The Sacramento gay/lesbian "River City Roundup"

Tell me if you can hear me. Yes. I can hear you. Okay. Is this better?

I'm flying. Put your mind maybe old days. I don't have to say anything. I can just do show and tell. My name is Roslyn.

I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Roslyn. Hi, everyone. I'm gonna do something I've never done before. Please indulge me since I'm on tape.

For once I wanna hear a good prayer on a tape. I want to really thank this committee for inviting me here and giving me this opportunity. You've been absolutely wonderful. The conference, I've attended a number of workshops today, have been just sensational. The sharing and the kindness and the come up the fellowship has been just so special, and I I really cannot thank you enough.

And, Ellen, it's a pleasure. It's just a pleasure. That's, I think, one of the greatest gifts to me in Alcoholics Anonymous is the honor of, you know, meeting someone when they're new and watching them grow and change and maybe having just, you know, a tiny bit, having the privilege of maybe sponsoring that person or one with that person at some point. It's it's really the greatest gift I received in AA. Let me talk about what it was like, what happened, and what it's like now.

And please know that, there was a time when I did a lot of speaking and, all over the country and certainly a lot in New York. And for a variety of reasons, I decided to stop doing that. I thought I was the president of AA and and everybody else thought so too. I used to say when I spoke, please know that whatever I share is my opinion only. I do not speak for Alcoholics Anonymous, and I am not the president of AA.

But I haven't spoken for seven and a half years, and this is the first time I've spoken in a long time. So it feels, I don't know what God has in store for us. Let's see. The last few weeks when I was thinking about this, I was thinking that because I've been sober a while, sometimes, who I was was so far away. You know, it feels like another person, and it is another person.

And what some things have come up in the last few weeks that I just wanna talk a little bit about because they've just brought they've been for whatever reason, I've either seen it on television or heard a story and it helped me remember some of what it was like. For example, last week, a week ago exactly, I got a call from a friend and she was very upset. And she and her husband had been to, a bat mitzvah, which I'll explain later, and, on Saturday. And they were with another couple and some and their children. And when they saw the couple went home, their teenage son had committed suicide successfully.

And she's got 2 children, one of whom is a teenager, and she doesn't know much about my past. And I found myself sharing my experience, strength, and hope, as someone who had tried to commit suicide as a young teenager and who had tried several times. And it was very, it was it was painful and it was also wonderful to remember that there was a time when I had wanted to end my life even before I picked up the first drink. And how appreciative I was that I was not successful and how much I could really empathize with the pain that the family was going through and also the pain that the young man had been going through. And so that helped me remember a little bit.

And then, later on, quite a week or 2 ago, I was watching television and, there was a program about self mutilation and young people who mutilate themselves. And I've never talked about that and I'm not gonna really talk about it now. Help me remember again, the years way before I picked up the first drink that I tried to hurt myself physically, destroy myself internally and externally with every, with broken glass and things anything I could find to hurt myself. And then, I arrived on Thursday night and Friday morning. I think that was yesterday.

Yes. Yes. Friday morning. I got locked in the elevator. I got, you know, I couldn't get out.

And so I was a little freaked out and, when I thought when they finally got me out of the elevator, I went back to my room because I was pretty upset. I had I had not been able I felt like I couldn't breathe and I had gotten really scared. And, you know, I told myself to breathe and all the right things, but I also was very scared. So I went back to my room and I switched on the television so that I didn't have to think for a few minutes. And, there was a program on teenage prostitutes and then help me remember again because that's who I was.

I was a teenage prostitute and I was a runaway And that was after I picked up the first drink. I grew up in a home where there was no alcoholism. There was no there's no compulsive eating in my family. There's no compulsive gambling. There's no compulsive drinking or drug taking.

Here I am. So that was hard. It was I think that's very important for some of us to hear because when I got here, I thought I couldn't possibly be an alcoholic. I came from an orthodox Jewish family. Jews don't drink.

I was not Irish Catholic. I was not an ACOA. You know, who was I and certainly I couldn't be this couldn't be legitimate. And yet, I also was in a home where there's tremendous violence. My father was a very religious orthodox Jew, but he was also, capable of great violence, on towards everyone but me.

