My
name is Islay, I am 25, and I've never been drunk.
It
wasn't until I encountered punk culture, a couple of years ago, that
I learned there was an actual name for one of my social quirks beyond
me just being... you know, quirky (being both a lesbian and a nerd,
at this point terminal quirkiry has become a way of life so my
personal decision to swear off addictive substances seemed otherwise
par for the course).
But
on the punk scene, they call it 'straight edge'. People who turn
refusal of drugs and alcohol and all those hallmarks of the
counter-culture into a kind of counter-culture of its own.
I
don't drink – I've never had a drink, really. I was allowed
the odd sip of wine as a kid, but when I was thirteen I got a pretty
harsh look at the end result of a lifetime of abusing something that
harmful, and decided that I would never allow myself to end up on the
same road.
I
should point out that my dad's death was not directly related to his
alcoholism – he had a heart attack due to years of generally
failing to take care of himself, the drinking being one shitty corner
piece of that whole situation. But, aside from contributing to his
overall ill-health, in the last year of his life his addiction robbed
him of perhaps the most meaningful elements of his life: his
relationship with his wife, and with me and my sister. Though the
details are hazy to me now – I suspect I've blocked most of that
miserable period of my life out and replaced the memories with mental
images of kittens, in a kind of psychological screen-saver I hope
never to disturb – it seems that my mother spent several years
giving him ultimatums about his problem, and finally carried through
her threat to leave him if he wouldn't stop drinking. The end of his
marriage devastated him, and he was still struggling (and mostly
failing) to come to terms with her decision when he died, less than a
year later.
For
better or worse, I have a similar personality type to my dad. The
obsessive/addictive psychology that made him this formidable,
awesome, well-remembered guy – hard working, stubborn, whip-smart,
passionately opinionated and hilarious – also made him vulnerable
in others, and I see exactly the same tendencies manifesting in my
adulthood (given the right inspiration I can sit down and write a
full length feature film in a week. I can also spend literally seven
hours in one go picking through an actor's entire instagram account
because I need more pictures of her face and
yes I know that makes me a creep but her face, you guys,
her face). And the bottom
line is that I don't think it's worth risking allowing myself to
develop a taste for anything more problematic than caffeine, given my
family history.
So
I don't drink. I will never drink. I will never take any substance
that's less than legal and I'm even cautious about painkillers most
of the time – anything beyond standard ibuprofen makes me nervous.
Beyond
a simple instinct toward self-preservation, I get a sick feeling in
my stomach about the idea of handing money over to the same industry
that effectively ruined my dad's life. Of course he was a grown man
arguably exercising a personal choice, but there's no denying the
fact that booze culture in this country utterly enabled my dad's
behaviour. If it had been less acceptable for him to binge-drink
regularly, if it had been less routine – hell, encouraged – for a
man to drink as heavily as he did, if all of his behaviours weren't
so goddamned acceptable, there's at least a chance he'd have
understood the nature of his problem sooner, and might have been able
to save himself – maybe even save his marriage to my mother.
Booze
culture enables the behaviour of a growing number of people who are
addicted – it encourages behaviours that grow inescapable before
the individual realises that there's an issue. I've seen it in people
my own age, I continue to see it, and it frightens me. When I hear my
friends talking about how much they 'need' a drink, talking
cheerfully about how wasted they were last night, how wasted they
plan to get again tomorrow, I can't help but see a flash of my dad's
ruined life come up behind my eyes and wonder if this was how he
started – if this was how he was able to keep going so blindly. I
wonder why this behaviour – overspending, over-drinking, merrily,
contentedly – has become so totally normal when it is also
fundamentally destructive.
Increasingly
I don't socialise in situations where I know people will be drinking
heavily. What seems to be a good time for some is just a forceful
reminder of stuff I'd rather not have to relive, and I'm not
comfortable asking others not to get drunk around me, so I just avoid
them. What do I say? 'Please don't drink so much that you smell of
the same beer my dad did when I was eight years old because now I'm
having to relive the quagmire of that trauma?' Given that these
functions are often semi-professional (oh, the amount of 'networking'
that gets done in bars) I know I can't spill my personal ugliness on
someone like that. And it often seems taboo even to just be there and
not drink, so I stay away, because I don't want to be prodded about
it.
