Seventeen years ago, a bearded stranger sitting next to me in the TV lounge of one of our city's least elegant hotels suddenly turned to me and asked if I had a drinking problem. 'Whatever gave you that idea?' I retorted, knowing I was physically sober at that moment, though slightly shaky and none too well coordinated. He didn't answer me. He just reached into the depths of a jacket that had seen better days, took out a grimy and much thumbed booklet, and said something about a meeting I might want to go to that night. He said there would be 'nice people who'll understand you' there. He also mentioned free coffee and cake. That decided me. Today, I thank God, whom I choose to call H.P. (Higher Power), for that conversation. Cold and empty as I was, I managed to pull myself together and get to the address he gave me. Of course, it turned out to be an A.A. meeting. It was there I made the first real human contact I'd felt in many years, with the man who eventually became my A.A. sponsor. A few weeks later, I went back out to drink and bleed for seven more years. But then I came back (H.P. again), and recently I celebrated my tenth anniversary of sobriety at our regular gay A.A. meeting here in my home city. My alcoholism goes way back, just as my gayness does. One of my earliest childhood memories is stealing sips from my foster father's can of beer and filling it with water so he wouldn't know. Then I started going to gay bars in my early teens. Right from the start, I loved the glow I got inside from a drink, even though I always hated the taste. It wasn't very long, though, before I started getting into a lot of trouble with liquor. I began to use it as a crutch, as well as a glow-getter. I drank to get up the courage to do dangerous things. I had no idea what I was doing at the time, but now I see that I drank badly right from the start. I remember, for instance, how a good friend used to get disgusted with my drinking when I was barely out of my teens. I thought I was just being sophisticated and looking for bed companions, like others in those gay joints. But now I know the drinking soon took over and became an end in itself. Before A.A., all I had was drinking and sex. I mechanically used people for both. Everybody was faceless. Nobody was real, least of all me! My sponsor was the first real person I'd met in years. And he made me feel real, too. He cut right through any concern I might have had about my gayness or anything else. Without sentimentality, he calmly held out his hand to me that first night as one human being to another, and what he put into my hand was life. Today, I believe we in A.A. have a family relationship with one another. I think all the people in A.A. — gay and straight — are my brothers and sisters. After we sober up, we are given a chance to create healthy new relationships, compensating for the way we fouled up others previously. Our fellow members are people we really come to know, loving them, feeling with them, suffering when they suffer, even lovingly fighting with them once in a while. It's a real sharing, an honest one. It's certainly something I never had at home. I'm also glad I feel this special A.A. closeness to many straight people, something I never would have thought possible. In fact, for years I stayed sober and so held on to jobs by going to meetings of A.A. groups that were mostly straight. In A.A. today, I know sober leather fans, transvestites, and members of every other sexual group there is. But the only important thing here is that we are all human beings, all alcoholics, and all in A.A. together. Personally, I have never hidden the fact that I am gay, in A.A. or outside it. For me, this has been the right decision. But I know it wouldn't have mattered if I had hidden it. What we do in private and how we choose to talk about it just are not what A.A. is about. Our Third Tradition says, 'The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking.' And this has meant my survival, right from the very first day. Believe me, if there were any other qualifications, I would have flunked out!