Alright. He died when I was young. He had a fatal progressive disease called called a ALS. And I've come to believe from my own opinion that any fatal disease affects the family family in the same way. And so there was lots of fear and lots of, never knowing how it was going to be from day to day.

And he died when I was almost 6. My brother was 3 and what we did in our house, which was a pattern I was to follow for the rest of my life, was we moved countries. And we moved back to England, which is where my mother was from. And we moved to England. And in England, I was the only Jewish kid in a school run by the Church of England, and they let me know every single day that I was different.

And they called me names and they called me a kite. And, instead of, feeling strong and feeling good about who I was, it was about that time that I started to just wish I was anybody in the world but me. I just desperately wanted to not be me or any any part of me. And I think that's when I started to really hurt myself physically in every other way that I could. I believe that my life was unmanageable before I picked up the first drink.

To me, alcohol was what saved my life. In many ways, when I look back, I think that was true for a while. I don't know. I definitely would not be here if it weren't well, I don't know I wanna say this, but, I think that I would have been a successful teen suicide. And so what happened to me is I was one of these kids that was too perfect on the outside.

I was very good. They used to the wild is so good. You don't even know she's there. And when I was 13, a few things happened. I was bat mitzvah, which in the Jewish faith is when you reach, you become a member of the community as an adult.

And I remember, I started smoking at that time cigarettes and I started taking amphetamines. They were just called diet pills, of course, and my mother had taken me to the family doctor, doctor Kaufmann, and he had given me diet pills. He was supposed to take 1 a day. And this is my story. 1 is good, 12 is better.

Now I had that attitude right from the get go. Right from the get go, I was off to the races. And I loved the effect. I loved what it did to me. I stayed up for days on end.

I could do the same thing over and over what seemed like 5 minutes and, you know, days had passed. And next thing I know, I started drinking. I started drinking, when I was about 14 or 15 years old. And I was in the Catskill mountains and I had been sent away. I was a problem.

Now I had become a problem. This kid who was too good to be true, once I started using drugs, my I had a total personality change and I became a runaway. I started running away from school constantly. For all intents and purposes, I really never went back to school after I was 14. Did get a high school degree, but it was it was just because of, the kindness of some people.

I was so unhappy. I hated being different. I hated feeling like I didn't belong. I sounded different. I had a very thick accent, and I just didn't know how to that it was okay to be me and to walk to the to the beat of my own drum.

I so desperately wanted to be like everybody else and I didn't feel like anybody else. And so I I started to run away and I started to get into lots and lots of trouble. And so when I found alcohol, it was like a dream come true because what it did to me was it took me away and I didn't go anywhere. I felt like I had found a way to run away and stay still at the same time. And right from the beginning, I I drank alcoholically.

My first drunk was the same as all the junks I had for the next 13 or 14 years. The first drunk I had was right out of a bottle. I have never drank out of, out of stemware And there was a bottle of rye and it was being passed around the room and it was kind of like a a joke. People wanted to see what was gonna happen when Roz got drunk. And I was young but I was very, very, very serious.

Very serious. And I I was one of these kids that was very old way before my time. I really did not have a childhood and that's, you know, another story. And so the bottle came to me and it was rye. I downed the bottle.

And we're not so happy then because I didn't pass it on. I was not a sharer. I got very drunk. I took off my clothes. I blacked out.

I passed out. I threw up. I woke up the next day and I thought I had a great time. The only thing I didn't like was, that I threw up. I really hated that.

I couldn't just never be a bulimic. And, so I thought that the problem was the rye and I never drank rye again. And I spent the next 13 or 14 years trying to, you know, really and truly trying to capture the best of of the moment and always, always, always the blackout drinker, always passing out, always waking up with who knows what, anywhere. Right from the beginning, I was willing to go to any lengths to get drunk. Right from the beginning, it became there's an I heard this expression that the man takes the drink, the drink takes the drink, and the drink takes the man.

