Spotlight On Sobriety 11/16/2025
- GaL-AA Newsletter Committee
- Nov 10, 2025
- 11 min read
In this week's publication:
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The Gift of Desperation
Men with the Men
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Spotlight On Sobriety 11/16/2025
The Gift of Desperation
He was twenty years old in 1984 when the fog first swallowed him whole.
San Francisco had seemed like a promise when he and Mark arrived—two kids from a small Nebraska town who’d fallen in love between cornfields and county fairs, now sharing a studio in the Tenderloin and believing the world would open on command. It did open, just not in the way they’d planned. The job at the copy shop vanished with a shrug from a manager who said business was “seasonal,” the car quit on the Bay Bridge in a hiss of steam, and Mark—tired of the way the bottle kept shouldering into their life—left a note and a month’s rent, then left for good.
Alcohol was already part of his grammar: a pause after work, a semicolon after a fight, an exclamation point on the weekends. But after Mark left, the punctuation turned into run-on sentences—blackouts that bled into mornings on someone else’s floor, mornings that bled into afternoons on the barstool. He’d tell himself he was too young to be an alcoholic. “I’ll get a grip tomorrow.” Tomorrow kept leaving him unread.
When he lost the apartment, tomorrow lost its forwarding address. He drifted toward a church on O’Farrell that kept its doors open late and its kitchen open later. Volunteers ladled soup that tasted like mercy. One of them, a woman with graying braids and a voice like warm bread, said, “There’s a meeting downstairs if you want to sit where it’s warm.”
He went for the heat and stayed for the words. People spoke about waking up in shame and somehow waking up again. They said “cunning, baffling, powerful” as if naming a storm could calm it (More About Alcoholism). They read a passage beginning, “Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path” (How It Works), and he felt something in him loosen, like a fist unclenching. He didn’t believe in much, but he believed in the way their laughter sounded unhurt by it all. He kept coming back.
By spring of 1985 he had six months sober, a job sweeping floors at a print shop in SOMA, and a cot in a church-run SRO with a curfew he didn’t mind. He was learning to be alone without being lonely, learning that coffee could be a ritual and not just a prop, learning to wake up with his shoes where he’d left them. He heard people talk about sponsors and steps and inventories, and he nodded, and then walked home alone. He’d do the hard parts later, he told himself. He was young. He could muscle through on self-will. In the rooms they warned that “half measures availed us nothing” (How It Works), but he filed that under slogans for other people.
When Thanksgiving rolled around, homesickness pressed into his chest like a thumbprint. He bought a bus ticket back to Nebraska. He pictured his mother’s pot roast, the quiet of the kitchen before the house woke up, the long driveway that sounded like childhood under his feet. “They’ll see I’m different now,” he told his Tuesday night men’s group. A few heads tilted in that AA way; someone suggested he line up meetings before he went. Someone else offered phone numbers. He smiled, pocketed the paper, and told himself he wouldn’t need them.
His family did what families do: they hugged him hard and said, “You look great.” They also did what they didn’t know better than to do: his uncle clapped him on the back and said, “One little drink with Thanksgiving won’t kill you. You’re not like those guys under the bridge.” He tried to explain. He even said the line they’d taught him: “I’m allergic to it; once I start, I can’t predict where I’ll stop.” But the old house made him small again, and the approval felt like oxygen. “Just one,” he said, and the glass was in his hand like it had been waiting in the cupboard for him all year.
One became another and then the room took on that tilting geometry he knew too well. He remembers yelling and his cousin’s face, all hard edges, and his mother crying in a corner of the kitchen. He remembers the red-and-blue pulse of the sheriff’s car—his aunt’s house, her rules—and the particular indignity of a December night on a metal bench at the county jail, cold climbing up from beneath like a second skin.
He stayed on the street most of that December, circling shame like a drain. He’d go a day without drinking and then drink for three, the math of despair. One night, after the wind bit through every layer he owned, he walked to a shelter in Lincoln where he’d crashed before. He didn’t expect anything except warmth and a cot.
Instead, he found an assembly line of kindness: a local AA group serving stew and cornbread, hauling trash, sweeping floors like it mattered. An older guy with a sun-creased face and hands that looked like they’d fixed things for fifty years set a tray in front of him and said, “You look like I used to look.” The words hit him square. He didn’t push them away.
