink, which produced the ohs and ohs that's not really a healthy attitude except this one old timer in the back of your own said, I don't know why maybe.

And that man became my sponsor. And when I did the steps when I did my 5th step with Geri, I was so flattered with the word for it that someone would take time to listen to me talk about my story. And at the time, I had not I didn't sponsor anybody or anything like that. So I was still very angry towards my ex lover because he also would need money and towards this one brother who had gotten into drugs and we had had a very hostile relationship. My last words to him were that he had 10 minutes to get out of town before I had him arrested.

Well, anyway, Jerry told me to write a letter to Max Glover telling him that if he believed he owed me this amount of money to please give it to a charity of his choice because I had to release it. I did that and my anger towards this guy disappeared. That was one of the first miracles of this program. He wrote me a letter back in which he didn't mention the money at all, but he told me that he reminded me that when we first started going together, I was on the wagon because I had a best experience drinking in Boston, missed a train from Boston to Chicago and I had been at the train station 4 hours before the train left. Now I was just I was that hungover, I didn't know what the hell was going on.

And so I had gone on the wagon when we met, then there was a blizzard and we started having a little glass of wine by the fire and lo and behold, I was off and running back to my old self. And he was afraid of me. He was afraid to say anything when I got sober, because when you stop drinking you closed down emotionally. And so when we first started going together and you'd have a glass of wine or 2, you get very affectionate. So I was afraid to say anything to you because I was afraid you'd shut down again or you would you get violent with me.

And I didn't even know you were afraid of me. That was kind of interesting. We had a couple of talks after that and I've seen him a few times. I have no hostility towards him at all. Now with my brother, at one point in his young life, I hadn't committed to an insane assault, because we thought he was crazy.

My mother tried to kill herself twice. The reason she didn't the 3rd time was because I went to the hospital the second time and leaned over a bed and said, the next time lady there will be no priest. As a good Irish Catholic for her that meant straight to hell, there never was a third time. However, the experience with my brother was such that I think it was 1981 I got a phone call. It was the day of that Princess Di and Charles got married because I was up watching it.

And he called me from a hospital in from New York telling me that he had just had a heart attack and it was a congenital thing and he was calling all of us to tell us to go get checked out because a simple pill would take care of it. And I was very suspicious because I hadn't talked to him since the time I had given him 10 minutes to leave town. And he the words came out of his mouth. He said, I have no one to blame for my problems but myself. And I sat up in bed and I remember and I said, I never heard you say that.

And he said, well, I've been in AA for a year. And I've gotten that message. And I said I've been in AA for 2 years. He said I know that's why I felt it was safe to call you. Wow, That was really a great miracle.

Years later, we were having a conversation. He said to me, I could never understand you were jealous of me. You were the brother that I looked up to. You were the brother that introduced me to the shows and music and all that stuff. I had nothing in common with Kevin.

But with you, I really admired you. Why will you judge me? I said, well, let's start with this. I'm the fag and you are the artist. How fair is that?

He later came to a testimonial for another brother. He came dressed as a black sheep, which was Orion. He had the last conversation I had with him, he told me that he had no money, he was living in Puerto Rico with his 3rd wife. He had no money and had to stop taking his heart meds and his son was very upset with him. And so he was going to move to Holland where his wife was from and get on their medical plan.

And he said they just needed to get some money together to do it. And I said, well, Dennis, I have tens of thousands of free miles. Why don't you just take them and go to Holland. And he started crying and I said, their business earned, it's not out of my pocket, just take it and go. The day after I got to Holland his wife called me to tell me he died in his sleep.

And I all think had I not given him the miles, I would have spent the rest of my life think I had killed him. At his eulogy, I was asked by his daughter to give eulogy at his funeral. And in the front pew of the church were his 3 wives sitting next to each other bawling our eyes out. And I said I introduced myself as an alcoholic from the pulpit of the church where we had all been baptized, made up for ethylene and all of that stuff. So there was all that baggage.

And I made that comment about, I said, Dennis might have been a success materially, but I don't know how many men at the funeral will be able to say that they had their 3 wives sitting together crying out because they love them. They all love them. And I think that was a testimonial to the amount of love that he was able to give. So that was a big miracle. And I'm talking about the miracles that come from sobriety.

I had one out here. There was a young man named Mitch Burfield, who died years ago. Mitch was a special type of person. I always when I would look at him, I would of Paul Bunyan, because he was from Montana and he was big guy. He had a serenity about him that I found very attractive.

And I learned later that he had the same feeling about me. And we used to come over to the house every once in a while when he felt some kind of turmoil, because he said I just kind of relax when I come over here. Well, the last time Mitch came to San Jose, he had AIDS and he finally went back to Montana. And he spent the last year and a half of his life going around to different schools in Montana talking about HIV and whatnot. And the last time he was here, he told me that he was putting together a scrapbook for his parents after died and he would ask me to write him a letter telling what impact he had on my life, which I did.

Well, then he died several months later and his sister who is also in the program came down here to San Jose. And we had breakfast and she had his memorial service brochure. And she was describing the service and she took part in the service and her part in the service was she read the letter that I wrote them. Now, that was very flattering. But then, I read he had written a letter to everybody on the back of his program called A in My Death.

And in that letter, he said that when he got sober, it was a great gift from God. But then he discovered that he had this plague and he got angry and he moved away from God. And after several months, he came back. And what he considered, he said actually in his program that he considered AIDS his AIDS a gift from God, because of the spiritual richness that developed in his life because of it. I don't think somebody who is not in one of the 12 Step Fellowship can even begin to appreciate the truth of that statement.