And right from the beginning the boost took over my life. It very clearly became a power it was very clearly a power greater than myself and I was more than willing to turn my will and my life over to the care of this power. And I absolutely believed that it could restore me to sanity. I felt that I was insane and that booze was making me sane. And so what happened for the next whatever years is the people changed and the places changed and the outsides changed, but I didn't change.

Drinking just got worse. I started turning tricks when I was about 17. And this is not what a nice Jewish girl was supposed to do. And right from the beginning, I wasn't really very good at it because I was looking for a meaningful relationship. And, I mean, I won't tell you the details of my I can remember my my very first trick and, you know, he told he told the person who sent me never to send me back because I I wanted to have a discussion.

This was in 19 maybe 63. I got $40. I'll never forget it. I had to give 60% back over and I had 40%. And, I remember eating.

The first thing I did was go have a meal because I hadn't eaten. I didn't eat in those days. The only thing that mattered was drinking. And I wasn't really very good at it for very long. And so I did something else.

And, you know, I've had lots of I have a lot of drama in my story, but it was really more of the same. I moved to different places. For a long time I lived in an area of New York called Jackson Heights, Queens. And the reason I moved there is I thought that, real Americans lived in Jackson Heights. They were from Nebraska and Iowa and Kansas, and a lot of them had grown up in farms.

And I really believed I so much wanted to be like a real American. And I thought if I could only live in Jackson Heights and learn how to watch football and eat peanuts and drink beer, I could be like them, and I really wanted to be like them. But what happened is, I just got drunk and I got loud and I got nasty and I got beaten up. I got pregnant, and, it didn't really matter. And I moved into the city and I lived in a hotel called the Hooker Hangout.

It's called the Shelton Towers. It was on 49th Street, Lexington Avenue. And I used to walk up and down Lexington Avenue. That was my beat. By the time I was 20 or 21, I was absolutely ready for Alcoholics Anonymous, and I went to my first meeting.

Not by choice, by the way. I was living in Brooklyn Heights. I changed where I lived all the time, and I moved to an area of New York called Brooklyn Heights. And at that time, I, I don't know if this is before or after. So I think this is before.

Anyway, I because I hated being Jewish, I used to wear crucifix. I changed my name. I changed my hair. You know, I changed everything. I wanted to be Italian at this point.

My name was Tony and so it's true. And, so I went to Brooklyn Heights and because being a good Christian that I was, I decided to go to, midnight mass. I always went to church and it was mid it was Christmas Eve and I thought it was, you know, and people were very very friendly and they were all in this room just like this and they were drinking what I was sure was alcohol laced punch because they were drinking punch and who would drink punch without alcohol in it? Not I. And I was already pretty drunk, but I was not in a blackout, which is very rare.

And, you know, I hung out and I thought that this was choir practice. I loved to sing when I was drinking. Terrible voice didn't matter. And so I thought we were all gonna sing in the choir that night and I was pretty excited. And, next thing I know everybody moved.

They took their chairs and they moved into the next room. And somebody got at the podium that just looked just like this and said, Hello. My name is Mary. I'm an alcoholic. And read the preamble.

Well, I got up and I told them what I thought. I, felt very sorry for them. I expressed my sympathy. I was sure that their life was over, that I was sorry that they were going to end their life this way because I was having so much fun. And I went to the bar and we all had a good laugh over this experience.

And we every time we talked about it, I'd say, come on. Here's another drink. I lived in Brooklyn Heights for a couple of years and at some point, I got I became a mistress of someone I was working for just like my mom. And my drinking got worse. I got pregnant a lot.

I had a lot of miscarriages, sometimes on the floor of department stores, sometimes on the floors of offices. My name was no big thing. No big thing begun. No matter what happened to me, I just say no big thing. First of all, get up from the gutter.

Sometimes I'd wake up. I'd be at knife point in park in the prospect park. No big thing. And I just didn't really care. I had no interest in anybody else and and really very little interest in myself.

And I've always had a hard time talking about how I felt in these years because I really believe that I was a minus 0. And I frequently introduce myself that way, particularly at the end. See, my name is Ralph and I'm a minus 0, minus 10. I knew that whatever I was, I was definitely less than, and I can't even describe the amount of self hatred that I had. I lived I I might as well just tell this one thing because it's kind of the beginning of the end.

