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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE March, 1991

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Gay Steppers

by Mark Chadbourne

There are many of us today in the gay and lesbian community who are coming out to ourselves and to each other in a different way. We are Gay Steppers, people recovering from addictions and codependency.

We have coped with the society we grew up in and our original families in ways that are common and even encouraged by our society. We have sought relief from the stresses in our individual lives through addictions to people, places and things. We have found ourselves deeply affected by our fears and the fears of others. We discovered and relied upon a variety of coping skills that were not in our own best interests.

Today, however, we have made some big decisions decisions that puts us into a position of recovery. Decisions that have removed us from victimization by ourselves and by others. We are victims no longer.

We find ourselves less interested in our past ways of coping and more attracted to others who meet regularly to talk about what's in that closet we stepped our of. We all have our own closets. We all have had our own unique processes. Today, we find ourselves moving even further out of our respected closets by stepping further into our own process of recovery.

We are learning to trust ourselves, our feelings, our perceptions and our processes. We are learning we are more that any one of them-just as we are more than our sexualities. We are learning that our particular experiences have the potential for deeper meaning in our lives. The human spirit soars, and there is a special resilience that we who are gay have inherited. We see ourselves as spiritual beings having a gay experience and that our particular past experiences have centered

around alcohol, drugs, sex, abusive relationships, overeating, overspending, gambling, overworking, even our exercising has been a means to control how others perceive us. You name it-if it's out there, we've done it. And we got good, real good at what we practised. It helped us to survive life-after all, we are survivors, rather than statistics... or so we think.

Still, all the highs wore off and we found ourselves in yet another emotional mess. Some of us have preferred to lie in our stuff a while before it occurred to us there must be a different way, or something we missed somewhere. Some of us sought others to do the cleaning up for us. Others of us preferred to get up and spread a little of our manure on someone else's bed of roses. Some favor!

Yet, somehow, something inside us was longing to be recognized just like the feeling we had before when we were awakening to our sexualities. That something which longed to be recognized, we discovered to be our selves. Our higher selves.

What we once found acceptable in our lives in our relationships to families, friends, lovers, work and substances, now seem like an empty shell of who we are today.

We are discovering we do have all of what it takes within us to live life fully. We are learning to trust ourselves. For so long, we carried the secrets of our families and society and acted them out. We have suffered the consequences of living in a homophobic society with life skills that have not been in our own best interest. We have had consequences that we had not fully anticipated.

Our sharing in meetings with one another helps us to identify more fully with one another. We have found the support we need to free ourselves from the emotional ties to our pasts and the biases we encounter in our daily lives today.

We have found a place within ourselves, within each other, where there is all the room to be who we are, where there is the courage, strength and wisdom to be that who we are intended to be-precious, gay and free.

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