They talked at a corner table while the shelter clattered around them. He didn’t mean to tell his story, but it spilled out—the boyfriend, the city, the good months, the bus ticket home, the kitchen, the glass. When he finished, the older man, Al, nodded like he’d been waiting to hear it. “I came in from the rail yards in ’69,” Al said. “Woke up in a boxcar on Christmas Eve with a mouth full of blood and no idea whose it was. Someone brought me to a meeting, gave me a cup of coffee and a chair. The next morning I woke up and the desire to drink was gone. Not cured. But gone. That can happen.”
It sounded like a bedtime story for grownups. But Al kept showing up. He drove him to a meeting that night, and again the next morning, and again the morning after. At each one, people said hello like it mattered. They pressed phone numbers into his hand and called him by name. They read aloud: “We stood at the turning point” (How It Works). He didn’t know exactly what he was turning from, only that he was tired enough of the old road to try a new one.
The day before Christmas, something shifted. He was in a noon meeting at a church basement where the coffee tasted like it had been brewed in 1976 and nobody minded. He listened to a woman describe the “gift of desperation”—how hitting bottom was a gift because only then could she stop digging. He knew now, in his bones, what she meant. The gift had arrived wrapped in bad decisions and winter wind.
After the meeting, Al said, “You ready to stop doing this by yourself?” He nodded. They walked to a diner for pie and Al explained sponsorship in plain language: “I’m not your boss; I’m your guide. I’ll show you what the Big Book showed me. You’ll call me before you take a drink, not after.” He said yes. The yes felt like surrender and relief in equal measure.
That night—Christmas Eve, 1985—he found a temporary room in a sober house with a lumpy mattress and a window that faced a brick wall. It looked like safety. He put a small calendar on the dresser and circled the date. He would later call it his second birthday.
The work wasn’t clean and it wasn’t quick. He started on Step One and meant it: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” The admission didn’t make him smaller; it made the problem exactly the right size to be helped. He began to pray in a way that looked, at first, like talking into an empty room. “I don’t know what You are,” he’d whisper, “but please keep me sober one more day.” He learned to call Al when he didn’t want to. He learned to listen when the other men talked about fear and shame and the stubborn hope that threaded through it. He made coffee. He stacked chairs. He learned that humility is not humiliation.
When he reached Step Nine, he asked Al how to make amends without reopening wounds. Al pointed him back to the book and to prayer. “We don’t do this to be forgiven,” Al said. “We do it to clean our side of the street.” He wrote letters where visits weren’t wanted, paid what he could pay, and accepted that some doors would stay closed. He heard those promises unfold—“We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it”, and discovered they weren’t giant fireworks but quiet lamps, lit one at a time.
Years moved like beads on a string. He returned to San Francisco long enough to thank the woman with braids and leave two crisp bills in the coffee can. He finished school, then—because sobriety had given him both purpose and time—he kept going. In his thirties, he enrolled in law school. He was older than most of his classmates, but he already knew how to sit still, how to read past midnight, how to ask for help. “We are not saints,” the book said. “We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection.” He built a life around progress: one class, one exam, one day at a time.
He moved to New York in his forties for a clerkship that became a career. The city’s noise pleased him; it sounded like proof that the world kept turning regardless of his moods. He met Daniel at a Saturday morning meeting on West 79th, the kind of meeting where the old-timers talk less and listen better. They swapped war stories over bagels and found, by increments, that what remained after the stories were gone was something steady and kind. They made a home with too many books and a plant they forgot to water but somehow didn’t kill.
He still goes to two or three meetings a week. He keeps a sponsor and sponsors other men, especially the ones who arrive as he once did—hungry, frightened, just sober enough to be dangerous. He takes them to a diner just like he and Al first divided a piece of apple pie and practiced the liturgy of “one day at a time.” He shows them the same worn paragraphs in the book and watches their faces when the sentences land. Sometimes they don’t land. Sometimes a man disappears for a while and then returns with winter on his breath. He knows better than to judge. He keeps a chair open.
Every December, he marks Christmas Eve with a small ritual. He wakes before dawn, makes coffee, and reads “How It Works” out loud in his kitchen, the way he heard it read when he had nothing except the desire to live. He sends Al a card—Al still lives in Lincoln, still favors black coffee—thanking him for that winter and all the winters after. He walks to a noon meeting, takes a newcomer call if it comes, and remembers the boy who wandered into a church for soup and found a roomful of people telling the truth.