I was 25, and I was working for this guy. And, I decided that my problem was him and my problem was the United States. I always felt that my problems were outside of myself, f always, and they were big. There was never anything small with me, you know, it was big. So I knew the problem with America.

And I knew that my solution was to move to Italy. And in Italy, I had this fantasy I was living a heterosexual lifestyle except that I did wake up with women at a blackout, but I never wanted to know what happened. So and when I was tripping, occasionally, I did a show with a woman, but it was purely for a man. So, you know, I had to get pretty drunk to do all that stuff. And, anyway, I I came into my bar that night, and I was a bar drinker.

I love the bars. Love the bars. And, I came into the bar that night and I announced to the bar that I was gonna stop drinking and I was moving to Italy. And we had a drink on that. And what I drank that night was beer because to me, I really was sincere about stopping drinking and beer was the way to do it because I didn't know that beer was alcohol.

There's a sign in the detoxes now in New York and it says, if you drink a lot of beer, you drink a lot. But they didn't have that sign in the bars. And so with every with every beer, we toasted my stopping drinking. And nobody said, hey, Roz, you're drinking 13 or 14 or 15 beers. And, I can certainly didn't think I was drinking.

And I went home to my then apartment. And the next thing I know, there were flames ceiling to floor, and I was living in, one of these gorgeous old, mansions, you know, that had been redone. And the ceilings were, like, 24, 26, whatever feet. And, the next thing I know, I was in the bar and somebody was holding my head and somebody was pouring a bottle of gin down my throat. I was screaming that I had killed somebody because I knew there were elderly people on the top of the building.

And the other thing I knew was that this is what happens when you stop drinking because I really believed that this fire happened because I had stopped eating that night. And nobody dissuaded me from that notion. I'm grateful today for that fire because that fire took every single thing that was in my life, every physical material thing. I had nothing except what I was wearing that night. And I want you to know that I would rather have lost my life than have lost those things.

My life meant nothing to me. But what that fire did for me was it propelled me into my next 4 years of help. And I needed to lose everything before I was able to get here. It's just my story. I wasn't I couldn't have gotten here one day sooner.

And so the next 4 years you can you know, I couldn't pay rent for very long. Rent was so unimportant. Electricity, who dared to have electricity? There was only one thing that ever mattered to me in this life and that was how was I gonna get it, what do I have to do, where do I have to go, and how much was it gonna cost? And I was a bottle baby.

I lost my teeth when I was at it when I was very young because of that. I remember the dentist begging me not to drink. Begging me. He grew he and his wife grew marijuana to give to me, to beg me to smoke marijuana and not drink so that I could save my teeth. And I remembered smoking a marijuana on my way to the bar.

Because I could I I did lots of other stuff but it didn't really matter. My I love to drink and I couldn't keep away from the bars. And so I just, you know, started to get lower and lower and, you know, an apartment lasted 3 months. And the next thing I knew, I was in a room on 30th between Park and Madison with someone I'd never met. Another story.

Junkie. I live with this junkie. She kept she got she was allowed to stay and I got thrown out because I couldn't make the rent. And ultimately in 1974 1974, I hit the streets. And I was no.

I basically, what I did was I went between 23rd Street and 14th Street between Third Avenue. This I don't if you don't know Manhattan, it's just, you know, an area. And I went from door to door at night, and if a man answered, I would ask him if he would put me up. And what happened for me, and this is my kind of my bottom, was that in the end nobody wanted me around because I was obnoxious. I was loud.

I was nasty. I mean, I wasn't I couldn't perform. I can remember the last time I I tried to make money off my body. I came to and the mattress had been stripped and it was like ice somebody had thrown thrown ice on me and they had left $2 And, that was the best I could do and couldn't do much with $2 in 1974, 75. And so what happened for me is I started to come to AA.

AA. I didn't want to. This was not my cup of tea. I didn't feel the love in the room. But, I absolutely felt that I had nowhere else to go.

