October 7, 2005 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE
eveningsout
One book is on drugs, the other is about them
by Anthony Glassman
Lurid headlines fill newspapers far and wide about the scourge of crystal meth in the gay community, about it making men engage in unsafe sexual behavior, destroying lives.
Actual hard
data on the prevalence of crystal meth and other drugs in the LGBT community in Ohio is fairly hard to come by, however. Earl Pike of the
AIDS
Taskforce of Greater Cleveland believes that drugs as a whole are a threat to HIV prevention, but that crystal methamphetamine cannot be viewed as "the" villain. He and other leaders of community organizations are investigating what programs and ser-
vices should be of-
cussion groups, where people in their late teens talk about how they were making $250,000 a year until they turned to crystal, then in the space of two months they were living in a gutter with only two teeth left in their head.
TWEAKERS
fered for drug users and drug abus-
ers.
Meanwhile, both Pater Noster House and Stonewall Columbus have started groups in central Ohio for those who wish to kick
crystal meth or stay off the stuff.
Two views of drug use/abuse
In other words, the anecdotes read as complete and utter bullshit, as Penn and Teller would say. And many of the more believable reallife stories seem to have absolutely no gay context whatso-
ever.
On the other hand, Chris Beckman's Clean: A New Generation in Recovery Speaks Out (Hazelden, $12.95, paperback), is fairly engaging.
CLEAN
A New Generation in Recovery Speaks Out
Beckman was an openly gay cast member on the MTV reality show The Real World's Chicago installment. A dubious claim to fame, perhaps, but one which he has put to good use. Beckman doesn't proselytize, he simply tells the story of his descent into a hazy half-life where he abused drugs and
in print make interesting backCHRIS BECKMAN people, trading
ground to the problem.
Cast Member of MTV's Real Worx Chicago
Frank Sanello's Tweakers: How Crystal Meth is Ravaging Gay America (Alyson, $15.95, paperback), is a pseudoscientific look at the phenomenon of crystal use in contemporary gay society. It's an interestingly mixed bag.
While some of the information Sanello presents could be useful and engaging, much of the book is incredibly repetitious, using the same quotes at the beginning of chapters and then later in other chapters.
Even worse, the book faces the same problem that community groups in Ohio have: There is little information on the actual prevalence of the drug, belying the subtitle of the book. Sanello can't say that the drug is really ravaging gay America. He can barely tell the reader how much crystal is going around gay New York and Los Angeles, much less out here in flyover country.
Those are not the worst problems with the book.
Almost completely unforgivable is his use of anecdotes from websites and e-mail dis-
bits of his soul for his next high. He also tells
of his struggles with recovery, which seemed to thankfully be less severe than many people experience.
Interspersed with his story are installments of other people's tales. It is in these other lives that the problem with the book lies.
The manner in which they are plastered, willy-nilly, into the narrative make reading them coherently almost impossible. One could read the entire book and then go back and follow the threads of these other people's lives, perhaps, but it's like a choose-yourown adventure, telling you to skip to page 12, then page 35, then on to 76. Reading the book in a linear fashion, the bits and pieces of these people's tales are almost incomprehensible— a bit here, a bit there, and by the end, the reader may have forgotten the beginning.
However, for someone who is struggling with addiction, or as a cautionary tale for a young adult, Beckman's book is more than sufficient.
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