On December 24, 2025, he will celebrate forty years. He doesn’t say forty much out loud; he’s superstitious about turning blessings into monuments. But he allows himself a moment to consider what the number means: forty years of mornings after that aren’t apologies, of holidays that don’t end in sirens, of relationships repaired or gracefully released, of work that calls on his best instead of his worst, of a life that fits.
If you ask him for advice, he’ll say what was said to him: Don’t do this alone. Get a sponsor you’ll actually call. Go to meetings even when your head tells you you’re cured. Read the book. When you fall—if you fall—come back fast. “We stood at the turning point,” the book says (How It Works). He knows there are a thousand small turnings in a sober life—toward honesty instead of performance, toward fellowship instead of isolation, toward amends instead of excuses, toward God-as-you-understand rather than the god as your fear. He turns and keeps turning.
At night, when he switches off the lamp, he sometimes thinks of the young man in 1984 who believed love would save him and then believed liquor would and then discovered, astonished, that strangers with coffee could. He doesn’t regret those early pages anymore. They are part of the book he keeps writing, day by day: not a neat plot, but a faithful one. If he wakes to the old whisper—You could probably handle just one—he smiles, because he knows the answer now. He reaches for the phone, or for Daniel’s hand, or for the wrinkled page where the words still wait: “Cunning, baffling, powerful.” He says a prayer as simple as breath. And in that simplicity, the desire loosens its grip again, and again, and again.
Written by Steve N.
As told to him by anonymous member of GaL-AA
Grapevine - Men with the Men?
Magazine Issue: March 2025
Author Name: Michael D.
Author City: Davenport
Author State: Iowa
What does a gay member with sex and trust issues do when it’s time to get a sponsor? One man found a solution
I came to the rooms of AA (this time) with not only a drinking problem but issues with drugs and sex as well. I grew up in the Midwest, gay and closeted until I left high school. I started drinking at 14 with the “winos” down by the river. I was then introduced to drugs and “cruising.” These things stalked me in the shadows like an after-party. I survived quite well being what some would call a functional alcoholic, but I was quite messy and uncontrollable.
Years of this brought me to my knees, to a suicide attempt, a psychiatric ward, then to an inpatient treatment center. Their program had mandatory AA meetings which we were driven to in a large van we lovingly called “the druggy buggy.” Another mandatory requirement was finding a sponsor. Now, AA suggested guidelines were very specific: men sponsor men, women sponsor women, and the same went for getting phone numbers. In my mind the LGBTQ community wasn’t considered during the conception of these rules.
I had a big concern. Finding a man to show me the Steps, one whom I would confide in and work closely with? To me this seemed reminiscent of a relationship, intimacy even. Being attracted to men, I’ve never been comfortable around them. I had not had a male friend since grade school. Having a male sponsor just wouldn’t work, not for this alcoholic.
I spoke to my counselor about my worries, and she suggested I just look for someone who I could relate to, someone who might have a story similar to mine. So that’s what I did.
One day after looking around, I heard my story. Someone who cussed, had an infectious laugh and a happiness that I wanted. And this someone was a woman. Fortunately, my Higher Power gave me the strength, the boldness if you will, to go up and ask her if she sponsored men.
At first she said no, then I eagerly told her, “I bat for the other team.” She paused for a minute, gave me a smile and said, “Yes.” She would take me through the book.
I was eager to do what she asked of me, and she was happy that I was willing. That was the beginning of a beautiful relationship, one fostered in trust. We worked as AA was meant for alcoholics to work, with no sexual tension between us. No possibility of a distraction or a “13th step.” The wonderful progress I made during my first year of sobriety I owe to AA, my female sponsor and God.
Members around me have noticed changes in me for the better. I’m sharing more and showing more confidence. They tell me “progress not perfection,” and I’m grateful for that. Hopefully, as I progress through the Steps and continue to incorporate the principles of AA into my life, my ability to create friendships with men will improve. Who knows, I may even switch to a male sponsor someday.
Copyright © The AA Grapevine, Inc. (March 2025) Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. To subscribe to AA Grapevine, please visit https://www.aagrapevine.org
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Spotlight On Sobriety 11/16/2025
The Spotlight On Sobriety 11/16/2025 features personal stories, articles and reflections submitted by members and friends of the fellowship. The views expressed are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent those of Alcoholics Anonymous or GaL-AA.
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