Counter-cultural
types, especially of the queer variety, tend to come together out of
a wish to escape what we feel is a grindingly destructive mainstream:
power structures that alienate us, seek to censor or crush us. I'd
call that the Patriarchy, punk calls it The Man – but in general
counter cultural efforts are centred on creating, or re-creating,
ourselves, not destroying them, as a reaction against a society that
would rather we didn't exist.
Booze
and drug culture seems an odd thing to have wormed its way in amongst
this sort of ideology, and yet, of course, anyone who spends time in
any creative industry – where us queer, counter-cultural types have
a tendency to turn up in vast numbers – knows that there's an
epidemic of addictions, of one kind or another, in the environments
we are often attracted to.
It's
perhaps a personality type issue: the same addictive/obsessive
personality types that, like mine and my dad's, are vulnerable to
these issues, tend to be the same shade of batshited-ly stubborn
required to stick it out in the artistic queer circles I often find
myself in.
But
it's also about marketing.
One
of the things that disturbs me about the coorporate nature of PRIDE
these days is that events and parades are increasingly sponsored by
alcohol companies. Most research (links at the bottom) highly
suggests that rates of alcohol dependency are higher in the LGBTQIA
community than they are elsewhere. Figures run between 20% and 45% of
the LGBTQIA community being affected by some kind of addiction,
compared to between 9% and 15% of the general population in the UK
and America (I haven't been able to find statistics for elsewhere).
We are a marginalised group more likely to be homeless and/or
unemployed and more likely to experience violence and abuse and less
likely to have access to medical and mental health resources than our
heterosexual cis gender peers are – it's not hard to understand why
addictions happen in greater numbers to us, we just have far, far
greater risk factors.
To
assume that an alcoholic beverage company doesn't know these facts
feels to me rather willfully blind. When a company like Bicardi
sponsors big pride events, which they have done in both LA Pride and
Harlem in America and Brighton Pride here, they get two things: some
nice fluffy good press, and further access to a market which has a
dependency on their products up to three times the norm.
So
whilst I harbour my own personal reasons for refusing to drink,
increasingly I harbour political ones, too. Just as I try, as far as
my extremely limited budget will allow, to be ethical in my
consumerism elsewhere, I'm not going to give money to companies that
exploit my community like that. Given that many good wee lefties are
very conscientious about other consumer choices – about fairtrade
and organic foods, about vegetarianism and veganism, about buying
second hand and from local sources – it seems odd to me that there
doesn't seem to be a similar debate about the ethics of alcohol
consumption, tobacco use or drugs.
There
are many, many ranges of engagement with ethical consumerism amongst
my friends in these spheres, from the entirely freegan second hand
crunchy granola hippies, to those who maybe attempt to recycle once
in a while but have otherwise prioritised other forms of activism
because ethical consumerism seems like such a minefield (and it is,
and I don't judge people who eat meat and use amazon – there are
compelling arguments to be made that these choices are no more
damaging than the opposite, because, well, this crap is a minefield).
But every one of them have at least thought
about these issues carefully before making the choices that seem
right to them.
I've
never seen similar thought and choice put into whether or not to
consume alcohol.
People
just... kind of do. Which is odd, right?
Similarly
with people who smoke – given that tobacco companies may in fact be
Satan (no really, google 'Bannatyne Takes on Tobacco', watch the
documentary – it's up for free – about how these companies are
advertising to children in
economically developing nations, and tell me tobacco companies aren't
the lowest form of scum on this earth), why in the hell do I see so
many lefties who seem to consider smoking to still be a kind of
counter-cultural badge of honour? Just because you're doing something
that is increasingly no longer socially acceptable doesn't make it
automatically subversive, kids. Where is the carefully critical
consideration about where that shit you're inhaling comes from and
what it is costing the wider world when you hand over money for it?
The
long and short of it is that I'm not going to support a booze and/or
drug culture which wrecks the lives of the most vulnerable people
under the queer rainbow. I don't think that makes me a mood killer or
a stick in the mud – I think that makes someone just doing her best
to choose an ethical way of life. And I really wish there was wider
consciousness of this issue, that criticism of booze culture wouldn't
automatically be dismissed as harshing someone's good time. I'd love
to see queer events go dry, to question the need for the presence of
alcohol in order to 'have a good time' and instead consider the
wholescale damage that need is doing to us as a group and the greater
damage companies like these do worldwide.
Sources
on LGBTQIA addiction rates:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/lgbt/report/2012/03/09/11228/why-the-gay-and-transgender-population-experiences-higher-rates-of-substance-use/
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