In 1972, a psychiatrist walked onto a stage in Dallas in a rubber mask and a wig. He spoke through a microphone that disguised his voice. “I am a homosexual. I am a psychiatrist.”
He called himself Dr. H. Anonymous. His real name was John Fryer. He had already lost a residency for being gay, and saying it in his own voice would have cost him his career. He didn’t reveal who he was for another 22 years.
The audience was the American Psychiatric Association. At the time, its manual listed homosexuality as a mental illness. If you were gay and asked a doctor for help with your drinking, being gay could become the thing they treated.
Fryer wasn’t alone on that stage. Barbara Gittings and Frank Kameny sat beside him. Kameny was an astronomer the federal government fired for being gay. He spent the rest of his life telling the government, and then psychiatry, that they had it wrong. In December 1973, the APA agreed and removed homosexuality from its list of disorders.
Three years later, Stepping Stone began. That’s not a coincidence. Recovery for our community had to wait until someone said out loud that we weren’t the illness.
Living Out Loud
This month is LGBTQ History Month. It started in 1994, when a Missouri high school teacher named Rodney Wilson decided October should belong to us. Here are a few more people we think about every October.
Bayard Rustin organized the 1963 March on Washington, which drew about 250,000 people. He was asked to stay in the background because he was openly gay. He did the work anyway, and the march happened.
Sylvia Rivera was 17 at Stonewall. With Marsha P. Johnson, she started STAR, which gave young trans people and kids on the street a place to sleep. When parts of the movement tried to leave trans people out, she said so, loudly, for the rest of her life.
Audre Lorde stood at a podium in Chicago in 1977 and said, “Your silence will not protect you.” Anyone in recovery knows the truth of that line. Shame does its best work in the quiet.
Christine Kehoe became the first openly gay person elected to office in San Diego when she won a City Council seat in 1993. Before that, she edited the San Diego Gayzette and helped start the AIDS Assistance Fund. In 1994, she helped connect Stepping Stone to the Housing Trust Fund resources that bought our Central Avenue property.
Recovery + Our Community
Our community has been part of recovery since before recovery had a word for us.
In 1939, Marty Mann went to her first AA meeting, at Bill W.’s home in Brooklyn. She became one of the first women to stay sober in AA. In 1944, she founded the National Committee for Education on Alcoholism to tell the country three things: alcoholism is a disease, the alcoholic can be helped and is worth helping, and it’s a public health problem. Her partner of 40 years was Priscilla Peck, an art editor at Vogue. Marty went by “Mrs.” to protect their privacy. A friend remembered her saying she never drank to escape. She drank to get in. The organization she started became the National Council on Alcoholism. Hold on to that name.
That friend was Barry Leach, a gay man sober since 1945 who went on to write AA’s book Living Sober. In 1985, he told a room of gay and lesbian members about coming out to a childhood friend in Texas. “Well, honey,” she said, “whatever it is it must be wonderful if you’re one.” Years later he told her he was an alcoholic, and she said the same thing. That, Barry said, is what AA’s Third Tradition means: the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. It traces back to 1937, when an Akron group argued over whether to admit a man with “another” stigma 😉, and decided he belonged.
In 1969, seven gay alcoholics in Los Angeles started their own meeting, Alcoholics Together, where they didn’t have to hide. Groups like theirs in Southern California kept pushing until 1974, when AA agreed to list gay and lesbian groups in its World Directory.
The year before Alcoholics Together, on October 6, 1968, twelve people came to Rev. Troy Perry’s living room in Huntington Park for a worship service for gay people. Perry had been pushed out of his own church for being gay. That service became Metropolitan Community Church. Eight years later, an MCC congregation in Golden Hill opened its doors to the meeting that started Stepping Stone.
Up the coast, the Gay Community Services Center in Los Angeles opened Van Ness Recovery House for gay men and lesbians in 1973. A year later, Brenda Weathers and Lillene Fifield opened a treatment program for lesbians that became the Alcoholism Center for Women. Stepping Stone grew out of that same moment, when our community decided to build the recovery it needed.
More and More Options
Recovery has never had just one door, and our community built a lot of them.
On March 6, 1990, eight AIDS activists from ACT UP and the National AIDS Brigade were arrested on New York’s Lower East Side for handing out clean needles, which was illegal at the time. A judge later ruled their actions were a medical necessity. One of them, Richard Elovich, drew on his own experience with injecting drugs. He went on to start GMHC’s substance use program and write New York State’s harm reduction curriculum. The idea of meeting people where they are owes a great deal to the LGBTQ activists who answered the AIDS crisis.
On September 16, 1994, thirteen people met at the West Hollywood Alcohol and Drug Center for the first meeting of Crystal Meth Anonymous. Members soon carried meetings to San Francisco and San Diego. CMA has drawn many of its members from the LGBTQ community ever since.
That same year, SMART Recovery held its first meeting, offering a science-based path that doesn’t use the Twelve Steps. Today it runs meetings specifically for LGBTQ people.
Different rooms, different methods, the same idea: nobody should have to choose between being who they are and getting sober.
How Stepping Stone Started
Before 1976, volunteers answering phones at the National Council on Alcoholism, Marty Mann’s organization, kept hearing from the same callers. They were gay and lesbian people looking for help with their drinking, and they couldn’t find a program that would take them as they were. Twelve to fourteen calls came in every day.
On February 17, 1976, charter members met at Metropolitan Community Church in South Park to start a recovery home for gay men and lesbians. By May, Stepping Stone had incorporated. By July, the county was funding the residential program. The first house stood across the street from what was then the LGBT Community Center. In 1979, we moved to Central Avenue, where our residential program still lives today.
Then came AIDS. Many people who came to Stepping Stone in the 1980s were determined to die sober: present for their grief, clear-eyed and fully themselves to the end. While the wider culture looked away, our community held its own.
See It for Yourself
Our history lives on our website. With Lambda Archives of San Diego, we built an eight-panel exhibit that follows Stepping Stone from that first meeting in 1976 to today, with the photos and documents that tell the story. Read it at steppingstonesd.org/about/history
Coming Soon: A Home for Alumni, Friends and Supporters
The next chapter belongs to our alumni. We’re building a new online home for people who have come through Stepping Stone, a place to stay connected, find each other and keep showing up for the next person. It launches later this year, and we’re looking for alumni to test it first. If you’d like to be one of them, reply to this email.
Pass It On
Every person in this email did some version of the same thing. They said the true thing out loud, often at real cost, and then they held the door for whoever came next. A psychiatrist in a rubber mask. A woman who called herself “Mrs.” so she could keep telling the truth about alcoholism. Seven people in Los Angeles who wanted a meeting where they didn’t have to hide. Thirteen people in a room in West Hollywood. Twelve to fourteen phone calls a day in San Diego.
That work isn’t finished. Every week, someone walks through our doors and says something out loud for the first time. I’m gay. I’m trans. I need help. I don’t want to hide anymore. Fifty years in, we’re proud to be a place where they can.
Here’s how to stay part of it:
- Stay in touch. Forward this email to someone who should know this history.
- Share your story. If you or someone you love found recovery here, or in any of the rooms in this email, we want to hear it. Just reply.
- Keep opening doors. Say the true thing. Make room for the next person. That’s how all of this started.
The people who went first made room for us. Now it’s our turn.
Happy LGBTQ History Month.
