How Alcoholics Anonymous lost its way
Addicts with the 'wrong opinions' no longer fit in
BY BEN APPEL
Even people who have never had a drinking problem know that
Alcoholics Anonymous has 12 steps. You admit you’re powerless over alcohol (Step
One), for instance, and apologise to people who’ve been harmed by your
drinking (Step Nine). But fewer people know about AA’s 12 Traditions,
the glue that holds a motley crew of recovering drunks together. The 12 steps
keep your life in order; the 12 traditions keep the group in order — or so it
is said in AA.
Arguably the most important tradition is Tradition
10: “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the AA
name ought never be drawn into public controversy.” The Washingtonians, a group
of recovering alcoholics that preceded AA by about a century, disbanded due to
infighting over its involvement in social reforms like prohibition, religion
and slavery abolition. AA’s founders, William Wilson and Dr Robert Smith (Bill
and Dr Bob), didn’t want AA to suffer the same fate. Best their organisation
remain neutral, they thought, so as to be welcoming for alcoholics from every
walk of life. For nearly 88 years, AA has never weighed in on foreign or
domestic policies, nor has it endorsed political candidates or legislative
proposals. And so desperate drunks of every race, colour and creed have kept on
coming and — together — got sober.
It is up to every individual AA meeting to uphold the
programme principles. (Tradition 4: “Each group should be autonomous
except in matters affecting other groups or AA as a whole”). But where many
struggle, I’ve found, over the 20 years I’ve been going to meetings, is
with Tradition 10. In AA, alcoholics are free to share about
anything they like, so long as it pertains to alcoholism; politics and the
culture wars, they can leave at the door. And yet, a lot of recovering
alcoholics can’t resist hot takes when they’ve been handed a mic. I noticed
this particularly after Donald Trump was elected, and especially in New York
City. Members started sharing about a fight they’d had that day with their
idiotic, MAGA-hat-wearing uncle on Facebook — apparently unaware of newcomers,
desperate to get sober, who might now feel unwelcome because they had voted for
the wrong guy.
In 2020, violations of Tradition 10 reached
a fever pitch. After George Floyd’s murder, institutions across the nation
absorbed progressive ideals into their mission statements. I was finishing my
last year of study at Columbia University. Having entered the university in
2017 as a self-described radical progressive planning a career in LGBT
activism, I was graduating an exile. I had become disillusioned with, and
spoken out against, my fellow progressives’ tactics: suppressing free speech,
purity policing and reducing every individual to his or her skin colour, gender
and sexual orientation. During my last semester, which was moved online due to
the pandemic, I’d sign on to virtual AA meetings after class, and immediately
be struck by how similar the two spaces had become. Pronouns lit up the screen.
Whereas opening readings once consisted of the AA preamble, the 12 Steps and 12
traditions, and details about the meeting, now some groups chose to add a
thinly veiled threat: “We will not tolerate racist, homophobic, sexist or
transphobic rhetoric in this space.”
From my experience of post-Trump academia, I knew these
proclamations wouldn’t so much prevent inappropriate speech as put everyone on
high alert, encouraging an atmosphere of self-censorship. Recovering alcoholics
carry a lot of guilt about the harm their drinking has caused others; they are
often irrationally fearful of causing any more. If they feel like they’re
traversing a mine field of potential triggers that could set off listeners in
the room, they may be reluctant to admit shameful details about the past, which
they want and need to get off their chests. Recovering alcoholics’ lives depend
on their ability to share honestly, and to feel like they will be accepted by
AA no matter their histories or their personal views. Increasingly, certain
opinions — although you could never be totally sure which ones — were no
longer worthy of respect in a democratic society. Meetings were not
unlike my university classes, where the silence during discussions would extend
for what felt like an eternity, as so many students stayed quiet rather than
risk transgressing.
But even silence could get alcoholics in trouble. In June
2020, Toby N. had been in the programme in New York for six years. He was
raised in the Mormon church, but left it when he was 24 and came out as gay a
couple of years later. On #BlackoutTuesday, when white people committed to
posting nothing but a black square on Instagram for a full 24 hours, Toby
decided not to partake. “I didn’t feel like it was going to do anything,” he
said. Then he got a direct message from a friend — another gay man in AA — who
asked: why hadn’t Toby posted anything about racial justice on social media? He
accused Toby of inadequate allyship. (Toby had donated to Black Lives Matter.)
In meetings, he would hear people whispering about other members’ “white
privilege”.