And so I just started to come to meetings. I had been, you know, in hospitals and I had had seizures. But I want you to know none of that stopped me escorted out. But, invariably, I was always told that I could come back if I would behave myself, which was very hard for me to do because I would usually sit in the back of the room and scream at the speaker while they were speaking. What I would also do is I would take all the literature that was at the meetings, and I would pass it out at all the bars that I went to.

And sometimes, if a guy was in a bar, he'd say, hey, baby. You know, come with me. And I'd say, okay. Can we make a stop first and then take him to a meeting with me? And so what I don't know.

Maybe maybe somebody got sober. I have no idea. So I started to put some time together, and I'd have 2 weeks and I'd have 3 weeks and, you know, whatever. I remember, in October of 75, I had maybe 3 weeks. And, this guy, my friend's brother who lived in Switzerland, had come in and, you know, he called me and knew you know, he only wanted one thing.

And, you know, I just couldn't do sex without drinking. So I said, okay. But just bring a bottle of scotch. So there went that time. I didn't slip.

I just didn't stop drinking. And I finally got a one room apartment at 117 East 37th Street, and it was right across the street from a group called the Mustard Seed. And I love the Mustard Seed because it wasn't a church, and they had lots of meetings every day. And in the beginning, I would go in the door, I would wait 3 minutes, and I'd go out the door because I was testing it. Because I they used to say the door swings both ways, and I wanted to see if that was really true.

I used to call into group, you know, see what they sounded like, hang up. And my last, what I hope is my last drunk, drug, the whole 9 yards, was Christmas Eve, interestingly enough, of 1975, and I haven't had a drug or drink since. So lots of things have changed in that time as you can well imagine. In the beginning, you know, I'm just going to share a little bit about my recovery, and it doesn't mean that it's the way for everyone else. It's just my experience.

And I always feel like I have to preface it because I didn't get sober by the big book. I got sober by my sponsor's book. And she she was very different, but I definitely got what I needed. I didn't get a sponsor for a long time because it meant having to ask somebody for something, and that was my biggest difficulty. I absolutely could not ask for help.

It was so hard to me. As a matter of fact, even when I started to go to meetings on a daily basis, I would buy very expensive cookies or steal them. But, no, actually, I was buying them because I was working. And I would bring them to the meeting because I never ever wanted anyone to say that got something for nothing. I wanted to show you that you weren't doing me any favors.

I was buying bookies. So I started to come to meetings, and I was pretty I was pretty sick. And someone suggested that I do AA, and I get sober the way I drank. And I drank every day, and I drank all the time. And I got to the bars early, and I stayed late.

So I did the same thing in AA. There was a woman at the meeting, and this is a mustard seed. And at every meeting, she would say just like this, my name is Sue, and I'm a happy grateful alcoholic. And I thought how sick can you get? And I was very mesmerized by her because I've always been very drawn to illness.

And the thing is, is that she looked like she was happy, and I knew that she was really bullshit, but she looked like she might be happy. And she was married to this guy, and, Eddie, who was a unity minister, who's also served a long time. And so what I started to do is I started to call Eddie every day, and I would say, hi. How is Sue? And he'd say, great.

Would you like to speak with her? And I'd say no, and I'd hang up the phone. And that was my beginning. And I always share this because, you know, I did not have clean motives for a long time about anything I did. The reason I asked Sue to be my sponsor is another newcomer came in, Kelly.

And I thought and and I saw Sue starting to sit next to Kelly at the beginners meeting, and I thought, oh my god. She's gonna get her first. I didn't know you could sponsor more than one person, so I immediately asked her to be my sponsor, so she couldn't be Kelly's. So much for good motives. She became my sponsor.

What a gift. I heard somebody share this earlier. There were no suggestions. The first thing she told me that was that I couldn't get involved 1st year. Little did she know that I already had, and I had gotten gonorrhea.

And I had it was mother's story, you know, 7 days, but in a way, the gonorrhea kept me away from men for the rest of the year. And she bought me a t shirt, and it said, my sponsor says no. And the thing is, for me, I was sober many, many years before I could say no on my own behalf. And so she gave me permission to say my sponsor said, and that's what I did for a long time. I didn't, I went this is where it gets a little embarrassing.

