Sober Queers for the New Year

As a professional drag queen, I was getting pretty used to spending most of my mornings (read: early afternoons) curled up in bed with the shades drawn, nursing a compounded hangover. Waking up with a hangover four days in a row was pretty routine.

Since alcohol is a depressant, a night of drinking would exacerbate my depression and anxiety. I found myself in a cycle of being too hungover and too depressed to get out of bed until it was time to get ready for another show and drink all over again.

Then, I tried “no drink November” on a whim last year, and it opened my eyes to how much alcohol has impacted my life.

Alcohol is deeply ingrained into queer culture. The Queer Liberation Movement was born from a fight about getting back into a bar, which is reflected in our safe spaces today. They’re almost exclusively businesses that focus on the sale of alcohol. Many of us found ourselves for the first time in these spaces, and they remain important community centers for queer folks.

This makes alcohol so easy to dismiss as a community problem, as so much of our culture is defined by bars.

When you take a marginalized community saddled with the shared trauma of having been or being closeted, hate crimes, mass shootings, conversion therapies, and tell them the only place they can be safe and free is in a bar? That’s a cocktail recipe for disaster. According to Alcohol Rehab Guide, “Up to 25 percent of the general LGBTQ community has moderate alcohol dependency compared to 5 to 10 percent of the general population.”

I’ve been sober-adjacent for over a year, meaning I drink maybe twice a month. I sleep better because alcohol negatively affects the REM cycle; the most important part of sleep. I also notice now that when I do drink, I spend much of the next day feeling unshakably blue.

I was using alcohol as a social crutch; if I was feeling anxious (which was always), I’d grab a drink to help with my nerves. And one always led to another. Breaking that habit and learning to deal with my anxiety without liquor helped me grow into a more self-assured and confident person.

Being able to alter my patterns of repetitive and excessive drinking by spending a month sober gave me room to assess how I was using alcohol to cope with my social anxiety and to mask my depression. Spending four weeks suddenly not drinking was a huge adjustment, but sobriety didn’t mean I had to separate myself from queer spaces.

Changing your relationship with alcohol will naturally change your relationship with bars, but you’ll find new ways to exist in those spaces. I spent the first few weeks feeling out-of-place in places I had thought of as home. It took some brain training to realize I’m the same person with or without a drink, and that made me all the more sure of who I am.

If you want to change your relationship with alcohol, Dry January is a great place to start. If you’re struggling with addiction, there is help. Check out smartrecovery.org, lgbtqcolorado.org, or phone a friend.

You’re not alone.

You are loved.