Accessing mainstream services
2008
“From our experiences and from our members’ experiences, people who are
referred to mainstream services feel a little out of place, and the
reason is normally that AA is a group of men with alcohol problems and
AlAnon is a group of women whose husbands have the problem. Being a gay
man and going to AlAnon for example you end up being amongst the wrong
sex. Apart from having to express having an alcohol problem they find
it difficult to express they are also gay.”
“There is a slight
problem, as there is always an intake of breath when you make the fact
public (that you are gay) in a predominantly straight male group; we
wanted to provide a space where the assumption was that you were gay
and would not need therefore to cross that boundary, as well as saying
‘I’ve got a substance abuse problem’.”
“One of the reasons many
addicts give for their addiction is ‘You would too if you had my
troubles’. It’s very easy to see that someone who is worried about
being gay might say to any mainstream service provider - ‘You would
take drugs too if you had the misfortune to have discovered you were
gay when you did not want to be’. It would be very difficult for any
NHS substance abuse service to find a way of convincing an unhappy gay
person to be happy about it, as well as leave the gin alone.”
Contributed by: LGBT Alcohol Support Group, 4