Editor’s Note

Abstract

Editor’s Note Benjamin Schaefer At the height of the COVID shutdown in the United States, I was asked to speak at an informal recovery meeting by a friend I had met ten years earlier in a twelve-step fellowship in Boston, Massachusetts. I got sober relatively young, at the age of twenty-four, and have remained sober and active in twelve-step recovery since October 26, 2008. Sobriety has been the singular blessing of my life, and in my time in recovery I’ve witnessed miraculous things occur in my life and the lives of other recovering people. And yet, to this day, one of the most impressive remains watching how quickly and efficiently the recovery community moved online in the early days of the shutdown. Within a week I could go to meetings all over the country, all over the world, with other people who were making it their business to stay sober a day at a time amidst the most cataclysmic event of our lifetimes. Never before had recovery felt so democratic. But when my friend asked me to speak, I was reluctant. I was just then coming off a period of intensely painful emotional and spiritual growth—what we might call in recovery a spiritual awakening, but which had felt at the time more like a crisis of confidence. In the slow and quiet days of that summer’s isolation, I had realized that at some point in my early sobriety I had developed certain ways of operating in the world to keep myself safe—particularly in my intimate relationships with men—but which had ultimately left me unseen. And I had wanted so badly to be seen. At twelve years sober, this was a difficult truth to reckon with, and in the aftermath of its revelation, I felt like cellophane: thin and transparent. But I agreed to speak at the meeting, because he was my friend and he had asked. Logging onto the meeting, I was nervous. By that point in my recovery, I had shared at more meetings than I could possibly count, but I was still adjusting to sharing online where I couldn’t gauge the feel of a room in quite the same way I could in person. I watched, slightly horrified, as more and more people signed into the meeting—people from Madison, Wisconsin, [End Page 15] and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Southern California and New York City. Soon the number of participants reached more than eighty. The meeting began and my friend introduced me. I read from a piece of recovery literature and then spoke for fifteen or twenty minutes about my experience in sobriety, after which the meeting opened for other people to share. It wasn’t long before I realized that a large contingent of the meeting was made up of gay men. This was something of a revelation. Though there is a robust recovery community in my hometown, with more than three hundred meetings each week, only two are designated as queer meetings, and I had largely avoided those meetings throughout my sobriety for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to me at the time, but which undoubtedly had to do with my own history of sexual trauma and my general distrust of men. But listening to those men share at that online meeting, I felt a familiar mixture of discomfort and curiosity. It was the peculiar emotional cocktail I’ve come to recognize as an invitation for further spiritual growth. The Universe was trying to tell me I had something more to learn. And so I began attending that meeting, which met every night during the pandemic, regularly. It was at that meeting that I met a gay actor who was weathering the shutdown in Stamford, Connecticut, and who had been sober for almost three years. We embarked on a deep and abiding friendship. Every night after the meeting, we’d talk on the phone, sometimes for hours. During one of these phone calls, this man told me he had once heard someone describe recovery as a journey towards becoming whole, but that something about that framing didn’t feel right to him. It was a...