Last year, two visiting Canadian softball players, one gay, one straight, were found dead of a fentanyl overdose in their Downtown Milwaukee hotel room. We offered the perfunctory public “thoughts and prayers” as well as a solemn “killer drugs know no demographic,” but what could have been a moment for a greater community response was not to be.
There were no subsequent billboard campaigns or PSAs published in the LGBTQ press, on community organization websites or elsewhere. Like the Second Amendment’s annual collateral mortality rate of thousands, drug deaths are shrugged off as part of the American reality. Overdosing is so common that bystanders live-stream Facebook videos of convulsing, vomiting or catatonic victims as entertainment. And, while it may be true that anyone is susceptible, studies show LGBTQs are proportionately more likely to abuse drugs than others.
Stress, internalized homophobia, our social heterosexism’s stigmatization of LGBTQs (with its resulting mental health, emotional and legal issues) all contribute to the disparity. Drug use is so thoroughly imbued, accepted and embraced in our community that a popular drag queen’s name, Sharon Needles, is celebrated as just another witty word-play like Ginger Vidas or Kim Chi.
Things began innocently enough back in the 1960s. Marijuana and hallucinogens were considered mind-expanding conduits to some alternate consciousness or simply a fun way to spend a day. You dropped acid, attended a concert, went dancing or had hours and hours of incredible sex. Being high even enhanced an otherwise boring college lecture. There were occasional “bad trips,” or, rarely, a drug-related death. But, the “that will never be me” mentality pervaded, and we ignored them, attributing such exceptions to an off batch or the individual’s bad luck. Heroine was a junkie’s drug of desperation, certainly not a trendy means to a psychedelic experience.
Still, when guys in my college dorm got high and contrived an amusement by igniting a knotted plastic bag hung from a wire hanger hooked on the ceiling light, a bucket of water below it, and were mesmerized in stoned awe as flaming drops fell with a “zap” and “zished” as they hit the water, I had my personal Peggy Lee “Is This All There Is?” epiphany. My roommate, a doctor’s son from New York, never did. Years later, on an oppressively hot summer day, I saw him trudging along North Avenue, still wearing his once-fashionable vintage winter overcoat.
Today, drugs are far more ubiquitous and dangerous. The sheer demand has suppliers mixing anything likely to induce an altered state. Heroin use is common. Home “kitchens” turn out methamphetamines and artisanal concoctions often containing fentanyl. Corporate greed has opioid producers devising distribution strategies to enrich themselves, stockholders and the prescribing doctors. Meanwhile, we consume with addicted abandon. As the TV ads go, side effects include risk of HIV infection when sharing needles or having unsafe sex and death.
There is recourse. A national website, drugrehab.com/guides/lgbtq, offers insight into addiction and resources for treatment. Locally, the recently opened LGBT Health Clinic in Froedtert Hospital offers an outpatient drug and alcohol treatment program buttressed by after-care and long-term support for recovery. Now, it’s up to the community to finally confront and deal with it.