I went to 25 to 30 meetings for the 1st 6 years. I can tell you every day where I went. I'll give you a Sunday. Sunday would wake up, I'd be so excited because I had like 5 or 6 meetings to do that day. And I would go to the 11:45 at the mustard seed, and they would read from the big book, The First Step.

And that's how I got to identify as an alcoholic because they would say all these things that people did to try to control their drinking, and I knew that they had written it after they had met me. And because it was my story. And from there, I would go to came to believe on 90th Street between 1st and second, and I go to a 1 o'clock and I go to a 2:30. And then the worst part for me was to have free time. So I don't know what I did for the next couple of hours, but I didn't go home.

And then I went to to, what was that meeting? Central Upper East Side Central, I went to. 6:15, 7:30, and 8:30. And then invariably and then we'd all go out for coffee. Coffee was just as important as the meeting because that's how you learned how to talk to people.

And then I would go to the midnight meeting. The midnight meeting was at midnight, and I'd do 1 o'clock in the morning, and then we'd go out for breakfast, I don't when I sponsor people today, I don't suggest that that's the way they get sober. It's the way I got sober. I had I couldn't be still. I couldn't make a decision.

I remember after I was sober a couple of months, I had to decide on, I was getting a I had this one room apartment, and I had to get a dish drain. You know, the, dish drain that you put, you know, next to your no dishwashers then. And, I went to Woolworths. I had a choice of avocado green, mustard yellow, white, or brown. I cannot tell you I must have spent 2 to 3 hours walking back and forth.

I asked everybody in the store what they thought. And I want you to know that I walked out without a dish drain. I couldn't make a decision. I couldn't read. It took it was months actually before I even shared in a meeting, and the first time I ever shared, it was because I, I didn't know what to do.

You know, I was having money and I wasn't spending it on booze, so I started buying plants. And the first time I ever shared in a meeting, I shared that I had 174 plants and I thought they were coming to get me. You know what they said, right? Keep coming back. So, it was a very slow, slow, slow recovery for me.

My spiritual awakening is of the educational variety. It's been very slow. At the end of the year, my 1st year, my sponsor said to me, here's where we go to work. You go from the beginners meeting on Tuesday night, so it's beginners meeting at Mustard Seed, and we go into the other room. It's the step meeting, And that's where the work started for me.

And from that time to this, well, I can't speak for Denver, so I won't even talk about Denver. But from that time on, I started to make step meetings became my first love. Because I felt for me that the healing occurred in discussion meetings, but for me, the change occurred in the step meetings. And that's the only way to this day that I know how to change, is through the 12 steps. There's just no other way for me.

And my my sponsor would say, read the book before you go to the meeting, and then read the book when you come home, and you would you will see that they have rewritten it. It was absolutely true. And I started to get active. I wanna talk for a moment about that because I had this really pain in the ass sponsor, and from the very moment that she became my sponsor, she would physically throw me into the lap of a newcomer. And she would say to me, Talk to them.

They're new. And you know, I'd be like in their lap. I didn't know that service was a choice, but I didn't know that I needed to get as active in my sobriety and in my recovery as I had been in my drinking. And I got very, very, very active. And service became my life.

I started answering phones at Intergroup, and I became a sponsor. And when I was a year silver, I started sponsoring someone who was 16, and she wanted to go to Young People's and not be around these old people. And so I took her to Young People's. I stayed. She left.

And for the next 4 years, I was very active in Young People's AA. Went to Young People's Conferences all over North America, chaired a Young People's Conference in New York and just had started to learn how to play and have fun and be alive in sobriety and always, always, always very involved. You just look at myself. Okay. Just a few seconds on well, we'll see.

Between my 5th 6th year was a very tough time for me. I can't really I was going to 25 to 30 meetings. If somebody had a feeling, I would say, make a gratitude list. What step are you on? You know, I my answer to everything was, what are you doing?

I just didn't know it was okay to just have a feeling. And I tried at all costs to avoid avoid them. I was sponsoring everyone. I was doing a women's prison meeting on Saturday mornings. I had a a nonmedical detox on Sunday nights on West 60th Street.

