Blacking Out, Beginning at 12

by Jennifer Vanasco, 365Gay.com

The first time Jennifer Storm blacked out after drinking too much, she was 12 years old. She thought she was going to a roller skating rink with some older friends. Instead, they took a detour and wound up drinking in a friend's car.

They were her first beers, and what started out as novel and exhilarating became horrific when a 28-year-old man in that car attempted to rape her.

Storm doesn't remember everything that happened that night, because she blacked out. In fact, she doesn't remember a lot of her adolescence, which was spent in a haze of alcohol and drugs and punctuated by her unhappy mother's death, the suicide of a dear friend, and her own self-mutilation and attempted suicide.

Her life was made more complicated by her romantic feelings for women that she was struggling to hide, because she had learned to be ashamed of them.

"It was much easier to play heterosexual when I was drunk," Storm said. "I had boyfriends, but it was so uncomfortable, that when it was necessary to engage – I mean sexually – I did have to be really drunk."

In her new memoir Blackout Girl, Storm details the darkness of that time and her fight to save herself.

Her story is heartbreaking – and illuminates an issue in the lesbian community that is not yet widely studied, and is barely talked about: lesbian alcohol and drug addiction.

"The elephant in the living room is alcohol," said Tonda Hughes, an expert in women's health issues and a professor in the Department of Public Health, Mental Health, and Administrative Nursing at the University of Illinois. "Smoking and smoking cessation problems get a lot of attention, because smoking is a social taboo. Alcohol isn't."

Lesbians are at greater risk than heterosexual women for alcohol addiction. Hughes' research shows that 44 percent of lesbians worry that they may have a drinking problem. In a paper called, "Substance Use and Abuse in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Populations," Hughes writes about a study that concluded that lesbians report alcohol problems at three times the rate of straight women. Another study she mentions notes that lesbians "reported more drinking days and more binge drinking" than straight women.

Storm says that she sees this reflected in her own community of Harrisberg, Penn., where drinking culture is pervasive. "I could list you 25 lesbians I know in this area who have a drinking problem. That's really troubling," she said.

Hughes said that the high rate of lesbian drinking are not due to sexual orientation per se. "It's mostly because of socio-cultural reasons. Many lesbians aren't married, don't have kids – there aren't the same kinds of social constraints that limit drinking."

Lesbians and straight women tend to have the same drinking behavior in their teens and early 20s. But as heterosexual women age and marry and have children, their drinking decreases, while lesbian drinking stays the same. Lesbians with careers and families, however, show alcohol use that is more similar to straight women.

There are other factors that help explain why lesbians drink so much. Lesbians are more likely to have been sexually abused, which may encourage a dependence on alcohol. Women feel safer and less sexually vulnerable when drinking among other women, and so in all-female situations, like lesbian parties, may drink more.

Also, lesbians have limited outlets to socialize and meet each other – they tend to congregate in heavy drinking settings like gay bars. So it's not only that women who are oppressed might use alcohol as a way to escape from everyday life – it's also that women who don't feel safe being out in their workplace or in their grocery stores may have nowhere to meet but in their local lesbian bar.

Storm said that her Harrisburg hometown is a good example of this. "There really isn't a lot here. A couple coffee shops host poetry nights, or have a singer-songwriter. There are not a lot of places to meet gay people, except the internet – not a lot to do here if you're gay and want to be safe and comfortable being out."

Lesbians are not doomed to generations of alcohol addiction, however. Hughes has noted in her "Substance Abuse" paper that rates of alcohol abuse may be declining among lesbians. She speculates on the reasons – perhaps there is more awareness about health risks or a lower rate of drinking among Americans in general.

There are other possibilities that point to a future decline. Hughes notes that as younger lesbians are more comfortable in mixed-gender and sexual orientation-groups, they may drink less. Discrimination is steadily abating and with less internal conflict, fewer women may feel the need to drink heavily. Gay/straight alliances are providing non-drinking social settings for young queer women. More lesbians are having children, which may add the structure to their lives that helps curb drinking. And lesbians, though they are not in recovery programs at the same rate as gay men, are more likely to be in therapy.

Storm is now sober and happily partnered. She says that she hopes her book will open a dialogue with other young lesbians who may be tempted to numb their pain and trauma with alcohol.

She says she wrote the book to give people hope, and to tell them that they can make a decision to turn their lives around, even though the recovery process itself has its own challenges.

"I think a lot of people feel very lonely," Storm said. "I have definitely experienced in recovery great periods of loneliness, because our culture is so wound up around partying that I feel totally and completely isolated.

"But then I snap out of it and realize that my life is so much better now, and picking up a drink and joining them is not going to make anything in my life better."