Toby was generally in alignment with them about social
justice issues, but he found the manner in which they spoke about them
exceedingly “toxic”. But a line had been drawn in the sand, he told me: “You’re
either with us, or you’re against us.” Exclusively attending meetings for gay
alcoholics, Toby had previously found acceptance in AA, but now he felt like a
stranger in the programme that had for years been like a second home. He
decided to leave. The 12 steps worked for him, but the dogma and the
groupthink, he felt he could do without. “It feels like I’m a man without a
country,” he said. “I don’t have the gay community that I thought I did.”
For many years, I also attended affinity AA groups for gay
and lesbian alcoholics. In these meetings, we felt no need to use coded language
when sharing: we could say “my boyfriend” or “girlfriend”, rather than “my
other half” or “significant other”. We could be honest about our difficulties
with various spiritual aspects of the programme (Step Three: A decision
to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood
Him): the only God many of us had ever understood was one who despised us.
It may seem like affinity groups violate Tradition 10, since some
of the topics discussed in these meetings are technically “outside issues”.
However, they are always spoken about as they pertain to alcoholism. And
because these meetings are clearly labelled in the directory, straight members
who attend are aware that some of the issues discussed might not pertain to
them.
Sometime over the past decade, gay and lesbian meetings
became “LGBTQ” meetings. After “intersectionality” leapt from university
campuses into the mainstream, these meetings became the most ideological of
them all. Suddenly, a whole range of difficulties had to be acknowledged. “If
you suffer from chronic fatigue and don’t feel like you can make it until the
end of the meeting to share, please alert me and I will call on your early,”
the host of one LGBTQ meeting in New York I attended read aloud. Then: “If you
want to share but you have difficulty speaking, please write what you would
like to share in the chat and I will read it aloud for you.” I still can’t
fathom how any member in attendance could have interpreted these announcements
as anything other than disturbingly infantilising: one of the key ingredients
for sobriety is personal responsibility.
Perhaps most disconcertingly, the language of one of AA’s
best-known readings changed. The preamble has always read: “Alcoholics
Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength
and hope with each other.” On the last day of the 71st General Service
Conference for the US and Canada, held virtually in April 2021, a vote was held
on whether to change the wording of the Preamble from “a fellowship of men and
women” to “a fellowship of people”. The motion passed. Many members were shocked.
Alcoholics Anonymous is famous for its stubborn resistance to change: the first
164 pages of the Big Book have barely been amended since they were written
nearly a century ago. The literature has saved thousands, maybe millions, of
lives. “Don’t fix what isn’t broken” is one of AA’s unofficial mottos. Why risk
changing something that works?
Another member, Justin D., says that another reason changes
should rarely occur is that they are hard to reverse. At an LGBTQ meeting he
attends in Baltimore, which began as a meeting for gays and lesbians, a young
woman joined the group and began demanding changes to the opening literature
because people were being misgendered. She called for a directive stating that
only gender-neutral language should be used when calling on members to share.
Group members reluctantly acquiesced to the woman’s demands. Not long
afterwards, she stopped attending. Now, if members wanted to return the
readings to their original form, they would have to propose it to the group and
initiate a vote — which could result in accusations that they are trying
to reintroduce trans-exclusionary language.
Elizabeth S. said that at a “queer-identified” meeting she
attended, all of the opening readings were amended to include only
gender-neutral language. However, she told me, one gender-specific pronoun had
apparently managed to slip through the editing process. When the woman who read
that particular announcement aloud arrived at the pronoun, Elizabeth said, she
began to trip over her words and look nervously about the room, as if she was
uncertain how to proceed.
Another member I spoke to, Bernadette R., remarked that for
decades women have bristled at the male pronouns used in AA’s literature to
describe God, or a Higher Power. “The female demographic is much bigger than
the non-binary demographic. So why are they getting a space faster than women
are?” She also mentioned her frustration with the new gender-neutral restrooms
at the meeting she attends every week, which make many women feel
uncomfortable. “Women deserve to feel safe,” she said.
And yet it has long been a principle in AA that it doesn’t
matter who you are, what you believe, or what wrongs you’ve committed — AA says
“You belong here.” The only requirement for membership is “a
desire to stop drinking” (Tradition Three). Critical social justice
ideology, which scoffs at the idea of redemption for those who may have
transgressed, is inimical to AA’s core mission. If the programme doesn’t
recommit to upholding Tradition 10, it could go the same way as the
Washingtonians. In the meantime, many alcoholics with the “wrong politics”
might choose not to join a group that could shun them for their problematic
views. And, as it is said in AA, for a real alcoholic, “to drink is to die”.
Names have been changed to respect AA members’ anonymity.
All agreed to participate in this article.