I I was the secretary of the Bill Wilson dinner. I was involved in everything, and somebody said to me from Intergroup, Ethel, who used to work at Intergroup, she said to me, AA is a bridge back to life, dear. And I thought, how dare you? How dare you? That you know, I honestly did not know what she was talking about.

And she suggested that I keep my hand down for 1 year and not volunteer. That was a very difficult time for me. And that was between my 5th 6th year of reco sobriety. I didn't I still sponsor people and I still do nonmedical detox, but I didn't volunteer every time I needed someone to do something. And that was a tough time, and I knew what was going on was I was beginning to I I think for me, the 12 steps are about coming out.

I've always felt this, but that's really what they do for me, that the person who is Raz just emerges through the 12 Steps, because I heard that, you know, they asked Michelangelo how he created the statue of David. And he said that he took a piece of marble and a chisel, and he chiseled away at everything that was not David. And that's how I see the 12 steps. They chiseled away, and they're still chiseling at everything that is not. And so, in my 6th anniversary, I was chairing a meeting on Wednesday nights at an Upper East Side meeting called Templeton.

And I, chairing this meeting for the last 6 months. I won't be seeing any of you again. Goodbye. I took a cab over to the firehouse, which was a lesbian meeting. I got there, and I said, here I am.

At this point, I had not slept with a woman. It only took like 2 or 3 days, though. And what can I say? I began to know a new freedom and a new happiness. It was the most glorious time.

They called me the miracle dyke. What I wanted to do was make up for all the years that I had not been a lesbian. I had not been out as a lesbian. So I went to this woman's bookstore in the Upper West Side, and I told them I said, I would go to buy a quart of milk, and I said, I'm a lesbian. I'm a lesbian.

So everybody everybody knew. And I went to this bookstore, and I said, I'm a lesbian, and I want to read everything. And I threw out every book that was written by a man in my house. I threw out every piece of music. I got hiking boots.

I stopped shaving, and I became a radical feminist separatist lesbian. It was great. It was a wonderful time for me. There was a lot of healing that took place. I went to every concert, every lecture, every workshop, everything possible that I could go to, and I only went to lesbian meetings.

Do I recommend that? I don't know. It's it's what it's my experience. At the end of that year, I thought something was missing in my life, and I got involved in the New York round up and began very slowly to incorporate men in my life, and what a joy. I hope that in my future that I never again limit myself to one small group of people, because life is so rich.

And I'm I needed that year, but I also very, very it was it was wonderful to begin to have both sexes in my life again, and I got very active in the round up. I just also have to say, because I know Annie's gonna listen to this, that after I was out for a year, I met, my lover, Annie. I wanna get emotional. We had 15 years this past Monday. This past Wednesday was our anniversary.

It's been incredible. Annie is sober as well. She was sober much less time than me, and so we it was difficult in the beginning. I had to remember that she was my lover and not my. And, she had to get her own sponsor and go to her own meetings.

I had to get my own sponsor and go to my own meetings. And we've had some wonderful times and some tough times, and we have another we have a commitment for 40 years, so we have another 25, and then we're gonna talk about it one day at a time. Right now is a very good time and I'm very happy and things are pretty good for us right now. I wanna share how wonderful it can be. We moved to Denver 8 and a half years ago.

Don't ask me why. No. Okay. I'll take it back. I'll take it back.

We moved to Denver 8.5 years ago, and I wanted to see if there's light outside of New York City. My brother lives there. I'm not he's got 2 children who I adore. We're their legal guardians, and I thought that I would want to be in their life as they were growing up. So we chose to move to new to Denver.

And, you know, our lives changed again, and meetings were different and things were different, and we had a lot of the 1st couple of years were pretty tough. They didn't know that I was the president of AA when I got there, and that was hard for me. And I had to eat a lot of humble pie. In retrospect, it was a great experience. Because what's happened as a result of being in Denver is for the first time, I began to be, a worker among workers, a member among members, a per you know, just a garden variety drunk like my sponsor always said to me.

My sponsor would say to me every day, every single day, Rosalind, you're a very beautiful flower, but you're a garden variety.