So I treasure that program and my memory of Mitch. My relationship with my father also healed even though he died in 1960. One, my mother would come out to visit after she retired. She did into a very fun loving person after she retired. She got better and she used to say she was and if she could do anything, she damn well pleased.

And she was too old to die young. So she smoked up until she could no longer hold a cigarette. And she really became quite a character. But one night she came out, I had gone I had decided I needed ACA therapy because of stuff that was going on in my life that was not wasn't making me happy. And part of that therapy was to come to her.

So she came out the night before Thanksgiving and I was having 16 people all from the fellowship for Thanksgiving dinner from the gay fellowship. So we sat in the living room and I said I have to tell you something mom. There's a reason you come out here and after 2 or 3 weeks we get into this big fight. It's because I can win to the closet when you're out here. I said I changed my lifestyle, I didn't say closet, I changed my lifestyle.

You need to know something about me, I'm gay. Her first words were so what and then her second words were and this is what knocked my socks off was your father was that way. I said, what? She said, your father is wrong both ways. Now this is like a 70 year old woman saying this.

I said, how do you know that? She said, I saw him kissing Father Hennessy one night. I said, was he drunk? She said, yes, they both were. Well, that just what was so miraculous about this for me was that after the Thanksgiving meal where we had all these people clearly gay running around.

I think Kathy was the only woman there. And it got rather festive to say the least. My mother had a ball. We went to the we decided we were going to go all go to the meeting at Thursday night meeting. Well, the secretary was in a fender bender and we couldn't have the meeting at the church.

So I said, well, everybody knows where I live. Well, it's in a meeting at my house. So trades back into the living room at my house and have the meeting. And after the chairperson spoke, he called on me. And when I get up to speak in front of my own living room, I looked across the room and there was a picture of my father that I had just begun to display.

I never displayed any pictures of him, but I had been coming to terms with that. And I looked over and I saw that. And it dawned on me then that yes, my father did love me very much. He saw in me his own struggle with his sexual orientation. And you can imagine back in the 30s 40s 50s when he was a young man, how hard that must have been given the public attitude towards it.

So he didn't want me So he was going to teach me to be a man that kind of thing well, I showed him. And subsequent to that at Christmas time, my older brother had taken family films and put them on a cassette. And it was one of my younger brother's first birthday party where he's sitting on my mother's lap in front of the birthday cake and I'm on my father's lap. My father's hustling the hair on my head that would do affectionately to a little child. And it just sends shivers up my spine.

I said, Brian, there's a reason there was this hostility and it wasn't coming from him, it was coming from you. So I did some psychotherapy and I'm from New England and now I'm a California crazy. So I went into the psychotherapy. And I won't bore you with the details, but I realized how I had actually set up the relationship with my father to never let him get close to me. I would not let him close to me.

I remember the day I decided I would never love anybody and never let anybody get close to me. And it was a childish thing that had happened when I was 5 years old. I was at a family party with friends. My father was distributing soda and he wouldn't give me any. And I was crushed by well, he was drunk.

So now the the other thing I want to touch on, I think I have about 5 more minutes. Some of the other miracles, I mean to figure this out, my father had been dead 30 years and because of this fellowship I was able to heal my relationship and my resentments towards him. I mean that all I don't have any negative feelings towards him now at all. And that was a tremendously freeing experience. The last great crisis in my life occurred 4 years ago when a career that I had ended because I was mistreated by my employer to the extent that according to the doctor I had been thrown into a depression because I was so shocked at what they did it created a chemical imbalance in my brain.

So I was in a depression. Now I have carried this resentment around for several years towards the woman who perpetrated this insult on me. I have never mind the fact that what she did cost them 100 of 1,000 of dollars that went straight into my pocket. How dare they do this to me? Right after it happened, I was at a meeting and I wasn't in a good space.

And so my sponsor dearest came up to me at the end of the meeting and said what's wrong? And I told him, shit, it's only a job. I want to hit him because it was my life. I now call that what it was with my ego, that's what it was with my ego. Who did I think I was that I was so indispensable in this position?

I think probably the best line I've heard today was something Chris said. And I don't even recall the details, but I think now I understand Kathy has been trying to get me to go to an Al Anon meeting whether maybe that's what I need to do to be able to figure out how to really not be in control. I since have a new job. I enjoy it thoroughly. I don't make any way near what I made in the old job, but so what I don't have the responsibilities.

Everybody who knows me closely says that I become a much nicer person. I feel much more relaxed. It's one of the miracles. And I have all kinds of miracles, little miracles that happen like this morning getting a phone call at 7 o'clock in the morning from someone who knows that I am not a morning person and the words coming out of her mouth, I feel such tremendous gratitude for my sobriety. And when I hung up the phone, I think what a hell of a nice way to wake up, to really think, yes, this is what it's all about.

She threatened to shoot me if I came up with a note, so I had to write something down just to give her a bad time. My biggest gift I've received in this fellowship is my concept of God. I hear a lot of people coming into these rooms who have no belief in God when they came in and developed one. Well, I think in some ways that's easier than having the belief I came in with that yes, God loved me, but if I step out of line he's going to kick the shit out of me and send me to hell. And what this program has taught me is that God is unconditional love.

What you have taught me in this room, I believe that every single human being has a personal intimate relationship with God, the higher power that this program teaches us. And what goes on between you and your higher power is strictly between the 2 of you and just as valid as what goes on between me and my higher power. That freedom to understand that I'm not responsible for you. I just have to accept you have every right to be where you are. You have every right to have the relationship you choose to have with your higher power even if you're an atheist and choose not to have it.

That's your right and that's the plan for you. And that does give me freedom from having to pass judgment. Not that I don't pass judgment, But I know that I don't have to and I don't need to and I'm a lot happier when I don't. And I think my time is up. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Brian, for