Queer KY, a nonprofit aimed at storytelling and wellness for the state’s queer community, hosted an event at the Center for Great Neighborhoods in Covington on Monday, where community members brainstormed ways to build out resources for queer Kentuckians in addiction recovery.
Queer KY had already done a similar event in Louisville, and Missy Spears, the organization’s executive director, said she was hoping to expand services into Covington generally. Moreover, the event dovetailed with the organization’s most recent magazine issue, which focused on the theme of home. The magazine solicited submissions from queer Kentuckians that asked them to describe where they felt the most at, well, home.
Home sometimes had a different meaning for queer people than it did for others, Spears said, as they were often prompted to seek belonging and safety outside of conventional home and family environments. But she noticed a pattern when reading through the submissions, one that presented a challenge for queer people in addiction recovery.
“What we noticed when we accepted submissions from folks all around Kentucky was that a lot of folks identified their home as a bar or a club,” Spears said.
As a result, Spears said, people would sometimes lose their support systems as they entered recovery. Thus, it was necessary to come up with alternatives that ensured people in recovery could get help they needed in a way that was also welcoming to their identities.
Attendees included business owners and community members from around Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati. The Northern Kentucky Health Department also attended with supplies and information about various public health and harm reduction services they offered.
Spears opened the room for discussion, and attendees shared their thoughts around what worked well in the current state of things and what could be improved. A moderator wrote ideas on paper sheets and stuck them to the wall for people to read.
Several key themes emerged.
The first was that there needed to be more visibility for organizations that provided queer-friendly addiction services.
Steven S. (he declined to give his full last name) said that such organizations existed, but they were hidden. For a queer person seeking help, it wasn’t always clear which treatment providers would be safe to enter.
Steven said that it was important for someone to “find places where you can go where you’re going to feel welcomed.”
Spears asked attendees to list some places, besides bars and other places where alcohol and substances were available, where they felt accepted and safe. Some places people listed off were fitness clubs, schools and arts organizations, among others.
Another problem came up: Many pride and other queer-friendly events and spaces often featured large amounts of alcohol. In fact, many of them relied on selling drinks to raise money.
To mitigate this, several attendees pitched the idea of doing outreach with local bar owners to encourage them to stock–and advertise–non-alcoholic beverages more frequently. Likewise, several attendees, some of whom owned businesses where drinks were served, recommended reaching out to beverage distributors and suppliers to encourage them to provide more non-alcoholic beverages. There was also discussion of hosting sober, queer-friendly events with a “club atmosphere,” as one attendee put it, where people could meet and have fun without the incursion of alcohol and other substances.
The latter parts of the discussion focused on the idea of harm reduction, which broadly refers to installing public resources to help people deal with addiction and other problems, often through the use of freely available protective devices, rather than insisting on outright abstinence. The go-to example of a harm-reduction measure is a free needle exchange where people using heroin can get clean needles rather than reusing old ones, which might expose them to infection. Wall-mounted automatic defibrillator devices and Naloxone boxes in public places are also forms of harm reduction.
Darnell Pierre-Benjamin spoke about “expanding the conversation on what harm reduction means.”
People sometimes had a narrow view of what harm reduction entailed, Pierre-Benjamin said. If bars and other businesses were aware of harm-reduction measures, they would often stop at having condoms on hand, but it was important to have other measures as well, such as HIV testing kits. Other attendees discussed easy access to fentanyl testing strips and the aforementioned Naloxone boxes, one of which the Northern Kentucky Health Department had on hand.
By the end of the meeting, the attendees had created a list of action steps they or other volunteers could take after the meeting to help address these problems. These action steps included developing relationships with local businesses to build out their queer-friendly competency, expanding access to harm-reduction measures in public places, compiling lists of queer-friendly treatment providers, hosting educational events about addiction and sobriety and being more deliberate about putting on sober-friendly events.
Spears concluded by saying that she hoped to host more events like this in the future, provided Queer Kentucky could secure proper funding.
“So in six months, we can get back together, hopefully with more folks, talk about what we’ve already nailed out of this list, what new ideas we have and how we can pivot and keep doing a little bit of work to make this place a little bit better,” Spears said.